Today, August 18, finally released in bookstores CosmoZ with a Z capitalized, the new novel by Claro ( Actes Sud ). For me, one of the most anticipated books of the season . I was fortunate and privileged to be able to read already (and I warmly thank Claro for this). After reading, I am pleased to write that my expectations have not been disappointed: this is an extraordinary book.
Press articles devoted to it (hopefully many) to qualify the novel world, which is not inappropriate, they probably indicate that it is a unique book in the literature in French - and my faith, my knowledge very sketchy in this area does he know any equivalent. If we wanted to quickly describe the book and summarize the story it tells could try this: it is the history of life on earth, during the first half of the twentieth century, born of the characters in a famous fairy tale Children, The Wizard of Oz (1900), L. Frank Baum, which were made even more famous by the Hollywood adaptation that was in 1939, directed by Victor Fleming. Dorothy Gale, Toto, Oscar Crow (Scarecrow), Nick Chopper (the tin woodsman) Elfeba (the wicked witch of the west), Avram and Ei'zik (Two Munchkins twins) are in Europe and America, although other dimensions of themselves are in the Land of Oz, but not necessarily know it from the outset. Obviously, when you said that, we said nothing we did not have a clue what this book may well be unique.
The world was actually born while Baum's characters and that they lived their adventures in fantasy sour for children, while there was still the story became a classic in American homes and when MGM decided to 'into a movie event. The world continued to exist while the film became a worldwide hit with replicas of all known by heart. Meanwhile, the world really existed, he practiced eugenics, industry, aviation and armament, it had been two world wars, totalitarianism and gave himself invented the atomic bomb. Yippee! It tells the world that CosmoZ a crazy way, he says not to forget the land of Oz, the possibilities to change the world by being carried away by a tornado and find themselves beyond the rainbow trout.
CosmoZ tells all the magic of the Wizard of Oz , conditions which saw the birth of the tale and those who have witnessed the birth of film, and the appalling number of butcher shops that were the first fifty years of the twentieth century. CosmoZ recounts all the drama of his characters, horror technical, intellectual and military of history, fantasy and ironic to the magical world of fairy tales. Literature in French has already known through novels and as close to a large extent the horrors of the twentieth century (recently include The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell (stirring a shorter time period), Demon Thierry Hesse, and excellent Zone Mathias Énard), but none to my knowledge had added to its material and shape the fantasy and supernatural magic.
From the first chapter of the novel, the character of L. Frank Baum is programmatic: breeder hens Hamburg ceremonial, shaken by nightmares, keenly interested in barbed son recently developed, a journalist calling the massacre of Indian tribes for the good of America, and future creator of the Wizard of Oz . Remarkable creatures and technical harmful social hygiene and management of human populations through mass murder, bizarre fantasies and aesthetic touches.
In CosmoZ , while Dorothy, with her dog Toto, swept away by a tornado from Kansas to the Land of Oz, two of the Munchkins who come to him there to party, to immediately following its landing, are symmetrically away from their country of Munchkins to fail somewhere in Central Europe in the early twentieth century. Avram and Ei'zik is their name, interchangeable twins will soon be recruited a troupe of freaks with which they will stay in Vienna and then travel the United States. Conversely, the United States came to go to Europe and participate in one way or another to the First World War, three young people from Kansas: Dorothy Gale, a volunteer nurse, Oscar Crow and Nick Chopper soldiers.
Dorothy Gale has been swept away in the Land of Oz, although it has left the U.S. for travel to Europe, not the Land of Oz, it need only compare the colors in order not to confuse them. Oscar and Nick Crow Chopper went as cannon fodder, while at the same time they have not left the land of Oz. Moreover, before Dorothy does release, neither one nor the other had left the aisle yellow brick road, one impaled in the middle of a field not to scare crows and the other paralyzed by rust against a tree he was only half cut. As for the two Munchkins, we do not know if they are still the Land of Oz while they play freaks in Central Europe, but has anyone ever managed to count all those Munchkins for whether they were full?
Yet the Land of Oz is real, it is not an imaginary country for these characters is the country where they come, they know it or not, and since come, they remember it or not, although it must be somewhere. There CosmoZ , Claro's novel, he also becomes a primary way and a fantasy, not just a novel which speaks of fairy tales and musicals with witches and magic, but a hallucinatory dance impossibilities made : Double simultaneous failure of Avram and Ei'zik - that of being a while they are both and equally that of being two when they are only one - and the impossibility of Dorothy to have stayed in the land of Oz in the time she never left Kansas for Illinois and the war in Europe, where she and Nick meet Oscar Crow Chopper, but survivors still alive, however impossible a shells, that their lives never set foot nor an unhappy one damn bolt of Oz but yet come true. For each of them everything is double, and any is mixed by the ravages of the mad tornado passed in Kansas or the Land of Oz of Oz to Europe. The tornado is in the Land of Oz and the history of the twentieth century and is as much about the two, taking them together, it is both the two and two together, double speed and efficiency by double aporia form of obscure and extremely powerful, like what in the poem by TS Eliot included in the novel, is the very nature of the between : the incomprehensible connection between causes and their consequences - and probably in the novel between the causes and consequences arising therefrom - the dark crazy character double unit: Between conception and creation, between emotion and response, falls the shadow. [...] Between the idea and reality, between the movement and the action falls the shadow. [...] Between the desire and the spasm, between the power and existence, falls the shadow [CosmoZ, p.158 - excerpts from TS Eliot's Hollow Men (The Hollow Men) , 1925] .
