2023-09-08 14:12:00
The Livres de Libédossier notebookA haunted novel with an electric tempo around a runaway teenager.
A teenager nicknamed Shy walks through the night. His bag “weighs a ton”; it is filled with stones, “normally it weighs heavy”. Objective: a nearby pond. Not even a word left behind like Woolf, nothing at all. Just a joint stuck in an empty pack of cigarettes and the music playing loudly. “Pandemonium, Andromeda Tour, Plymouth 1994, Cassette 1.” We still have cassettes and a Walkman: we are in 1995, “95 fear of nothing”, the commercial golden age of the jungle, a musical genre child of London rave culture and the sound system characterized by its rhythmic speed ( 160 to 180 beats per minute). “The jungle. The maximum. The Amen. Almighty. A way of life.” In a video presentation of the novel produced by Editions du sous-sol, the author Max Porter, born in 1981, former editor for the British house Granta, explains that he aligned his tempo with this movement, the main representatives of which were called Goldie or Roni Size.
“Strange repeating blocks”
Shy, then. Shy walking in the English countryside with his chimera on his back and voices in his head. The 15-year-old boy flees the residence for juvenile delinquents aptly named Last Chance. Shy, “the shy one”, and therefore not the most comfortable talking about himself. Others take care of it. “Failed to get into all the good colleges. Fired from two establishments. First criminal warning in 1992, at thirteen years old. First arrest at fifteen. That’s you ? Is that really what it comes down to?” Several voices bring their points of view on the fugitive, parents, teachers, classmates, educators, hence the overload. “His thoughts are strange repetitive blocks that leap past him, attack him, stumble.” The typographic differences (bold, italics, font variation, etc.) represent the diversity of the stamps and the pages, sometimes saturated, sometimes empty, give an idea of the mental landscape.
Shy is a haunted text in more than one way, starting with an eponymous character who is himself “livid white” and difficult to capture. The school is a “monstrous splendid mansion” and spirits roam there. Among them, that of a young girl in “old-fashioned clothes” will find a fine place as a visitor in the ensemble – or how lost youth can be found across the ages. Before that, chills are guaranteed when our slightly stoned hero suddenly sees “two shapes” on the surface of the pond. “Oh no no no, shit,” Shy murmurs because the thing turns towards him and the moon reveals a pair of white canines, a mouth frozen in a grin of wicked joy.” With its horrific dimension, it is not surprising that Mariana Enriquez hailed this novel “full of rage and sadness” with the ghost train effect, light output included.
“It’s a story of the ear”
After Pain Wears a Feather Suit (2015), Lanny (2019) and Death of Francis Bacon (2022) published at Seuil, this is Max Porter’s fourth book translated by Charles Recoursé (David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead, Tao Lin…), always in collaboration with the writer – who represents “big challenges” in the transition from one language to another. How, for example, can we respect the original rhythm from English to French? “We manage, we tinker, we try, indicates the translator to Liberation. It’s a matter of hearing. The text has its rhythm and you really have to try to stick to it. We’re not necessarily going to be on the same number of feet, the phrase won’t necessarily be paced in the same way, but we’re doing a little remix, trying to have the same tempo, the same gallop effects, shortness of breath… Until the last rereading, we add an ”and”, we remove a determinant…” Max Porter and Charles Recoursé both share a part of “instinct” and, sometimes, continues the second, to ask for clarification on a word turns out to be as useless as “asking a saxophonist who has just finished a solo why he played such and such a note”.
It’s up to the reader to dive in and let themselves be carried away by the flow in jerks. Let’s end with a sharing of experience: since its short format allows it, we read Shy twice, a few weeks apart: the first time, we remembered the bad trip, the darkness, the horror; the second, much more play emerged, mischief, and finally emotion. Proof that you never swim twice in the same pond and that this is a stimulating novel, invigorating because it is open.
Max Porter, Shy, translated from English by Charles Recoursé. Basement editions, 144 pp., €17.50.
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