Monterey is the title of the new opus from the pen of the Mauritian Barlen Pyamootoo. The man made himself known in 1999 by publishing Benares, his very first novel. This resolutely modern story both in its narration and in its concern to report on daily life in Mauritius, without exoticism or misery, immediately made its author the leader of the new generation of writers from the Indo-Oceanic island. . Pyamootoo’s new novel is part of this modernity.
” Being from Mauritius and the world, I think that’s what it is to be a good Mauritian writer “, entrusts Barlen Pyamootoo. This quest for ubiquity founds and animates the unique work of the novelist from Trou d’Eau Douce, a locality located on the eastern coast of Mauritius. Making two worlds live simultaneously, one in resonance with the other, had made the success of his first novel, Benares. Its plot is set in a small Mauritian village, while the whole narration is haunted on a second level by the clichés and mythologies linked to the famous Indian city which gave its name to the eponymous village.
Her second novel, The Tower of Babylon, published in 2002, proposed a variation on the theme of ubiquity, featuring a wandering through Iraq while the author has never set foot in this country. The starting point was a sentence taken from childhood when little Barlen’s father yelled at him, reproaching him for spending his time mopping rather than doing his homework. ” What else have you done around Babylon, Barlen? “, he threw at her angrily. In Creole, go around Babylon has a pejorative meaning. In his second novel, the author plays on this double agreement to let his imagination wander in the streets of bombarded Baghdad, contemplated by a hieratic Saddam Hussein from the top of his portrait hanging on a lamppost.
A heavenly city
Monterey, Barlen’s new novel Pyamootoo, his fifth, is no exception to the rule. Monterey is the name of an American city, where the action of the story takes place. A heavenly city, by the sea, which is reminiscent of the birthplace of the author, Trou d’Eau Douce. ” In fact, I was in the United States in 2011-2012 and spent three months in Pittsburgh, remembers the novelist. And one day, coming back from a jazz concert, we pass through a neighborhood where all the streets have a name reminiscent of the wars between Mexico and the United States. And there was a war in Monterey, California. I found this magnificent name and I said to myself one day, I would write a book with the title Monterey which means the king’s mountain and I would invent a country, a village, countries… »
Monterey is part of the US cycle of Pyamootoo. After a fictionalized biography devoted to the great American poet, Walt Whitmanauthor of grass leaves, the novelist returns to stories that are more down to earth, and yet so deeply emblematic of our absurd lives, to which we struggle to give meaning. The novel tells the story of Nick Armando, a young man barely out of adolescence, moving through his life, between running away, trouble and delinquency.
” It’s the story of a boy who loves to fix cars, especially old cars because it goes back to his childhood, when he helped a mechanic to fix old cars, explains Barlen Pyamootoo, summarizing the plot of his novel. He is a sheet metal worker. And then, he has spending desires too, because he likes to go to restaurants with his girlfriend whom he met at the cinema. He likes to go to places where people have fun, in discotheques for example. For him, the money he receives as a sheet metal worker is not enough. He has the opportunity to sell weed, just to have money and spend. And then, it ends badly for him… I wanted to talk about the condition of these people I call ”little people”who don’t have much, not a great education, but find their place in the chaos around them »
More Newsboy [personnage dans Les Misérables de Victor Hugo, NDLR] than Julien Sorel [protagoniste du Rouge et le Noir de Stendhal, NDLR], naive and insolent in his way of being, Nick is however not driven by any particular ambition. Coming from a modest background, brought up by strict but loving parents, he is content to live, moving towards the horizon that his talents and impulses point to.
Handyman since childhood, skilled with his hands, Nick has an innate gift for mechanics. His passion is fixing cars. Bored at school, he got hired as a trainee at the age of 13 with a mechanic, to the great despair of his father, who hoped that his only son would take over his grocery store. Nick learned quickly and proved himself to be a gifted repairman for whom, after a few months of training, the plane beater, grinder, sander, chisel, taper punch, round-nosed chisel and countersunk file had no effect. no secrets. Poached by employers in the surrounding medium-sized towns, he left Monterey for Bidwell. His employers appreciate his docility, his taste for perfection.
” And despite the fatigue, the dust and the smells of paint and solvent, I had a blast when I dented, welded, sanded, planed, puttyed, marsouflais “. However, this succession of verbs in the mouth of the character who tells himself in the first person, denotes less stubbornness at work than a succession of repetitive acts of which Nick sometimes feels a little prisoner. It is undoubtedly this frustration that will lead him to his destiny, when his path crosses that of the drug traffickers. Opportunity being the thief, he in turn becomes a trafficker, closely watched by narcotics. His race ends in prison…
Reinventing the world
There is something Camusian Meursault in Nick, who is an anti-hero, a rebel without a cause. His life story is neither tragic nor comic. There is also no emphasis or embellishment in the writing of Pyamootoo. One could almost speak of a ” white writing », which draws attention to itself by its austerity and the simplicity of telling the real. The emotional load is reduced to a minimum here. We think of Ulysses by Joyce, the author’s favorite book. Simplicity does not prevent the novelist, however, from mapping, with a realistic sense of precision, the ever-changing landscape of life, as Barlen Pyamootoo argues. I always thought that I absolutely wanted to have a simple, but beautiful writing, or else simple, but deep at the same time. It’s not easy to achieve simplicity and depth at the same time. So, I try to purify, to say things as directly as possible or as simply as possible. But at the same time I would like, that’s my dream, for it to be underpinned by depth. But, as Victor Hugo said, the form is the substance that rises to the surface. That’s what I’m trying to do with this more or less refined writing… »
” Each book must be a reinvention of the world “, liked to repeat Barlen Pyamootoo in the writing workshops that he provided for a long time in Mauritius. Putting his lesson to work in his own books, the novelist, in turn, reinvents the world. He does it brilliantly in his new opus, where through the nostalgic evocation of the carefree childhood by the protagonist, the landscape of “Monterey d’Eau Douce” is reborn, bathed by the luminous ocean, as in the extract from the following novel: “That morning, my grandfather was taking me to school on his bicycle which he was pushing, and I, sitting on the luggage rack, was only listening half-heartedly, and for two reasons. . First, because I only had eyes for the landscape. I contemplated the trees that hid the sun, the paths that gently sloped down and led to the sea. And when no more trees lined the road and the sea had disappeared behind the sleeping mists, I turned my head to the other side to compose the mounds of black stones in the fields of onions and measure the extent of the sandy plain with the fathom. Then because I firmly believed that it was in the nature of old people to ramble, especially when they were talking to children. »
So begins Montereyan invitation to enter the poetic world of the unmissable Barlen Pyamootoo.
Monterey, by Barlen Pyamootoo. Editions de L’Olivier, 208 pages, 19 euros.