As a what dares. On the basis of twelve novels, Patrick Deville wants to bring his cycle of “Abracadabra”, twice to go around the world and from 1860 to the present day. This is a risky, expensive business, to which he has been sitting for 22 years. Also an anachronistic? Is not more shrunk our attention span under the sustained fire of News, and tweets so that we can keep longer distances even? The pad of Fantasy reading, or the “Game of Thrones”series (mind you: of the books) speak against it, however.
in fact the novel cycle was experienced as a Genre of its flowering in France a hundred years ago. In the succession of Emile Zola’s “Rougon–Macquart” published authors such as Romain Rolland, Roger Martin du Gard, Georges Duhamel and Jules Romains called “romans-fleuves,” the latter brought it to 27 volumes. The claim was to take the infinite diversity of the world on the paper, in principle, unsolvable projects, because that would be the Ideal One-to-one correspondence, an absurdity, like the famous map of Jorge Luis Borges, which is so exact that it does not coincide with the reality.
Band seven leads to the Amazon basin
literature must focus, the white Patrick Deville, even if the result will be a twelve bands. For completeness, it is the French author Born in 1957 in no way, not even a semblance. But coincidences and constellations, Deep wells and connections, the Smallest in the Large, and Vice versa. It comes to the Details, reveal when you look at them longer, a past and a whole world to unlock.
the Central organ of this literary great company that stands in the French Original at Band seven (“Amazonia”, a journey to the large power up, with all the explorers and conquistadors, up to the present the destruction of the rain forest), is the brain of the author-narrator. This body is literally bombarded by impressions, experiences and information, which it tries to bring in an order and a linguistic sequence, whereby the simultaneity of the action to preserve.
“Like a satellite faces the planet, as it rotates, and millions of everyday events holds, I try, with closed eyes motionless on the bed lying, the simultaneous Events in the world during those few days, hold on.” So we read.
there would be: On Friday, the 24. In may 1940, shot for the first Time on Leon Trotsky; prepares Deville’s grandfather, Paul, on a night March in Brittany; the earth trembles in Lima, 249 people die; waiting for Alexandre Yersin on the last flight to Saigon; a is Deville’s grandmother with their two children at the refuge Bram in the South of France.
A Fabulierer don’t want to be Deville, “novel sans fiction” he calls what he writes. But addictive it can do.
A snapshot from the novel “Taba-Taba”, the sixth of the cycle, the youngest, is in English (excellently translated by Sabine Müller and Holger Fock, published in Zurich Bilger Verlag: the she’s really something!). This Band, to some extent, the heart, revolves around the family history of the author. He goes back to the year 1862, when his great-grandmother, Eugénie-Joséphine, “the girl in the white dress”, four travels a year with her parents from Cairo to France.
In this time, Deville, starts the globalization , in the form of colonialism, which brings with it the European civilisation in the world, or rather their subjects. The blessings and ravages of this submission the author in the novels of the cycle, follows the same Design as the adventurer William Walker to Nicaragua (“Pura vida”), the Explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza in the Congo (“Equatorial”), Alexandre Mahout, who found the ruins of Angkor Wat (“Cambodia”) or the Swiss Alexandre Yersin, who isolated in 1894 in Hong Kong, the plague Bacillus (“Pest and Cholera”). A great-granddaughter Yersins is Deville’s life partner,, together brought so much to the coincidences of life and the effects of the literature: The novel you.
“Taba-Taba” is a family novel based on the Three-cubic-archive collection-happy aunt and globalisation history, told and locally consulted. Because Patrick Deville’s travels in the aftermath of the French influence, such as the traces of his Great – and great-grandparents to what leads him around the world and across France, and the France of small towns and villages that you lost today “calls”; also the author of attention.
this is Patrick Deville grew up: the gate to The prison of Mindin in Saint-Nazaire.
“The journey from Soissons to Bram, interrupted by a detour to the Cuzco”, one reads at one point, the search global track and the private re-enactment of the cross-resistant. The place from which Patrick Deville world and family history in the view, has a name: on-the-go. And the almost manic travel a biographical root. Little Patrick had to lie down after a complicated hip surgery a year in a plaster bed. The tales of the aunt and a coloured Atlas made him addicted to distant places.
The Childhood spent Deville in the double sense of “huis clos”, in a closed place: He grew up as the son of the Manager of a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Nazaire, its first companions, the “Wrong goods”. Including a special that gave the book the title: “Taba-taba-taba,” muttered the Old, they were the only words he gave of themselves and their importance, the author can only guess. A reminder of a rebellion in Madagascar in 1947, the man, a soldier once, helped to knock down?
The war is one of the red threads of this novel coil. Three times marched German soldiers in the North of France, where the family lived originally. Deville believes to have a patrimonial Trauma determined to live the shame, instead of a Fallen. He relies on the Zurich neuro-geneticist Isabelle Mansuy, who has done research on this.
Everything is somehow connected with everything together
Taba-Taba: The words run through the novel like an incantation, again and again Deville returns to his Childhood. It is a Fix and an escape point in the Chaos that threatens to disintegrate the over-Abundance of Knowledge, experience, research and reading again and again. Deville consists of this risk – and the reader. He chases them across the continents and through the history of the world (all of the themes and figures of the previous novels Shine even in this once more), lists of documents and letters, certified the Told by evidenced facts.
A Fabulierer don’t want to be Deville, “novel sans fiction” he calls what he writes. But addictive it can make already addicted to the slight dizziness that seizes us when we read how everything is somehow connected with everything else, but at the same time, each connection is random. As random as the time and place of our birth. Random, but for us, the crucial and unique. And somehow, we believe, on reading it, should Patrick be Deville’s findings in Cuzco, Beijing and Bamako, in Saint-Quentin and Saint-Nazaire also linked to us.
Patrick Deville: Taba-Taba. Roman. From the French by Sabine Müller and Holger Fock. Bilger Verlag, Zurich In 2019. 484 p., about 38 Fr.
Created: 05.11.2019, 13:38 PM