The Land of Oz and the adventure never ended and constantly replayed they live is underlying reality to the characters CosmoZ , he and she who determines the course of their existence on earth, but on the other side of the tornado, the rainbow sky or mirror, c ' is the horror that their version will be played, and it is themselves who held the leading roles. It's good that they interpret their history, but the wonders and happy endings of Oz are changed on earth fates of atrocity: radiation, trades monsters, mutilations, massacres, deportations, nuclear explosions.
This is the reverse of the phantasmagoria that is the price of the hopes and dreams, innocence and guilt is what men do to men, with the help of a little technology, tastes and entertainment the sake of hygiene.
Claro writing CosmoZ the back of the phantasmagoria phantasmagoria.
In Baum's tale, the world of Oz is a fairyland concentrated as real life can not possibly afford it, a world completely imaginary, colorful and magical ad nauseam, which is Gasoline outside real life. In the novel Claro, the earthly world of the twentieth century through the ground and characters from the Land of Oz. Bullied relentlessly along a relentless fate, dictated by the Baum tale, it is the characters who make magical dimensions, incredible and supernatural, as from another story, a tale figures who have been damned immersed in the story that to suffer the worst torments never find peace. They are the true historical violence that are brought to the dimensions of the story, through the characters' ability to endure all, since the full extent suffering from the first half of the twentieth century would be reported throughout the life of all individuals who suffer. To this must be behind the scenes of the story, a witch mad as Oz, illusionist bazaar and conductor of chaos, and quack satanic demonic demiurge, pulling the strings. And it takes Dorothy Gale, Oscar Crow, Nick Chopper, Elfeba, Avram and Ei'zik are characters and story remain to endure tremendous pain if repeated without passing away.
From beginning to end, the novel itself is a tornado, a furious mixture and pleasurable in which blend a variety of disparate details - from hypnosis to the chickens watches factories, through tumors language, Hoover vacuum cleaners and degeneration of protoplasm - and the tragic march of the history, when it found the technical means to show the Land of Oz in Technicolor ® and restore the big bang for use as a weapon of war and end the world as possible, even probable. Everything is made in a language Electrical and electrifying, but is integral with the mechanism of this crazy language vibrant and crazy which arise and fly sparks of beauty and wonder.
Nothing better than a few snippets - Random, because here we can rely on luck, each time to a find - to demonstrate the quality of invention, acid and brilliance of this language:
Thus the Oziens found temporary refuge in the belly moist Freaks , the new production at MGM, under the eye of the glassy operator B. Merritt Gerstad. That's where they s'improvisèrent several weeks during, extras disfigured phenomena faded, tenants of this unsightly darkened room where nobody knew exactly what was spent on ritual, what cult, monsters who came to power not only of body and voice but dreams, desires, wills, laughter suddenly changed to cry and mockery caught in its own trap, as if the essence of deformity had metamorphosed into air, perfume, and all that, by dint of breathing, felt a thrill worrying , their limbs twisted and corrupted by the actions they would do if ever, face replaced by another face with devious intentions, all attracted by the lights like moths, but not like blind men eager for a semblance of sunlight. ( CosmoZ , p.317)
promise us that someday we will produce ... in Oz.
immediately under the table, the foot of Avram looking for my shin, to no avail.
In Oz? Singer repeats shine without leaving the slightest emotion.
Yes, wonderful country Oz, repeats Ei'zik without noticing the air suddenly worried about Perla.
blue eyes pale Singer Leo as if the sun had penetrated the sealed move. Then he smiled a smile that makes us the son of his imagination. A short time, everything freezes around us, the plates continue to crack the smoke of cigars, drunkenness settle, breasts no longer force the necklines. Jazz piano by sputters of shebang sees its agreements and smoothed exchange notes clear, thin, infinite. The indecency of the world is perhaps an illusion. All this vulgarity has Perhaps no other purpose than to disguise our obsession to survive. I look Perla. His two hands are clasped, fingers interlaced, but it's not a prayer that his knuckles clenched, his fair skin that protects the bones, suggests that the whole body takes refuge in his extremities when he feels threatened deep. Her mouth is slightly open and I see more clearly that a stone under water, his tongue pressed against his teeth. I even feel his toes to squeeze into its tiny pumps. But in his eyes, hard nuts, I see nothing, nothing but circles in different nuances with diameters embedded refuse to become a target.
Oz? But of course, is provided, see for yourself on page 19 paragraph 71 bis, paragraph 2. ( CosmoZ , p.103)
Dorothy asked to examine the bones and trying to imagine the whole of which he was the game.
is a whale bone, "said Elfeba. Formerly, this place was a refuge for injured whales.
Oscar sneezes. But what they all talk?
Avram Ei'zik and fell asleep in the hollow of a stone as big as a wagon wheel. Password Elfeba bone in Nikko, which pushes the tip into her thumb before the drop, the haggard, as if the spirit of the whale had visited his cell.
Toto then makes a leap and grab the shine, all the look, intrigued.
The dog sinks his fangs into the porous rostrum that turns quickly into a powder that the wind scatters.
Well, "said Nick, I think the fate of our origins is sealed. ( CosmoZ , p.281)
Finally, I can simply say that this is an important book, and after wishing him the best public and critical success, indicate some links that will know a little more about it: a text on the keyboard cannibal , Claro's blog itself, another on red rose feedback, the blog Laure Limongi, and another on the third book , the site of François Bon. We also find two texts on please follow the golden path , the blog (under very appropriate) Fabrice Colin, dedicatee CosmoZ and two reviews in online journals, coffee culture and fluctuat.net (the latter also signed Fabrice Colin), and an interview with Claro.
© Anthony Poiraudeau - 2010
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