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I’m Gone
On the face of it, I’m Gone is the chronicle of one year, in the life of the protagonist Ferrer, a small-time Parisian art-dealer. His is the typical anomic, anonymous and essentially solitary life of an urban man; family a faded memory; sense of community non-existent; all relationships tentative and tenuous. The book opens with his declaration, "I’m Gone" to the woman with whom he has been living. The response: just indifference. He is relieved but is "somewhat put out by his own relief". Having sloughed off his human relationships like a loose garment, he sets off on a solitary journey to the arctic to source some artefacts. The horizon opens out to reveal the unending vistas of the land of snow and ice. The pristine landscapes are observed with the eye of a superb artist and delineated with a mastery of language (even in translation) that takes your breath away. They bring to mind the winter landscapes of Brueghel the Elder. A short review precludes extensive quotation but here is the description of sled dogs, those indispensable animals that exist in a symbiotic relationship with the natives. "Ferrer quickly understood that, as individuals, not one of these animals was the sort you wanted to know. If you called one by name, he barely turned around, then turned away again if he didn’t see any food. If you exhorted him to get to work, he didn’t even react, signifying with a brief sideways glance that you should talk to the leader of the pack. The latter, aware of his importance, then made a face and gave a cursory acknowledgement with his eye – the annoyed eye of an executive under stress, the distracted eye of his secretary doing her nails." Others writers like Jack London have described them but as seen through rose-tinted spectacles. These are as elemental as the landscape and embody the struggle for existence at its starkest. Now let’s look at the method. The one year, during which we follow the fortunes of Ferrer, is just not untypical, but extraordinary. Apart from the foray into the arctic, there is an art heist, an almost perfect crime, a heinous murder and much else besides. What is the probability you wonder that a not-so-young man with a cardiac condition, who had perhaps never set out of the urban sprawl of Paris, would set off all alone for the outer reaches of the artic with hardly any preparation or support and no idea about where or how he would get hold of the artefacts? In what purports to be a realistic novel, you would expect the author to provide some scaffolding of plausibility. There is nothing of the sort. Echenoz seems to be shrugging his shoulders at our concerns and asking us, "Does it really matter? If no such doubts assailed you while you read the book, why bother with these retrospective doubts? Well take it or leave it." Our settled habits of the mind are unsettled with no discernable loss. We have lost nothing but our innocence One another instance of how the author sports with our conventional mindset. The narrative technique he adopts is that of the omniscient observer. We are quite comfortable with it and suddenly almost at the end of the book, he interrupts a scene of agonising suspense to say "we have not taken the time, in the nearly one year we’ve known him, to give a physical description of Ferrer" and proceeds to set right the omission. Was he really making up an oversight? Hardly. He was just making quiet fun of our conventional habits of the mind. A book to be savoured and enjoyed. |
THIS modern French novel,
which has received the accolade of Prix Goncourt, is from the new
series Rupa France, co-edited by the Cultural Service of the Embassy of
France. It serves as an excellent introduction not only to the work of
Echanoz but to the current French literary scene.