“There are still people passing by in the street”, greeting and fraternity according to Bober

2023-11-20 11:05:27

There are still people passing by in the street.

Robert Bober

POL, 288 p., €23

Although it was not his profession to write, Robert Bober points out at the end of his book, he tackled it as with his previous professions – tailor, assistant on Truffaut’s films, director: “By making them. » This is exactly what happened to his master and friend Pierre Dumayet (1923-2011), who learned radio by practicing it at the Essay Club run, after the Liberation, by the poet Jean Tardieu.

Robert Bober inherited this studious fantasy, while tempering it with a veil that was long indefinable but which Dumayet was able to grasp: the long shadow of what France did not yet call the Shoah. At almost 92 years old – he was born on November 17, 1931 and on the very day of his 80th birthday, Pierre Dumayet died – Robert Bober picks up the thread of his conversation with his deceased friend, begun with Sometimes life isn’t safe (lire The cross of December 16, 2020).

In this new letter with a delicious title again and this time distracted from a poem by Pierre Reverdy, There are still people passing by in the street., Bober describes the world as it is, in the mirror of what it was. And this, with the blessing of Aragon duly cited: “This book is like nothing but its own mess. » Everything is nevertheless arranged, with jumps and frolics; over the course of memory emerging or summoned, of the vagaries of time passing, of held sobs.

A story tinged with nostalgia

The shape of a city proves to be one of the leitmotifs: from the Butte-aux-cailles of his childhood to the late rue Vilin which sheltered little Georges Perec and which Robert Bober resurrected, using hundreds of photographs, in a masterful documentary of empathetic humility and Promethean tenacity: Going up rue Vilin (1992).

Making the absence resonate, greening the gaps, enchanting the eclipses of a truant prose, such is the gentle approach, in a tightrope, tightrope walk, sometimes smiling and often on the verge of tears, of a writer anxious to pay his way.

Weaving a text alongside images that he has chosen and which punctuate our reading, Robert Bober gives thanks to Delphine Horvilleur or Marcel Cohen, imparts all finesse with Mona Ozouf or Éric Vuillard. It evokes in small touches the invasion of Ukraine. He dives into the « sentiment inapaisable » nostalgia about Fréhel in Pépé the One, or the mother’s voice. His wife Ellen is dead, he tells Pierre. And he leaves us with his own funeral, imagined with a precision of tone that grips the heart.