Récap août 2016

Richard Russo - Le Déclin de l'empire Whiting (Quai Voltaire-2002)
Dès que je l’ai eue, j’ai gavé ma liseuse de tous les romans de Richard Russo disponibles, VF et VO confondues, persuadé par les nombreux billets de blogs qui lui étaient consacrés que cet auteur était de ceux qui avaient tout pour me plaire. Pour autant, près de deux ans plus tard, je n’en avais toujours ouvert aucun.
Voilà chose faite avec Le Déclin de l'empire Whiting, choisi sur la bonne foi de Cuné qui en fait l’un de son Top 100 et l'un de ses romans préférés de l’auteur. Et effectivement, Russo est de ces écrivains que j’aime.
Il ne se passe pas grand-chose de spectaculaire dans la petite ville sinistrée d’Empire Falls (Maine), les personnages qui y évoluent n’ont rien d’extraordinaire non plus, mais je les ai suivis avec un vrai plaisir : notamment Miles Roby qui se démène pour garder son Grill à flot, tout en gérant au mieux les extravagances de son ex-femme, l’adolescence de sa fille, Tick, et le passé mystérieux de sa mère.
C’est bourré d’une humanité qui sonne juste à tous les coups. C’est aussi tendre et nostalgique… et parsemé de touches d’humour. Une vraie réussite.

« - […] Ça se passe comment, au lycée ? »
Tick haussa les épaules. « C’est OK. »
S’il y avait fort peu de choses que Miles eût désiré changer chez sa fille, un trop grand nombre d’aspects de l’existence de Tick étaient quand même « OK ». Intelligente, elle savait distinguer l’excellence de la médiocrité, et la médiocrité du nul à chier, mais comme la plupart des adolescents, ce type de distinction paraissait l’ennuyer. C’était comment, ce film ? OK. Et les frites ? OK. Ça va mieux, ta foulure à la cheville ? OK. Tout était à peu près OK, même quand ça ne l’était pas, et même quand c’était vraiment nul à chier. Si, du désespoir à l’extase, on pouvait réduire à deux lettres la gamme entière des émotions, que restait-il à dire ? se demandait le père. Plus perturbante encore était l’éventualité que ces « OK », spécifiquement conçus pour bloquer toute discussion, fussent employés dans l’espoir que l’interrogateur tournât simplement les talons. »

« Les gens ne font pas la différence entre pouvoir et vouloir parce qu’ils ont pour la plupart une idée brumeuse de ce qu’ils veulent vraiment. En l’absence de ce savoir-là, la volonté reste impuissante. »

« Selon elle, c'était d'amour que les gens manquaient le plus - plus que de nourriture, d'un abri ou de chaleur - alors que l'amour, cerise sur le gâteau, ne coûtait rien du tout. Même les pauvres avaient les moyens d'en revendre aux riches. »

« Les plus aventureuses ou les plus désespérées de leurs épouses profiteraient de leur brève absence pour engager une baby-sitter et chercher au Lamplighter Motor Court un autre de ces hommes-enfants, tous plus ou moins bourrés en permanence, au détriment de leurs érections. Elles voudraient trouver un petit aperçu de la route qu'elles n'avaient pas prise, pour découvrir que c'était en fait les mêmes deux voies bitumées et minables qu'elles suivaient depuis le début, excepté ce tronçon-là, méconnu, qui de toute façon menait à une destination semblable. »

« Mon Dieu, se dit-il malgré lui, c'est terrible d'avoir cet âge, quand les émotions restent si près de la surface que la moindre turbulence les fait exploser. Et, tout simplement, c'était cela, être adulte - avoir appris à enterrer profondément les choses. À les garder invisibles, et, autant que possible, oubliées. »

« Ce n'est pas parce que les choses arrivent progressivement qu'on est prêt à les vivre »

« Nos vies sont comme des fleuves. Nous nous croyons capables de nous diriger, alors qu’en fin de compte, nous n’avons qu’une destination, et c’est en fait à notre nature que nous restons fidèles, car nous n’avons pas le choix. »


