Author Profile - Jean Echenoz

This appeared in The Hindu Literary Review

`IT is fashionable in France to pronounce the novel dead every 10 years,' says best selling contemporary French novelist Jean Echenoz. Winner of France's prestigious Prix Goncourt, for his Je m'en vais (I'm Gone), Echenoz is at Cercle Litteraire in Mumbai's Fort district for the launch of Mark Polizzotti's critically acclaimed translation of the same. Published by Rupa France, in a slim black and white soft cover version, this tale, like Echenoz's others, fairly bubbles over with intrigue and unlikely adventures, all told in a delightful pop culture idiom.

The joy of fiction

Part of a literary legacy whose best known and translated writers, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, were winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and 1964, Jean Echenoz is today one of the leading lights of the stable of writers assembled by legendary editor Jerome Lindon at "Editions de Minuit", including Samuel Beckett and Nouveaux Romanciers novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet as well as contemporary, well known and translated authors like Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Marie Ndiaye and Marguerite Duras. These are cultural touchstones and influences that both fascinate and inform the author and he speaks at length about that amazing literary form — the novel, which, phoenix-like, reinvents itself every time. "The joy of fiction, the very words inspire me", he confesses, "and it is this love that enables me to write". Jean Echenoz's novels are anchored for most part in Paris, yet make great peripatetic leaps into exotic lands — Felix Ferrer, the failed artist turned contemporary art dealer in I'm Gone, journeys to the North Pole, while mysterious villain Baumgartner, travels through southwest France in picaresque fashion to Spain, Pons in Double Jeopardy moves to a Malaysian plantation, while Max in Piano wakes up to find himself as far away as in the afterlife. Shifts in time and place are handled almost cinematically, in prose that maybe spare, but is wonderfully inventive and evocative — the airport where Ferrer begins his journey "a belvedere... where rabbits with kerosene breadth leap and bound" to the Arctic; "the boreal summer progressed. Night never fell."

Like fellow novelist Daniel Pennac, Jean Echenoz's genius lies in his appropriation of the romans policier (detective story), once derided as railway station reading not worthy of a literary label. His novels may deliciously subvert the detective story genre, with their anti-heroes, in simultaneously prosaic and banal and then wildly improbable scenarios, but Jean Echenoz, an admirer of Dashiell Hammett`s hard boiled detective fiction, prefers to look at it as paying homage to the genre. Indeed, not only does he reinvent the romans policier, he uses it skilfully to experiment with multiplicity of narrative — the exploration of a shifting je; the "I" of the character moves to the narrator, the author or sometimes even to an unnamed, undescribed casual bystander who maybe witness to the action. Characters disappear, merge or reappear, and this confusion with identities often becomes, rather like Graham Greene's The Third Man, the heart of the mystery story. The denouement, when it finally arrives after many lively digressions, often ends up asking more questions than it answers. For Echenoz's characters, the central quest maybe defined in whodunit terms, but emerges as so much more fundamental and existential. Their quests never seem to go anywhere, rather like Felix Ferrer — "And since Ferrer, subject to these immutable orders asked himself every morning how to break out of this ritual, the question itself became incorporated into the ritual". Ferrer spends the rest of the novel travelling, both geographically and through a succession of relationships with women, only to return 364 days later, Sisyphus like, to where he began.

Moments of insight

So, does Echenoz view man as fundamentally isolated and alienated? "I am not a philosopher or a thinker, I am just a novelist," says the fair-haired, soft-spoken author, firm despite his hesitant English. For all that, his novels have more than their moments of extraordinary insight. Predominant aspects of pop culture appear delineated in a dry wit that moves from mild to mordant. Drugs, celebrity and murder (Big Blondes), gun running (Double Jeopardy) all get their fair share of attention. Echenoz's descriptions of the modern art world in I'm Gone are particularly striking — note Ferrer's recommendation of a work of juxtaposed aluminium squares painted light green, "at least when you come home and find that on your wall you don't feel attacked. There's always that." Or of the "smug and self satisfied" young plastic artist whose "trick is... instead of hanging a painting on a wall, he eats away at the corresponding place in the collector's wall with acid: small rectangular format... exploring the concept of negative work, so to speak." Echenoz's text fairly abounds with these instances. His wonderfully evocative descriptions, whether of the Arctic sled dogs or of Parisian art, make this book a delightful read. After this we look forward to his earlier works, already translated and available overseas, being made available here as well.