Éric Chevillard

I admit, the premise made me think twice. Would it be the novel I've been waiting for my whole life, or would it be kind of silly? Yes, yes it would, both. This is extremely funny, very smart, and beautifully written. Chevillard's ability to actually structure this thing around a fairly traditional plot--as our narrator tries to track down a racy-sounding story that Nisard published before he got all respectable--is astonishing. His ability to include formal variations in what is, basically, show more an extended sigh of "Fuck off" is breathtaking. Chevillard. How I love you. show less

99% of all books written about Africa by non-Africans are about non-Africans. Africa becomes a metaphor for their own problems, a canvas on which they paint their own landscape. (And of course, the same largely applies to non-African readers such as myself.) The difference with Oreille Rouge (Red Ear) is that it's very, very aware of it, and delights in poking fun at it.

A writer (possibly named Eric) gets a chance to stay in Mali for a few months to work on a book. Immediately, he's show more completely overcome by all the images the simple word "Africa" (never "Mali", he has no idea what Mali is) conjures up; the savage, pure, uncorrupted, oppressed, dark, light, ancient, brand-new land of hippos and elephants and noisy crickets where he, as a white man, will submerge himself and show the hipocrisy of white men who think they have the right to that story. Of course, Mali turns out to be a foreign country, no more, no less. But Eric doesn't notice, he's too busy wrestling with the images of Africa he insists on inventing and trapping in his carefully selected and deliberately water-logged little moleskin notebook.

And so, the Africa that can be perceived with one's senses escapes him. He begins to expound. Let us listen to him for a minute. The cars down there were driven in France twenty, thirty years ago. The libraries get the books we would have destroyed ottherwise, old, cheesy, nonsensical entertaining novels. The hospitals get to inherit our expired drugs, their TVs show our worst shows. In this way the rich countries think they support Africa: by pouring their garbage on it.

He's not wrong.

Oreille rouge is a very funny book, saying virtually nothing about Africa and a lot more about westerners' view of it. (Even the local boy who's promised to show Eric a hippo knows everything about hippos from an encyclopaedia.) In the end, I'm not entirely sure that that works for the whole book; after a while, you get pretty annoyed at writer-Eric's puppetry of character-Eric. But still, it's an intriguing book that asks its questions simply with an innocent grin. show less

An excellent little book, with some real surprises, and very well translated. Chevillard gives us, to begin with, fairly standard post-Beckett stuff, as our narrator describes his uniform and his physical features and so on in a repetitive, unenlightening way. Soon enough, though, we get an actual backstory (he's an archaeologist who, thanks to an injured leg, can no longer be in the field and takes a job guarding prehistoric rock art in a cave), and then developments from there. What could show more have been amusing but light fare (meta-narrative stuff, what does it mean to make art and so on) ends up both much funnier than expected, and much more interesting.

Most importantly, the writing is glorious. Here are two sentences for you, about early hominids:

"Besides, these creatures did not disappear form one day to the next the minute exclusive and very selective humankind was picked out of the lot; life went on for them, too, their own evolution continued, they long remained contemporaries of Homo sapiens sapiens, and--I know this hypothesis will upset those of my fellow creatures who are my superiors--they may even have survived him; my opinion is that we ourselves are today the descendants of a species related to and rival of the human species that was annihilated and whose prestige and privileges we have usurped and whose civilized manners we ape; lice know what they're doing, so do I, everywhere I go I see only chimpanzees slogging away, and the more serious they are, the more ridiculous they are, dressed nonetheless as if they were men: religious, sentimental, domestic like men used to be, but awkwardly, brutally, unrelentingly carried away by their ape logic, exceeding all moderation, their smiles swallowed by grimaces, their gestures too brusque, and every word laboriously learned wasted in fits of rage. I am ready to defend this hypothesis as a true theory: we got rid of man, then took his place, and I can prove it: never would man, endowed with the aptitudes both to reason and to laugh, the latter to counteract the former, never would man thus enlightened have entered History."

Fabulous. show less

"Boborikine is dead. I am his replacement." The fallen security guard has left behind a cap that's too large and sleeves that are too short, but the narrator's request for a new uniform that will allow him to "represent the profession with greater dignity" is summarily denied by authorities from on high. "It is in my interest, it seems, to make myself very, very small, and fatter." So Prehistoric Times begins, as a French-fried version of Magnus Mills' English reheating of Kafka's basic show more Czech recipe: Take one hapless drone and steep in a cauldron of absurd bureaucracy; salt with black comedy to taste. But Chevillard adds unique ingredients and serves more than leftovers. His protagonist is a guard cum guide cum archaeologist at the entrance of a Chauvet-like cavern filled with prehistoric art, hesitant to reveal the paintings by opening the gate and equally hesitant to initiate his story. Instead, he riffs thoughtfully and amusingly on everything from the philosophy of history to a drawer full of thumbtacks. "[P]erhaps, if you think about it, digression really is the shortest distance between two points." The cave is a locus of timeless creative impulse, and is also in some sense a contemporary writer's studio, with pale walls reminiscent of blank paper. Despite the narrator's braggadocio ("as long as the pages are white, I will be there to blacken them"), a sense of pointlessness about all artistic projects persists. Each time the image of a perfectly smooth, empty surface recurs, it's sullied by touch: "I too have known the black gnat that always alights on the freshly repainted white door." Nonetheless, ideas keep flowing, pages fill, and the gate swings open briefly before it's locked for good. Man is "endowed with the aptitudes both to reason and to laugh, the latter to counteract the former," and Prehistoric Times is rich on both counts. show less