Mathilde Vischer's narrative poetry

Dear reader,

I'm talking to you. You are the most important link in the book chain. One might say the golden link, the primordial link, the link that cannot be detached without breaking the whole. You, the reader, without whom the book would have no reality, as a Slovak writer by the name of Pavel Vilikovsky once said. I'd like to tell you that amidst the jostling of the new releases of the fall literary season, increasingly comparable to the jostling of the waves of a sumptuous tsunami, I'd like to tell you that you don't have to be up to your neck in it. In other words, you can stay dry, dare to take your time and read quietly in the shade of a tree, why not some poetry, for example. That's right, why don't you set yourself apart this year, instead of following the trends, by reading Like a star falls in the night, by Mathilde Vischer?

It's not a book of this torrential literary season, it's not a novelty, but you know, it's a book that's not yet a year old and therefore still has mother's milk behind the flaps. It's overflowing with youth. Of course, on the subject of this new literary season, I'm sure you'll have gathered by now. It's not about doing things differently for the sake of doing things differently. Nor is it about sabotaging it, or even worse, ignoring it and then forgetting about it. It's simply about doing your own back-to-school literary season on command, when you feel the deep, inner, bubbling urge to do so. Doing your own back-to-school reading more freely, a bit like playing hooky, that's what I mean. After all, isn't playing hooky like leaving school for the pleasure of coming back to it?

If I take an unfiltered approach here Like a star falls in the night (I must warn you), it's already to share with you a resonance. To tell you roughly what the resonance of the words is would be a lie. Rather, it's the resonance of words rubbed together, like wood rubbed against wood to warm and smoke, in the hope of a fire. In this collection, it's that very resonance that jumps out at you. The lyrical, magnetic and meticulous writing hooks us into the text, and the short paragraphs each have a meaning. It's like looking at a series of images.

All this forms stories. There are also characters caught up in these stories. You'll tell me that stories, or the telling of stories, is strictly the business of the novel, that it's the ordinary marathon of serialists, novelists and prose writers, but that's not true. What's special about Mathilde Vischer's poetry is that it's poetic prose. There's a narrative, and the characters are called Jeiran or Myriam, for example. Who says reading is a solitary act? And you know, characters inevitably mean childhood or old age, birth or death, love or lovelessness, appearance or disappearance, hands touching and hands leaving, as is the case with the following disappearance:

«One night they lie side by side in a bare room. He covers her hands, then clasps them lightly in his. He envelops them, like the garment of a benevolent, consoling skin. They lie side by side like two dead men exchanging hands, burying one another, in the desire for a light, comparable, unique disappearance.»

As you may have guessed, this narrative, or rather these narratives, are not linear. There are no steps to follow. You're not following a marked path. Of course, there are texts that follow one another, but each text is an entity in its own right, sometimes continuing the previous text, sometimes openly breaking it off, to assert its independence. It's because the stories don't follow one another that the charm works.

In short, it's a bit like remembering. You remember a multitude of details of a story, facts and gestures that clash and intersect, but you can't remember them linearly. We remember them according to the powder keg of memory. The poetess, if it's really her, if she hasn't disguised herself while writing, or better still, if she hasn't absented herself, remembers in the shade of a chestnut tree a child eating ice cream. And on the page that follows the memory of this child, there is death and the cemetery as the only answer to life. Isn't this the poet's way of talking about everything, and approaching pleasure by tackling pain?

In the background, read Like a star falling in the night, is to enter fully into short stories, without taking off your shoes. Some are punctuated by questions, dreams and reminders. Time is just a watch to be wound according to the lucidity of the moment:

«I've opted for clear-sightedness. Gentleness and lucidity. But these words, these images assail me. To give birth to a child here, under the rubble of meaning, in a society that is capsizing. I see her, look at her, her children clinging to her, she's frail and aging, she's crying, they hang from her long silk skirt with holes in it, begging for attention, imploring. We stand with our arms at her sides, incredulous, slowly prisoners of her motionless suffering, the darkness of her hands gradually permeating the interior of our thoughts.»

The images rain down, and as a reader, you follow in their footsteps. Where to? I'd be tempted to say where the stars fall at night, but that's another matter. To go with whom? I'd be tempted to say with the characters in the collection, but that's not all. To do what? I'd be tempted to say I don't know a damn thing. What's important, in the end, when you read Like a star falls in the night in the shade of a tree, how to put it, is perhaps to have no intention and «not to try to catch the other in his own dream, to leave him free, in the enigma of his strength and misery».

Write to the author: arthur.billerey@leregardlibre.com

Photo credit: © Maxisciences

Mathilde Vischer
Like a star falls in the night
Editions Samizdat
2019
116 pages

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