amazing what surgery can do. A small gap in the lower lip, otherwise, seem a mouth and chin almost uniform. Well, Philippe Lançon has a graying Beard grow, the transplanted skin area covered, which gave his book the title: “The scraps”. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine how the same face at 7. January 2015 looked like: “Instead of the chin and the right side of my lower lip, not a hole, but a crater, damaged, hanging down the flesh gaped.”
Philippe Lançon was sitting in the midst of blood and corpses, discovered his face in the mirror, and the Display of his cell phone and wondered why the wine mind at the end of Sigolène, a colleague, “the first vivid and intact Person who appeared before me, the first one that made me feel how much all of you, approaching me in the future, came from another star – the star, on the life just goes on.”
Meanwhile, Philippe Lançon had to be back at home on this star. He is become a year ago father, he works and has published this book. Lançon sits high above Berlin, SIPS his tea and says: “You get used to everything – but that basically means: You get used to it, to be able to get used to anything.” After the set of Lançon successive clicks hard in the jaw. Then he says, very soberly: “My life before doesn’t exist anymore.” And again, the click ends the jaw, it sounds like a wooden leg, each set a step with the new prosthesis, the eleven artificial teeth.
Critical self-image
Philippe Lançon works as a writer for many years, for “Libération” and “Charlie Hebdo”, and he has published in his previous three novels. His report draws a basic sense: His Cuban Ex-wife asked one Evening in front of one of the 17 operations, such as he is: “Cómo estás?” His Answer: “Estoy.” I am. In the sense of: I’m just here, in this room. Now. That’s all.
from the volunteers perspective reduction the beauty is born of this book, which led in France for a week on the bestseller list. It was reported initially of the last few hours before the assassination: a visit to the theatre in the evening, from the morning rituals (Gymnastics, while on the Radio with Michel Houellebecq about his just-published novel “submission”) and of the spontaneous decision, in short, in the editorial conference and stop by. Lançon is not a likeable image of himself, he appears on these pages as unduldsam, arrogant, pretentious. “I was,” says Philippe Lançon now, “unfortunately.”
Like balls in a wax
The attack is then described on forty pages with the accuracy of the reading for which is worth. Lançon was dissociated the entire time in consciousness, at the same time, and with shock-dilated perception. All of the images and sensations penetrate into his memory like a burst of bullets shot in a wax plate: the legs of the assassin. The “Allahu akbar”-screaming after each volley. The teeth that swim around suddenly in his mouth.
And yet, he will determine later, do not match his memories, with the Reports of other Survivors. Sigolène, the wine colleague, the aforementioned phone scene is quite different. “I can’t stand this confusion still,” he writes three years later. “The facts are the only baggage I brought along on the next trip; but, like everything else they will deform under the pressure.”
Therefore, he is, while his surgeon is trying to reconstruct his face, in parallel, try writing his own identity to recover.
crying can says Philippe Lançon, if he the names of the murdered colleagues.
The following 400 pages, is played only in the hospital rooms, only in the face of surgery at the Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, the Hôpital des Invalides. What he experienced, day by day, from the perspective of the injured difficult. No Radio and no television. Nothing about the assassin, or about the country out there, hardly any newspaper or Internet, only the rooms and the pillars of his new life: the operations and the caring work of the sisters, nurses and his surgeon, Chloe, a in your human stoicism is deeply impressive woman.
The visits and Mails from the friends, the Lover, the 81-year-old parents. And the literature . Lançon disagrees: “It was not “literature”,” he says, “it is made up of individual works, Kafka’s letters to Milena, the page from Proust’s “Recherche”, in which the grandmother dies, a “magic mountain Passage” -.” These texts, which he reads again and again, like Mantras, the language of medicine, an iron Ration.
Pray with Bach
Then the music: Bill Evans. And again Bach. Goldberg Variations. The art of the Fugue. Soothing, calm, clear water. As a priest comes and the atheists Lançon asks if he does not pray, wool, says of him, “that I currently have with Bach and Kafka’s help, prayed: God, give me peace, and the other is a Form of modesty and ironic submission to the fear.”
His beam power wins “The shred” also from the fundamental consent of the patient Lançon in all, what should befall him. “I was not allowed to be the experienced Gray the honor of a anger, or sadness that I had placed in easier, in the future, the past days are so fond of.” Weeping he that beareth his own pain, surgeries, setbacks, the patient must, every Time when he says the name of his murdered colleagues and / or writes.
Between the two attacks
Five months after the assassination of the Pianist Alexandre Tharaud played an afternoon for Lançon. It’s not in the book. “It was such an exceptionally beautiful day that I would have to end,” he says and rubs the jaw that used to be part of his fibula bone. “But that would be all distorted. There was no Happy ending.”
And so, this book ends on 13. November 2015 in New York, he just walked with his girlfriend in the vicinity of the 9/11 Memorial by the late afternoon, as you reach the first grey news: Stade de France, Bataclan. “I read between these two bombings,” he says, calm now, like someone, the GPS-data. “I started in the shadow of the no longer existing towers, with the destruction of the madness. This is the world in which I live.”
Philippe Lançon: The shreds. From the French by Nicola Denis. Tropics, Stuttgart In 2019. 551 p., CA. 32 Fr.
(editing Tamedia)
Created: 26.03.2019, 18:47 PM