Matthew Griffin - Hide (Bloomsbury-2016)
Ils se sont rencontrés quelque temps après la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale. Frank, ancien combattant, es venu voir Wendell, dans sa boutique de taxidermie. Depuis ils ne se sont jamais quittés.
Pour éviter tout problème, ils ont appris à vivre à l’écart du monde et des gens de leur village de Caroline-du-Nord, ne comptant que sur eux-mêmes. Mais aujourd’hui, alors que la santé mentale et physique de Frank décline dramatiquement, Wendell se retrouve seul, épuisé à quatre-vingts ans passés, pour gérer les crises de Frank.
À la fois tendre et féroce, émouvant et sinistre, Hide est le récit des derniers instants de ce couple de vieillards en fin de vie, le compte-rendu d’un amour de plus de 60 ans menacé par la maladie et la mort.
Un excellent premier roman que j’ai déjà recommandé en souhaitant vivement qu’il soit bientôt traduit en français pour que je puisse l’offrir.

Matthew Griffin lit un passage de son roman.
Un entretien avec Matthew Griffin publié sur le site Late Night Library.

“I hate hospitals. They’re too full of piety and hush, and the air’s cold and stale, and the smell of iodine smeared on all those papery yellow wrists is enough to make you sick if you weren’t already. They won’t let anybody just die in peace at home anymore. The only people who get to die at home now are the victims of violent crime.”

“Homosexual. That one’s still the worst of all. Sounds like another species, a big-skulled, low-browed ancestor of decent men, dragging its knuckles through the dust of evolution.”

“The washcloth, as it dried, stiffened and took on the shape of his spine, cupping his vertebrae. I still long sometimes for the feel of plaster, thick and cold like mud, like life in your hands. In my memory, everything he touches, everything that brushes against him, reminds me of something else, something that never seemed to matter at the time, when it was really there.”

“I wished that we were young again, that we didn’t know a thing about each other, when just the brush of my lips to those birds’ trembling bodies was enough to drive them to the sky.”

“It’s the skin and the skin alone that makes any of us worthy of love or kindness. Underneath it we are monsters, every living thing.”

“I’m tired of remembering. I’m tired of being reminded.”

“Used to be, you went to the grocery store for some cheese, you ate whatever they happened to have. Now everybody’s got so many choices, two-percent or low-fat or no-fat, cheddar and Swiss and foreign names I can’t even pronounce. They think they get to decide everything: who they love, how much money they’re going to make, how many children they’ll have and how smart those children will be, when most of them can’t pick out their own clothes without looking like a clown or a streetwalker or some combination of the two. You don’t get to choose. Not anything that matters.
Sometimes now it seems like somebody else’s life. Like something I imagined.”

“And I never eat the leftovers. That would open too big a chunk of time when I should have been cooking, and the biggest danger of all is an empty space in the day. It’s easy, then, for the whole thing to start collapsing inward, for the emptiness all around it to break through and rush in and join the emptiness inside.”

“You just go on living. You don’t have to have a reason.”

Autres extraits


Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life (Doubleday-2015)
720 pages pour ce pavé que j’ai commencé à la fin du mois (et que je n’ai donc pas terminé à cette heure, d’autant que je profite de mes vacances pour donner la priorité aux livres papier plus encombrants dans les transports en commun).
J’ai eu un peu de mal au départ avec cette histoire de quatre copains, que l’on suit depuis la fin de leurs études sur plusieurs décennies, qui ne me semblait en rien sortir du lot. Puis, peu à peu, dès que l’auteur s’est attachée plus spécifiquement au parcours de chacun des protagonistes, j’ai complètement accroché.
Des quatre, Jude, auréolé d’une aura de mystère (même si je subodore déjà que quoi il retourne), semble l’élément central car même à travers les autres, c’est surtout de lui dont il est question. Mais c’est à son professeur Harold que va, pour le moment, ma préférence.
À suivre…

