Why do we like “choral” stories? Because they are the only ones that really resemble life, the hazardous reality, the improvisatory essence of the universe. This is undoubtedly the reason why lovers of Johann Sebastian Bach can listen tirelessly, all their lives, to The Art of Fugue where the Goldberg Variations. Various melodies start from different points, chase each other, overlap and end up composing a stunning sound reality. Abnousse Shalmani’s novel is a stunning choral novel. The characters come from different times and places, chase each other, overlap and end up composing a human comedy of which, once the book is closed, we will never tire of replaying the episodes. The reason is that this comedy, as long as we give up our comfortable hypocrisies for a moment, takes root in our bodies, at the most intimate, at the most unspeakable.
Certain characters in the novel evolve in Paris at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, in the radiant core of what we call the Belle Epoque. The main ones are called Marie de Régnier, daughter of the poet José-Maria de Heredia, Henri de Régnier, her husband, with whom she will not sleep because she loves Pierre Louÿs, author of Songs of Bilitis, writer, poet and sulphurous fucker. Henri de Régnier will accept this situation for the love of Marie. In the background, we already come across the “boss”, Colette, tutelary writer of our 20th century. We also meet Proust and his merry little band, Ravel, Fauré, and Debussy who will set the Songs of Bilitis. Then, later, the playwright Bernstein, Jean Cocteau… In short, the Paris of frenzied, sapphic, homosexual, heterosexual sex and of literature which is accountable only to itself.
The other characters live in Tehran around the 1950s. The central character of the novel is a “poet” (the author does not seem to appreciate the feminine “poetess”), Forough Farrokhzad, virtuoso, inspired, nourished of an opulent literary and philosophical tradition, which it renews and subverts. In the rich Persian literature, there will be a before and an after Forough. An afterward where a woman’s body no longer inspires the poet in love with metaphors, but speaks itself. Forough is a body that spreads sonorous, shocking, living, turbulent, sexual and, above all, magnificent words, over the blanket of silence that the talkative East has placed on the feminine. Forough has a friend, Cyrus – a Persian first name before the catastrophe of Islam – who is a professor of literature. He introduces Forough to the Songs of Bilitis but also the story of love and sex which will link Pierre Louÿs and Marie de Régnier until their death, which the physical and intellectual connection between Forough and Cyrus unknowingly repeats. The other characters are Iranian society, Forough’s husband, father, mother, brothers, in-laws…
“It is wrong to say that life is unfair”
As soon as Forough’s first collection of poems was published, she quickly achieved success and notoriety, they all agreed – except one brother – on at least one point: Forough is a scandalous whore who dishonors the clan. Abnousse Shalmani notes, so that we can clearly understand the difference between the world of Marie de Régnier and her lovers and that of Forough and her lovers: “There is no half-world in the Orient, there is no there is no step towards autonomy, the whore does not rub shoulders with the mother, the woman under the veil is not a promise of the flesh, but the certainty of oppression.”
The reader will discover how all these characters will inevitably end up finding each other. It is Abnousse Shalmani’s talent as a novelist to have traced a path between Tehran and Paris where these sensitive, eager, courageous, different and so close to each other bodies circulate. Here the bodies don’t whine because society is mean to them. We are not in the ignoble victim sociology which gives literature the seduction of a packet of Kleenex. The narrator states: “It is false to say that life is unfair. It is we who inject injustice into it.” Here, bodies transgress, suffer, get up, enjoy, fight and divinely sing freedom, perilous freedom. They suggest an ancient cousinship between Persian culture and the European spirit, which is not detected anywhere else in the Orient, except, obviously, in Jewish culture.
With this novel which is unlike any other, Abnousse Shalmani has just entered, by kicking in the door, into the very closed circle of writers whose next book we impatiently await.
I have sinned, sinned in pleasure, by Abnousse Shalmani. Grasset, 198 p., €19.50.
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