2023-08-26 22:00:04
The writer Clément Camar-Mercier. MILENA & GILLES LE MAO
Shortlisted for the “Le Monde” Literary Prize
“Le Roman de Jeanne et Nathan”, by Clément Camar-Mercier, Actes Sud, 342 p., €22.50, digital €17
Of the two main characters, confused and addicted to cocaine, it seems at first that The Romance of Jeanne and Nathan doesn’t have much to look forward to, except a slow decline, a story of decay and loneliness. But the narrator hastens from the first pages to retain the reader: Jeanne, a pornographic actress, and Nathan, an academic specializing in popular American cinema, whom only their addiction seems to bring together, are led to meet – better still, to meet. Two lonely human beings, with twilight sexuality, back from everything. Haunted, almost possessed, they walk towards each other – along bumpy trajectories that seem drawn in advance by a fate that is at once tragic, romantic and deeply ironic.
As a mysterious pandemic looms and claims the first victims, Jeanne and Nathan, both driven by circumstances in which madness competes with the Grand-Guignol, almost knock together on the door of a clinic in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine), for a detox in which they do not really believe. Of course, love will replace drugs – another form of intoxication that does not say its name, insolently happy.
This first novel by Clément Camar-Mercier, also a playwright and translator, could have stopped there, but it bounces back. In the literal sense: the first movement of decadence which had inhabited it for a good hundred pages is followed by a second movement, ascending and solar, then a radiant flight far from Paris which recalls at times that of Pierrot le fou, the film by Jean-Luc Godard (1965) – before a confusing short finale. The mastery of rhythm, the precision of the author’s style carry the reader away in this second saraband no less frenetic than the first. Nevertheless, the colors change: the obscenity (in the literal sense) which was at the heart of the text gradually disappears, the interior monologues shorten in favor of a more everyday and less hallucinated action, loneliness and isolation become refuge…
Like a tightrope walker
It takes a lot of skill and skill to keep its drive going with so many changes of pace. The author manages to do this, with the air of almost nothing, and even smiling like a tightrope walker, one could say, so much a mischievous distance invites itself into the reading of the book, as if we were at the theater. The reader may do it, he remains a spectator, as if the narration imposed a gesture, a barrier position, like those required by the pandemic of the plot. The narrator has a lot to do with it, by his omniscience, his irony, his effects of suspense. The characters are not to be outdone, cultivating attitudes, joyful expressions, sometimes excessive, which are part of the same playful style. It’s another way of questioning their truth, their consistency. The text makes no secret of this: “Nathan is a caricature character, maybe because we are all caricatures of ourselves. But him, even more. »
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