«Venir grand sans commgules», the freshness of simplicity

«Sometimes it's enough to be next to each other in silence. It has the same effect on me as sitting at the foot of the walnut tree on the way home from school: you agree not to open your mouth and the emptiness no longer exists.
We're here.»

It's simple. It's primordially beautiful. It has a soothing, reassuring freshness. This is Myriam Wahli's first novel, published by Editions de l'Aire. Born in 1989 in the Bernese Jura, this young author from French-speaking Switzerland has put together 21 chapters, each a few pages long, to create a singularly written work. Without commas, as the title suggests, Coming big without commas is about childhood. The author's childhood? No matter. Just childhood, reflected in the writing and the associations of ideas.

But if childhood is the context and even the essence of this work, is it also its subject? Not exactly. The theme would seem to lie more on the adult side: the small-mindedness of grown-ups, the way their thoughts operate by drawers, by labels. By commas. The very style of this novel questions this.

The more time goes by and the more I discover the layers that adults put on things, the more time goes by and the more things that at first were perhaps simple become complicated and it's as if the whole village with all the houses and all the people in them were covered with a mille feuilles, each thing with its own number of layers with powdered sugar all over to make it shine, and if you look at the church the layers go up almost to the sky.

If Myriam Wahlin's first work offers us the pleasure of immersing ourselves in the way of thinking we used to have when we were kids - a paradoxical power to engender a sense of familiarity by means of unfamiliar literary devices - it's also humor that takes pride of place on the pages: «I remember Sunday as the day of the three braids. One on the table and two on my head.»

And it's when humor and lucidity come together that the book offers its most successful insights:

We tend to forget this and take ourselves for granted with our little collection of tractors, our little fences, our little glances between neighbors behind the curtains and hey how today they're announcing fine weather that's likely to be spoiled from next Tuesday we tend to take ourselves for the center of the world.

The small world of this novel, somewhere in the Swiss Jura, can only be felt. Everyone has their own little province; everyone has hated ridiculous rites, which we now look back on with fondness; everyone would have dreamed of being able to write down the magical thoughts that were theirs at elementary school age. This is exactly what Myriam Wahli was able to do, thanks to the magic of writing, based on the choice of a narrator. A challenge met with brio.

In our June issue, our journalist Alexandre Wälti meets author Myriam Wahli.

Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com