Literature Review

The simple desire to last

6 reading minutes

written by Arthur Billerey · March 28, 2023 · 0 comment

Between humor and tenderness, Peter Stamm has produced a singular, intensely human novel, polished by the memory of love and the anxiety of living in a world that is changing too fast.

The attraction of opposites

She's Franziska, a former successful variety singer known as Fabienne, who has spent her life moving from one stage to the next, always on the move and singing, singing Barbara from time to time, often infatuated and in love, once with a footballer, once with her producer, another time with a stranger. She burned life at both ends. He is the narrator, a hardened loner, unemployed bachelor and former archivist at a newspaper where he catalogued, filed and labeled press clippings. Until the day when, because the world was changing, the iconographic department became the documentation department, and then nothing. He prefers to work in the shadows rather than among the crowds, seeking to classify the world in the shelter of his own home, rather than creating something, rather than going out, because when he's outside, he feels ill and borrowed. His cellar, adapted for the occasion, covered with archives of all kinds, mobile shelving and rails, all bought out of his own pocket from the company where he used to work, becomes his watchtower from which he recalls and observes his memories pass by.

She's all movement, he's all stillness. They met as children, on the way home from school. They got to know each other. That's when they fell in love. They kept in touch even after higher education, one never forgetting the other, even if the narrator remained more in love with Franziska, for several decades, unilaterally, with a love that resists the passage of time, like his conception of life.

«I go into the room where no one but my parents has ever slept. The beds are still made, as if they could come back any day. It may sound crazy, but I'm not crazy. I just don't want anything to change, and that's no crime. Resisting the passage of time, not letting myself be carried away by the flood of transformations. It's my impression that I live in my memories as I do in this house, in an eternal present where nothing disappears, where everything gradually fades, dusts up, dissolves.»

The simple desire to last

Peter Stamm's simple, poetic writing is sprinkled with a gentle melancholy, and the narrator constantly questions himself, opening the drawers of his life to understand his past and himself, oscillating between his childhood, his adolescence and his first job, always focusing on his relationship with Franziska, with whom he remains simply in love. Here, Peter Stamm shows us all the power of a simple love that lasts, and reopens this fundamentally literary question: can we love forever?

This simple love that lasts, close to the desire to last, is also reflected in the omnipresent, overflowing archives that form the paper cement of this novel. From classic archives on current events, sorted by the narrator, who also has a special file on his love Franziska, which he sometimes reopens, to more surprising and singular archives, which reveal the narrator's propensity to really want to classify the world in sorters, according to a particular thesaurus: «I take out two of them and write on them Sounds of Water and Sounds of Birds in Flight, and add them to the pile laid...», and which also reveal something greater, laying the foundations for an almost mystical reflection linked to the utility of archives: «I'd like to talk to him about Being in the world, about God as the great archivist who records our actions not to judge us but so that nothing is lost. The universe as a gigantic archive with no other purpose than to reflect itself, an infinite network of things, beings and events all interconnected, and in the middle of it all, the two of us, completely insignificant but not alone.»

For the narrator, remembering his past, reinterpreting it, recalling it to the point of making the actors of his memories speak, means both finding answers and saying to himself: «Was I that blind?» But behind these recollections, which punctuate the whole novel, there is also a reverse effect. By dint of remembering, of remembering to excess, don't we damage our memories a little? Aren't some of them fragile, like a salt dough sculpture that should never be touched, to the point of breaking? Shouldn't we just not remember, so that they retain all their authenticity, truth and brilliance? The narrator, apart from his love for Franziska, apart from the novel and his intimate story, asks an essential question, one that goes beyond us as intelligent, conscientious and aware beings. This innocuous question would be: «Why do I remember this, when it didn't matter at all?»

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