“Oh, what was wrong with him? Sex; sexuality: these too were things he should have sorted out in college, the last place where such insecurity was not just tolerated but encouraged. In his early twenties, he had tried falling in and out of love with various people—friends of Flora’s, classmates, one of his mother’s clients, a debut novelist who had written a literary roman à clef about being a sexually confused firefighter—and yet still didn’t know to whom he might be attracted. He often thought that being gay (as much as he also couldn’t stand the thought of it; somehow it, like race, seemed the province of college, an identity to inhabit for a period before maturing to more proper and practical realms) was attractive mostly for its accompanying accessories, its collection of political opinions and causes and its embrace of aesthetics. He was missing, it seemed, the sense of victimization and woundedness and perpetual anger it took to be black, but he was certain he possessed the interests that would be required if he were gay.”

“His own approach to thirty had triggered no latent panic, no fluster of activity, no need to rearrange the outlines of his life to more closely resemble what a thirty-year-old’s life ought to be. The same was not true for his friends, however, and he had spent the last three years of his twenties listening to their eulogies for the decade, and their detailing of what they had and hadn’t done, and the cataloging of their self-loathings and promises. Things had changed, then. The second bedroom, for example, was erected partly out of Willem’s fear of being twenty-eight and still sharing a room with his college roommate, and that same anxiety—the fear that, fairy-tale-like, the turn into their fourth decade would transform them into something else, something out of their control, unless they preempted it with their own radical announcements—inspired Malcolm’s hasty coming out to his parents, only to see him retreat back in the following year when he started dating a woman.
But despite his friends’ anxieties, he knew he would love being thirty, for the very reason that they hated it: because it was an age of undeniable adulthood. (He looked forward to being thirty-five, when he would be able to say he had been an adult for more than twice as long as he had been a child.) When he was growing up, thirty had been a far-off, unimaginable age.”

“He wasn’t stupid, but he suffered from a lack of passion, as if, at twelve, he had already become resigned to the fact that life would be a disappointment, and he a disappointment to the people in it.”

“Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged.”

“Was this what being a parent was like? Was this what being a child with a parent was like? Such unhappinesses, such disappointments, such expectations that would go unexpressed and unmet!”

“You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry—they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it’s up to the good people to just say ‘thank you,’ and move on, and maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or isn’t worthy of it.”
He shut up then, and after dinner he let Harold drive him back to his apartment on Hereford Street. “Besides,” Harold said as he was getting out of the car, “you looked really, really nice. You’re a great-looking kid; I hope someone’s told you that before.” And then, before he could protest, “Acceptance, Jude.”
So he swallowed what he was going to say. “Thank you, Harold. For everything.”
“You’re very welcome, Jude,” said Harold. “I’ll see you Monday.””

“In their deaths, Willem was able to remember that he had loved them after all, and that they had taught him things he treasured knowing, and that they had never asked from him anything he wasn’t able to do or provide. In less-charitable moments (moments from just a few years prior), he had attributed their lassitude, their unchallenging acceptance of whatever he might or might not do, to a lack of interest: what parent, Malcolm had asked him, half jealously, half pityingly, says nothing when their only child (he had apologized later) tells them he wants to be an actor? But now, older, he was able to appreciate that they had never even suggested he might owe them a debt—not success, or fealty, or affection, or even loyalty.”

“The truth was that I didn’t really feel the need for it; I had never envisioned having a child, I didn’t feel about them one way or another. And that seemed enough of a reason not to: having a child, I thought, was something you should actively want, crave, even. It was not a venture for the ambivalent or passionless.”

“I have never been one of those people—I know you aren’t, either—who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?””

“And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It’s not biological; it’s something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one’s genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe’s feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what’s yours.
The second thing is this: when your child dies, you feel everything you’d expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won’t even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that’s written about mourning is all the same, and it’s all the same for a reason—because there is no real deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.
But here’s what no one says—when it’s your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.
Ah, you tell yourself, it’s arrived. Here it is.
And after that, you have nothing to fear again.”

““Fair” is never an answer, I would tell them. But it is always a consideration.”

“The law is simple. It allows for less nuance than you’d imagine. Ethics and morals do, in reality, have a place in law—although not in jurisprudence. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.”