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A foundation by grace: Birth of a bridge, Maylis Kerangal

in the imaginary town of Coca, in northern California - enclave of fiction in the real world, an enclave of fiction where everything is as real - The new mayor starts dreaming of a great work to do for his city, to make it either the provincial, sleepy town background estuary it has ceased to be that since it is a city but a city included in the lists of cities that place and practice of modern twenty-first century emerging across their entire landscape. He wants to build a gigantic Coca and extraordinary, which is taken in the same movement powerful and frightening as that brings out Dubai Desert skyscrapers and spread like oil slicks artificial peninsulas, as that in China is growing like mushrooms growing more and new megacities. This is a gigantic work of art that will last command, a bridge spanning the valley at the bottom of which is Coke, the cross from the mesa overlooking the town to the ancient forest which faces , through which he drives a highway, and with his foot Edgefront on the other side of the river like the ramshackle suburb of Coke, including Coca never wanted to be while still drawing his proletariat. The bridge will be huge and powerful air at once, suspended two rounds of two hundred meters high each, and as a large cut on the sky line.


This site that implements Birth of a bridge , the last novel of Maylis of Kerangal (Vert, 2010), the building and tells the story, giving us his world and lives that do. The novel gives the square of the central character in George Diderot, the engineer who runs the site, and not Ralph Waldo, architect who designed the bridge, we do occasionally intersect, and this clearly states the book's way of showing us the construction site and in its technical and material, or not according to their symbolism and ideas abstract allegedly presided over the bridge design to build. It is a novel that is on the side of the action, on the hardware side and action to take, which, rather than designers, famous builders, those who like Summer Diamantis are responsible for overseeing the production of huge mass of concrete required, which, like Duane Fischer and Buddy must ensure Loo the proper functioning of the machinery that dredge the river bottom, or as Sancho Alfonso Cameron must carry and handle materials within a centimeter from the cabin of crane. The novel does not deliver much for these characters, these and others, as if they were devoid of depth and as if their existence was reduced to their technical acts, it gives us quite the contrary, their lives - with which everyone is struggling as it is elsewhere with the specific work required by the site - and we know intimately as the drama of their lives and the heavy work of their interiority without having to we say the front, thanks to the constant force and subtlety of the text to always tell more than he makes explicit.

The novel is a foundation, the foundation of a new age of an area slightly away from the paths through which passed the foundation canonical in the imagination, the U.S. - that of discovering a new world to conquer a new territory to the construction and establishment of a new company driven by the idea of universality and certainty of the uniqueness of her fate. The Americanness of the novel is multiple, since of course the location of the story, California - the region that is the culmination chronological, geographical, mythological, metaphysical and aesthetic of the grand narrative of the American founding, and the Americanness - until the work space and territorial and implements the text, via the function played by characters in the economy of the book, each of which can be read as figures American or American-style (to speak as subtitle of the novel by Norman Mailer), migrant hero, destiny.

The foundation on which we are witnessing in Birth of a bridge replays of one hand the great foundation whose space was the American theater, and several character names there are various explicit references: Georges is an echo Diderot Denis Diderot, whose movement and philosphy century Enlightenment in the eighteenth century were those that allowed the political foundation of the United States of America; architect Ralph Waldo is called the two names and surname of Ralph Waldo Emerson, American transcendentalist philosopher of the nineteenth century and the beautiful character Katherine Thoreau has the same surname Henry David Thoreau, the great American writer of the nineteenth century, near Emerson - and these are both materialism and the elegy of the U.S. territory as a promised land which are then summoned by resonance of names. But on the other hand, the novel up this foundation in another age, that of early twenty-first century, an era when the foundations of new cities and new worlds are primarily elsewhere in North America - Asia South East, the Middle East, India - and passed through Dubai , where the mayor of Coca is struck by a violent shock that he understands what he wants to accomplish, the movement and momentum that will create the yard and deck. It is a city away from the full glory of the story of the American foundation that will adopt, to rely again, a way in the world and a report similar to those of countries that now pronounce an account of Foundation whose full luster away from America.

The narration of a fiction novels that deploy on a large scale, whether long-term chronological territorial scale, thick historical or large group adventures is very often - always? How would this be circumvented? - A linking of the world and large scale events on the one hand and the trajectories of individual lives and characters of the other. The relevance, accuracy and quality of such joints scales and distances in general seems in this novel type of project, particularly difficult to find, but here in Birth of a Bridge , everything is smooth and ease, and the passage of the large scale of landscape and territory close to that of the characters and their cohabitation shall be made in Maylis Kerangal of virtuosity with a discreet and gracious thanks to which we always feel the size of space and monumental project without ever leaving the size of individuals and their actions. The site and those who work there, and do, are obviously interdependent, but in the inseparability of one and the other one is here on the characters - these are the characters that bridge, no bridge the fact - without losing the power supplied by the dimensions of space and history, or lose the energy expended by the shipyard. It is a tour de force, but it seems to flow naturally. It was said that the characters 'made' in the narrative in the sense that their action is paramount, but we must also say that they act deeply on the story, meaning their lives, which we recounts the drama and ordinariness in a few pages good and just, "do" something to the story and the novel, add their depth, their contingency, their fragility and they carry the hopes of a better life, although without quite knowing how, a life as possible.

