«In search of Karl Kleber», a fake regional thriller

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.

Or, pourquoi mélanger tout cela dans un roman, par ailleurs très agréable à suivre déjà rien que dans ce qu’il a de plus stendhalien, à savoir son intrigue, qui évolue de Morat à Paris, en passant par Bâle, Thoune et l’Aveyron? D’abord, un écrivain fait ce qu’il veut; l’espace de liberté qu’offre l’art se justifie à lui seul. Mais l’affaire est plus profonde: s’il y a bien une disparition que ne pourrait pas accepter Daniel Sangsue, c’est celle de la littérature. Les livres, on le sait bien, c’est ce qui reste, contrairement aux paroles, et c’est ce qui permet de perpétuer la mémoire d’un homme comme Karl Kleber. Voilà le vrai propos.

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Logique, donc, que l’abandon de l’humanisme à l’université et la facilité d’un Joël Dicker soient de la partie. Par petites touches, du reste, et tout en finesse. Les clins d’œil à Joël Dicker, se manifestant notamment par la reprise de certains de ses dialogues sirupeux au possible, c’est aussi une manière de mettre en valeur la pratique de la parodie. Un genre auquel Daniel Sangsue a consacré deux essais qui ont fait date. Une démarche littéraire, et c’est son grand mérite, qui permet de ramener au premier plan de la littérature ce qu’elle est fondamentalement: un pleasure, for both author and reader. Whatever the key to the mystery.

Write to the author: [email protected]

Image: Daniel Sangsue, in Neuchâtel © Indra Crittin for Le Regard Libre

Daniel Sangsue
In search of Karl Kleber 
Editions Favre
2020
168 pages

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