Literature

Jérôme Meizoz, absolutely moving!

3 reading minutes

written by Le Regard Libre · 05 November 2019 · 0 comment

Tuesday's books - Jonas Follonier

Aren't the Trente Glorieuses, with their thousand cars, fridges and supermarkets, profoundly ridiculous - and therefore moving? This is the fascinating subject of Jérôme Meizoz's new novel, set against the backdrop of Valais's entry into modernity. With a new Rhône: the freeway.

«This era, today, seems to me a dream or a collective madness.»

This is the era of the seventies and eighties. Told by a Valaisan now living in Lausanne, novelist and professor Jérôme Meizoz. His novel Haut Val des Loups, the antepenultimate, had fascinated me, inspiring the song In wolf country, recorded in a hurry and with my voice from «Je viens d'avoir vingt ans». Being a boy, the penultimate one, did not win the sympathy of our former colleague Nicolas Jutzet, right here, nor that of other members of the editorial team. One thing is certain: with Absolutely modern!, The writer's gamble has paid off in spades.

And what a challenge! It's a challenge to describe, without resorting to commonplaces of all stripes - and we can't do without them! PLUS -or rather to write, all simply, It's a turning point in the history of modernity, and more specifically in the Valais region. This historical inflection point, with its direct and human consequences, is the transition from a society of corner stores where only the salesman touches the shelves to a society of supermarkets. Worse still, hypermarkets have become Saturday's entertainment. Along with the garbage dump, they've become one of the two new churches where citizens - or rather, residents - meet. If not at the queens' match:

«There I meet a lawyer-deputy from the Catholic party, who loves his secretaries and often takes charge of them:
- Do you come to see all the fights?
- Recently. Now, very wealthy people don't buy Maseratis or Bugattis - it's ridiculous - but black cows. Their value has increased tenfold.»

Let's talk about the Church. It's omnipresent in Meizoz's writing. A clerical institution that he ridicules, as usual, making it an accomplice of the partisans of progress, by which he means most MPs and entrepreneurs. Among them, the entrepreneur-founder, highly reminiscent of a Martignerin patron, perhaps a little too mean-spiritedly treated, and the entrepreneur-emperor, a caricature of Christian Constantin:

«He would gather his subjects for the Pig Celebrations. Accountants, small businessmen, publicists and speculators, humorists and half-actresses, all came to kiss his ring.
The entrepreneur-emperor sang on stage in imperial costume, surrounded by promiscuous girls, slapped the cheek of his best enemy and dictated an Olympic edict. Let me cut to the chase.»

Unfortunately, I'm also obliged to cut this column short. Absolutely modern! is, in fact, a chronicle, as the book's thirteen chapters are called, interspersed with two-page stories about «Angels». Presumably important characters on the author's personal horizon, they speak volumes about the era in question and the profound changes it has brought about in our lives. The fact, for example, that you can no longer say that someone «died of old age» without sounding like a nerd.

It's just that technology and its omnipotence have come a long way. And Jérôme Meizoz's advantage, his immense advantage, is to be able to question it without needing to philosophize like a Heidegger with obscure and, precisely... technical terms. The novelist's words are our own: metro, work, sleep, fridge. This little last one is important, and we'd be well advised to add it to the list: unlike work, sleep and, in a way, the metro, the fridge is a "real" thing. thing. And we live in the empire of things. But it's getting time to go and eat, and my anti-liberalism is starting to bother me, so I'll end by simply and warmly recommending that you read this little nugget.