This is the story of the disappearance of a Swiss university professor, investigated twenty years later by a former colleague. Or maybe that's not really the point. With In search of Karl Kleber, published in May by Favre, Daniel Sangsue has written a «meta-novel» in more ways than one. This faux-regional detective story, a genre the author pokes fun at, can also be understood as a parody of Joël Dicker and, above all, as an eulogy of literature, in which the Americanized university takes the cake. Review.
In July 1997, Karl Kleber, a professor of literature, disappeared from traffic on his way home from university. No one seems to have discovered the secret of his disappearance. So there's plenty to investigate. This is what a former colleague of the missing professor sets out to do, many years later. The character-narrator himself. A retired professor who is not uncritical of the academic world, which he barely managed to endure during his last years of teaching. Don't expect to find any correspondence between Daniel Sangsue and this professor emeritus who swears by Stendhal; that would, of course, be to confuse everything...
Still, it's not as if the author wants to hide behind a character. This is the first time that Daniel Sangsue has published a novel under his real name; the four previous ones were signed «Ernest Mignatte», a sort of double - yet another one - whimsical and ghostly. By the way, since we're talking about ghosts, Sangsue's main object of study over the last twenty years, there were already open criticisms of the university in his Diary of a Ghost Lover, published in 2018 alongside the more scientific essay Vampires, ghosts and apparitions.
But why mix all this up in a novel that's already very pleasant to follow, just in its most Stendhalian aspect, namely its plot, which moves from Murten to Paris, via Basel, Thun and Aveyron? First of all, a writer can do what he likes; the freedom offered by art is justified in itself. But the matter goes deeper than that: if there's one disappearance Daniel Sangsue can't accept, it's the disappearance of literature. Books, as we know, are what remain, unlike words, and they are what perpetuate the memory of a man like Karl Kleber. That's the real point.
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Logical, then, that the abandonment of humanism at university and the ease of a Joël Dicker should be part of the picture. In small touches, moreover, and all with finesse. The nods to Joël Dicker, manifested in the repetition of some of his most syrupy dialogues, are also a way of highlighting the practice of parody. A genre to which Daniel Sangsue has devoted two landmark essays. It's a literary approach, and it's its great merit, that brings literature back to the forefront of what it fundamentally is: a pleasure, for both author and reader. Whatever the key to the mystery.
Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com
Image: Daniel Sangsue, in Neuchâtel © Indra Crittin for Le Regard Libre
Daniel Sangsue
In search of Karl Kleber
Editions Favre
2020
168 pages
French 
German 
English