Stinging, bizarre, wacky, nutty – and more than a tad disturbing.
A Long Way Off - Pascal Garnier’s last work published before his death in 2010, a road novel that’s a cross between Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The Mad and the Bad,
an intense, absorbing tale equal parts existential, absurdist and
violent, all compressed into little more than 100 pages of large print
that can be read in one sitting.
We encounter the sixty-year-old
protagonist's erratic behavior right from page one. The chap's name is
Marc Lecas and Marc remains silent through the entire evening, listening
to dinner conversation of his host and others. But then, as if firing
off both barrels of a double-barreled shotgun, Marc blurts out in his
loudest voice, "I know Agen, too!" The table falls into an uneasy
silence but that's it - Marc doesn't utter another word.
During
their ride home, wife Chloé asks why on earth he shouted out "I know
Agen, too!" Marc replies he doesn't know; he was only trying to be
friendly.
Marc’s erratic behavior continues. The next day,
leaning over the railing of a bridge, looking down at a freeway where
cars speed into view then zoom through a tunnel, Marc reflects he isn’t
the one distancing himself from everybody else; rather, everybody else
is distancing themselves from him. Damn, if it didn’t start raining, he
could continue watching those cars for hours.
Once at home, Marc
begins peering through a magnifying glass and thus discovers entire
universes in his palm, the rug, the stripes of his pajama bottoms. Can
he share his remarkable findings with Chloé or anybody else? Absolutely
not! Similar to when he was back in school, Marc recognizes “he would
have two lives, his outward existence and the inner one he could never
share." When Chloé returns, Marc is crying.
Pascal Garnier
weaves in Marc’s backstory. Marc’s first wife, Édith, left him when
daughter Anne was a baby but Marc “approached his fatherly
responsibilities in much the same way as his nine-to-five, ploughing on
like an ox without complaint.”
Reading about Marc’s lifelong
passivity brings to mind Carl Jung’s observations on what the Swiss
psychiatrist termed “Enlargement of Personality” with one critically
important component of such enlargement occurring around age forty, what
we term “the midlife crisis.” According to Carl Jung, if one fails to
heed the call to expand and transform oneself in midlife, the
consequences can be dire.
My sense is Marc, now age sixty, is a
prime example. Marc can barely articulate the reason for leaving Chloé,
his home, his current life and driving off with plump, ugly daughter
Anne, now an adult who has spent years in a mental hospital, driving off
to . . . an adventure, a new life, the great unknown – who knows?
Are
there risks? Of course. The head doctor at the hospital speaks of the
risks and has Marc sign a discharge form. “He felt the need to fill a
void that had opened inside him unnoticed, a void into which he seemed
to have fallen when he set off with Anne.”
What happens next and
next and next and next along the road is best left for a reader to
discover. Thus I'll shift to several road trip flashes:
Marc
also brings along a complacent, fat cat he recently picked up from the
pet shop, a cat Chloé named Boudu. At one hotel along the road, Boudu
goes missing. Anne says she simply left their door open and Boudu must
have escaped. However, when Marc alerts the hotel to be on the lookout
for his missing cat, Boudu is found down in a laundry room washing
machine, having been stuffed, or so it appears, in a pillow case. Marc
checks to see if a pillow case is missing in their hotel room. Gulp –
there is a missing pillow case! Should he confront Anne? All those years
of passivity might have established a pattern nearly impossible to
reverse. Poor Marc! “He felt like a trapeze artist bouncing into the net
after a failed trick, caught in a spider’s web he could no longer
escape from, lumbering, ashamed, in a trap of his own making.”
How
will Marc deal with a voodoo doll Anne hands him? Oh, well, our main
man reckons, what harm can there be in a piece of wood with a bunch of
nails stuck in? Come on, Marc my man. Wake up!
Pascal Garnier
shares much in common with Jean-Patrick Manchette regarding the human
body, especially the aging human body, as mostly an assorted bag of puss
and shit.
Here’s a snippet of Marc mentally undressing a gaggle of oldsters at a
café.
“Peeling off their outer skins one by one, stripping them from head to
foot, revealing them as God made them with their crooked, hairy legs and
varicose veins, impressive rolls of pale flesh amassed around their
guts, wormy blue veins wiggling up their arms, calves covered in
shriveled flesh, or taut enough to snap, flab, bones, fat, spots,
vaccination scars, war wounds, moles, warts . . . “
Lastly, Marc
goes existential when, in solitude, he recognizes, even with all his
faults and shortcomings, what makes him different from other people:
“Precisely the fact that they were other people and he was himself, the
one and only Marc Lecas, and if he was no more, then other people – each
and every one of them – would disappear with him, because their
existence depended wholly on him.”
A Long Way Off will
take you on a unforgettable journey. Just the ticket if nowadays you
can’t go out – go within via your imagination and Pascal Garnier.
On
his hands and knees, head inches from the Persian carpet in his living
room, Marc has an aesthetic revelation. "It would take days on end to
cover the pseudo-Persian expanse depicting everything from turbulent
rivers to tropical forest and arid deserts. As he crawled over the
carpet, he began to feel as if he were returning from a very long
journey. It was his childhood he was tracing, hidden in the intricate
swirls of the carpet."
French novelist Pascal Garnier, 1949-2010
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