Nine months is the time it took stomach cancer to take away Elizabeth Stromme, the wife of Philippe Garnier, at 59 years old. Eighteen years is the time that passed between his disappearance and the story given here. First time (“the funny death”), the chronicle of the last days, in a log house lent by a friend, somewhere between lakes and forests in Sonoma County. Elizabeth Stromme chose not to treat her cancer. She also wanted to decide the end, by stopping eating. Strange routine of the last few days, then, suspended between this certain death which approaches without hiding and the dazzling of a Californian winter. Twilight in a vibrant nature landscape in the sun.
Second part (“the funny life”), the memories of their life together, which began on the edge of adulthood. Bohemia, improbable trips. Memories of landscapes and bars from the ends of the world. She: the drive for life, and this hothead who will over time nourish a resolute activism of which agribusiness will be the ultimate target, in novels snatched from the indifference of American publishers and agents. Amazing lines describing his ecological fight ultimately based on a praise of the garden and gardening as the ultimate recourse against the devastation of the world, where personal morality exceeds the political issue. He, constantly jostled by this upright and ardent figure in his inclination towards pococurantism, stunned with love and sometimes scratched by him – bringing back this formula which deep down is desperate and which seems to have been engraved in him: “I have never been as unhappy as ever since I loved you”…
You never needed to be a scholar of American rock, literature or cinema to follow Philippe Garnier on his wanderings. It was always enough to adopt the slightly dragging rhythm of his step and not to believe too much in his nonchalance designed to keep bothersome people away. Under the heavy eyelid, the eye captured details known to no one, creating striking silhouettes. Of course, behind the shattered rockers, the disgraced writers, the forgotten journalists or the burned screenwriters, we could clearly see the face of Garnier himself; but he hid behind these thousand doubles, and guided us to their places, their poorly kept secrets, with perfect and entirely ungentlemanly discretion. When it came to telling a little about his own journey in Cut cornersit was to better line up a gallery of portraits that were not his, he himself inventing a dilapidated double.
“A tribute to the woman I always thought I knew everything about”
Having never been more than a simple reader of Garnier, I sometimes wondered if he lived in a mansion in Beverly Hills bequeathed to him by an old star flattered to be rediscovered, or in a caravan perched on the edge of a cliff in Point Dume. This time, no mysteries. It is about his wife and himself that he speaks, without masks. This eye which for quite some time has learned to grasp the flaw in the armor in the extravagances of fallen idols, this time scrutinizes the sick body of his wife, her breathing at night, her ultimate manias, and then what remains of desire . A dull pain runs through it all, never really admitted, or really analyzed. It’s like a beating of the temples. Tenderness is not said bluntly either, but it bursts into incredibly luminous and sometimes sadly grayish fragments. As a result of the time perhaps spent between the disappearance and its story, everything is clarified as much as possible. No sentimental wave to the soul, rather a look which is both up close and at a distance, witness to oneself.
Deliberately, everything is not always glorious, no matter: the chronicle of this path towards death spares us the metaphysical pensum, and aligns the shards of life – the visit to the in-laws, the laughter, the shady bars and the billiard games, lemons proliferating among the scree of the terrace, blackened notebooks, storms without rain, such an absurd swim in the Mississippi, suns and wanderings, graceful silences, cascading blond hair and then mourning dry, the unreality of it all – really not “funny” at all, and which this book alone at the end perhaps allowed us to grasp. “I am writing (this book) not to make amends, nor to revive her, but rather as a tribute to the woman of whom I always thought I knew everything, and who surprised me to the end.” From there a dense “tribute” of life, of a whole life, of all life, and which burns your fingers.
Nine months, by Philippe Garnier. L’Olivier, 135 p., €17.50.
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