Belinda Cannone: Entre les bruits (2009)

This is a story of confusion, but then that would be expected of a novel which is a spy story (a number of times reminding me of Echenoz's parody spy novel Lac), a detective story, a love story, but most of all an intense study of awareness, of what our minds (and bodies) are capable of. Belinda Cannone explores not only between the sounds, but between the relationships we have with all living people and things, even though we may not be aware of them.

A central subject is hyperacusis, or the ability (some may with reason say disability because of its sometimes devastating effects) to recognise tiny sounds a long distance away: the sounds a 'mute' mouse makes, what people are saying some distance away in a noisy restaurant, the sound a fox makes in a distant forest, etc. Ear plugs are a great help in a town where the noise of chaos can drown out thought, drown out any attempts at communication.

Hyperacoustic Jodel, who works as an acoustics engineer, meets hyperacoustic eleven-year-old Jeanne, and begins to teach her how to distinguish between different sounds, how to to some extent render some order to the chaos, learn what it's like to be different. But then only the different understand.

I was some way through this novel which one reviewer had suggested had strong sexual content, which I thought was maybe a reference to a different book, and then Jodel has sex with Jeanne's mother Jaumette. I don't think the description of sex lasted more than two pages, and for those looking for masturbation go elsewhere, but the description of Jaumette's multiple (and I mean multiple) orgasms stunned me by the realism: Belinda Cannone, er, knows how to write.

Links to my Belinda Cannone posts:
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Belinda Cannone: Entre les bruits
Belinda Cannone: La Chair du temps

Belinda Cannone: La Chair du temps (2012)

I wrote a post about Belinda Cannone when La Chair du temps first came out and it was brought to my attention in Magazine Littéraire. Reading it certainly wasn't a disappointment. To recap, Belinda Cannone (as herself, the narrator) arrives at her home on the Cotentin peninsula in La Manche to find that she has been burgled, and two vital trunks have been taken: they contained her personal diaries over decades, old photos, documents, etc. Particularly for a woman with a poor recollection of things, this is a great loss, tantamount to the theft – indeed the rape – of her memory.

La Chair du temps (literally 'The Flesh of Time') is Cannone's very expressive expression for memory itself – as if it were a living entity: we are, in the end – each one of us – made up of the past, we are the construction of ourselves over the period of time we have lived. Cannone's loss is profound, and this book is in large part a reconstruction of the nature of the theft and speculation as to what can have happened to her diaries, what the robbers were like and what they can have done with her memory in its physical form. At the same time, the book examines the nature of memory itself, makes comparisons between other people who have suffered similar losses (such as Hemingway), and reflects on different kinds of loss, on different kinds of memory.

The creation of this book is a strong counteraction to the devastating effect of the theft, and this new 'journal intime' (or personal, intimate diary) becomes a 'journal extime' (or public, 'extimate' diary).

And then, before the Épilogue, and after Cannone has told us that this book is different from 'autofiction' in that everything here is true, we have – mainly for the purpose of the closure of something that is by its very nature unending – a 'nouvelle' (or short story) in which the menacing Raphaël emerges to haunt the narrator by his appearance in her life, and his eventual admission that he is the one who has stolen her memory.

Belinda Cannone is obviously a writer I've until now missed out on: I must read more of her work.

Links to my Belinda Cannone posts:
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Belinda Cannone: Entre les bruits
Belinda Cannone: La Chair du temps

Belinda Cannone

Until this morning, when I read a review in this month's Magazine littéraire of novelist and essayist Belinda Cannone's La Chair du temps (literally 'The Flesh of Time'), I wasn't aware of her existence. Last March she arrived at her house in the country to find that two trunks, containing many years of her diaries, notebooks, photos and correspondence, had been stolen. Her shock was immense, and she wrote frantically to try to fill the void, to right the wrong, and this book is an attempt to render the intimate 'extimate'. Obviously, I had to find out more about Barbara Cannone.

Cannone – a university lecturer in Comparative Literature at Caen – wrote and published her thesis about writers and music in France in the second half of the 18th century, and music is a preoccupation in her work.

So too is desire. The novel Lent Delta (1998) – literally 'Slow Delta' – is an exploration of the desire to live seen through the eyes of a woman on her final day of 104 years of life; and the novel L'Homme qui jeûne (2006)  – literally 'The Fasting Man' – is the negative image of desire. L’Écriture du désir (2001) – literally 'The Writing of Desire' – is an essay which examines desire in general and its relationship to literary practice.

Last year she published Le Baiser peut-être – literally 'The Kiss Perhaps' –which was the first of a series of books to be written by different people on universal subjects. For Cannone, the kiss represents the most beautiful gesture of desire, a fusion, when self joins other, and there is a brief talk for Mollat on YouTube in which she also extends the word: when she writes, she leans toward the reader in desire, in a kind of kiss, and hopes that the reader will make a similar gesture toward her. The fascinating eight-minute interview, in French – and in which, for instance, she covers the prostitute (who doesn't kiss because she can sell her body but not her desire), Diderot (Cannone's 'dance master'), and Dante (Paulo and Francesca) – is here.

Last year I noted that Laurent Mauvignier – a startling and original French writer – has been barely translated into English. Consulting the Library of Congress and the British Library websites, the indication is that no work of Cannone's has been translated into English. Perhaps, once again, this is a case of a writer's work just being too French for an English readership, in spite of the universal themes.