The feat while flexibility and fluidity that makes Maylis of Kerangal with Birth a bridge is fully engaged with the language of his text, which we can only welcome the beauty and power, bringing the lyrical writing, while taking great vigor and fierceness of the orality, which is always comfortable and natural on the two registers and manages, with a facilitated lively and serene virtuosity to both keep them together in momentum and tension. All this holds together, the extent of the written language of declamation and power and violence of orality, integral with one another and working together without ever anything seems artificial.

It is, frankly, a text to phrases and pages removed but held, shouting but sing these phrases, loose and lyrical sensual when something is caused disproportionate and called that one does not believe it at first may be seized and carried by language but we'll see, drunk, she made yet, indeed, that language, it takes the shock and it is up to snuff, rhythmic pulse, alert and nervous, where violence and outcrops where beauty squirts - Birth of a bridge, is a language that sounded music that finally I always look for in literature, the family of the one for me as the more fiery glory of the language, and we hear in Faulkner, in Michon. I wanted to find another word than thanks to say what is there, since it is precisely this term that aptly puts Claro forward on his blog about this book, and writing of Maylis Kerangal in general (and it's a word - to grace , Toward Grace - which is certainly much Claro, he does not use lightly), and we would always find yourself another formulation that we have read elsewhere, but another term would be less accurate and more artificial about this book and the writing. Grace , it's good that he is .

I quote to finish a long and splendid, dazzling chapter excerpt from "take the measure of the place" , centrally located the novel, which contains the story of the first foundation of Coca, which takes place next to the second, with the construction of this extraordinary bridge:

Yet even today, it is unclear how the men could think of to settle below a mesa red so badly c abossé in the flat bottom of one sided valley where asymmetric hyenas descended at dawn and lynx to the incisors still bleeding. Yes, it is unclear how the die-suppressant fanatics, driven by the sole mission of giving land to their faith, worship their god, a god to their death, had managed to cross the continent in all its breadth, cutting the meadow and mountains, finding a path in grass high enough to feed their animals, to fight their way through the cactus forest that surrounded the plain - plants with sharp antlers as straight razors or other machete - the barbed wire border height of a man on horseback, how they were strangled with bare hands rattlesnakes, passed through the bottom of canyons, how they had circumvented the murky ponds evolved into frozen lakes in winter, in reserve in the summer of deadly mosquitoes . How they had braved the heat and cold beast of beggars. Hunted deer, trapped hare, harpooned tench. Indian killed. How they had dragged their carts piled aboard filthy, built houses, raised bison, fattened pigs, enclosed fields of potatoes and corn to feed the whole. How many dead bodies and how crazy at the end of the road? How many horses butchered into steaks on primitive fire? How many scalps? How they could stay there especially about having children, to bury their dead, spring summer autumn winter one year, then two, then ten, spring summer autumn winter, continue to burn and brains to pierce the breasts, there to eviscerate bodies, spring summer autumn winter, how they had done so, one wonders really, because there remain, on this strip of land as a flared skirt the edge of the river, grow between the high plains and the forest screaming, take root, it was still defying Heaven and Creation, claim tu coyotes and grizzly smoke, drink melted snow to stick to the runs, to roast scorpions crouching shoulder against shoulder , spitting sand and eat flint. They did, however, these bearded men with hair, hemp hat these women, these children with fever, all dirty st scared to death chanting hymns hand on the trigger, all murderers: they founded a city.

But they were not mistaken. The corner was worth the trouble and more - the cracks and tears putrid blisters, frostbite hammers to crack their feet pale: the hold is off seven kilometers between the plates and blazed the underground giant, flat, a palm, and provided with a river on its western flank. A harsh climate but loyal, declined at the regular Solstice after solstice - music paper, the scanning of their lives, bringing their days, they monotony eventually die - hot summers with thunderstorms liquidated electric sky and hailstones as ping-pong, bright autumns, winters icy, spring kings, while the sweetness, a gentle clearing, a thousand shades of green, not the horses in the meadow, youth and strength of reeds, water and acid air noise. And there are those winds have arisen from the east, they pick up charge of loess on the plateau, which permeates the soil, sowing the valley, cattle fattening as butter cream. Arriving, men who could still have been knee and brought to their mouth with a pinch of earth to enjoy a snap of language - since there was the gesture - and then they had raised, had circled on their own launched their hats into the air and yelled there is, is where the fuck is there, we got - anyway they had no choice, that was or ever had the horses fever, children no longer spoke, women's bellies are covered with eczema and they themselves were going mad.
(Maylis of Kerangal, Birth of a bridge , Vertical: 2010, pp.163-165)

© Anthony Poiraudeau - 2010

Images: Cover Birth of a bridge , Vertical Editions, 2010 - Maylis of Kerangal, portraits C. Helie - Gallimard.