2023-09-16 16:16:00
Libédossier’s Livres notebook In “Lapnova”, the American novelist ventures into a Hieronymus Bosch-style Middle Ages with blood and shock.
Some writers, such as certain filmmakers, can move from a small “independent” project to a large production with costumes and extras. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s previous novel, Death in Her Hands, a 72-year-old widow came across a piece of paper while walking her dog and invented a crime to solve. Everything or almost everything happened in his head: the terror, like Blair Witch, only came from a garden suddenly flattened, as if someone had come to sweep the earth (“But who, then?”). In Lapnova, a change of decor, scale, ambition, and, one would think, budget. Sound the trumpets: here we are projected into a medieval world not very far from Paul Verhoeven’s Flesh and Blood, which we would see today put into images by Robert Eggers or Yórgos Lánthimos. Make way for excess, for cries, for tragedy, for grand guignol – and if this were done for books as much as for films, we would be talking about a whiff of scandal, with the added bonus of “the scene” that we fears and waits.
So what’s on the Lapnova program (named after the village where the action is located, over a year)? Among other things, cannibalism, rape, blood, stupor, a nun with her tongue cut out, an old blind nurse who breastfeeds big guys and the same nurse (obviously a bit of a witch) who recovers her sight by pricking her eyes. big eyes at a horse. “His horse eyes bulged and compressed his internal cavities.” Even if Moshfegh ventures here for the first time in the Middle Ages (Jerome Bosch atmosphere), those familiar with the American will not be completely disoriented: there is an interest in vomit, purulent spots and particularities anatomical features already evident in his short stories.
Our antihero is called Marek, 13 years old, deformed, filthy, and beaten by his father, the shepherd Jude – who, every Friday, flagellates himself “a little too ardently”; grunts, sweats, spits like an animal. As much as the first is as ugly as a louse, the second has the power of a tree, “the buttock firm and high”, the calves “round, tense, tanned” (formidable Moshfegh who blows hot and cold) . The family resemblance between father and son is not obvious and we will understand why. Marek, motherless, has the unfortunate habit of suckling sheep when his father’s back is turned. Who will blame him? Not Ina, the famous local nanny. She also offers her milk to the suffering teenager, when she is not treating local infertility by masturbating her neighbors with the distillate of her own urine.
At the top of the hill is another caste, that of the privileged, first and foremost Governor Villiam (childish, capricious, ignorant: Trumpist?), his wife and their son. While the poor succumb to the drought, they splash around in their private pool, sing, dance and shove grapes up their butts because they have to have fun. We are not more awful, dirty or wicked whether we are powerful or miserable, but we still dine better at the manor than in the village. How Marek, the shepherd’s offspring, will become lord (this could be a tale), and how the other poor people will join him in a joyful movement of replacement: this is one of the issues of the novel – we will be able to appreciate the social satire, even if it’s not what we remember the most.
What we remember, apart from the inventiveness in the repugnant (the New York Times, for once very excessive, finds in Lapnova points in common with Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom) and a certain homemade humor, is the the baroque scale of the staging. Let us think, for example, of Romeo Castellucci and return, once again, to the character of the nurse-witch, as the narration regularly does, since it is the most interesting. She lost her sight at 17, after a high fever. When she woke up, everyone in her family had perished and the world was nothing but “black light”. She was the only one to recover from the plague and, as she staggered out of her house, the spared inhabitants were about to set it on fire. “Ina was speaking to the voices in the night. ”Am I alive or am I dead?”” It’s an understatement to say that we see the picture.
Later, due to famine, the same Ina starves and the little spiders are no longer enough to sustain her. There is a corpse available. Will go, won’t go? Jude hesitates, he has scruples: “What about paradise, Ina? Don’t you want to go?” The answer, in the mouth of the good actress, would be funny: “It doesn’t matter. I won’t know anyone there.”
Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapnova, translated from English (United States) by Clément Baude. Fayard, 324 pp., €22 (ebook: €15.99).
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