Éric Chevillard: La Nébuleuse du crabe | The Crab Nebula (1993)

Éric Chevillard's La Nébuleuse du crabe is his fifth novel. although he's written a great deal since. The Crab Nebula in translation. Nebula, a shape-changing cloud formation. Um. I wasn't too certain that I was going to get on with this book as it seemed a little too weird, even for me. But I'd read Chevillard's Le Plafond (1997) and enjoyed it, escaped with impunity when I read his weekly column in Le Monde littéraire before the pathetic Claro took over the page, so why not continue and see if I can get through it? I did, and I'm glad of it.

To be honest there wasn't much time at stake as it's only 124 pages. Once again, the woolly French definition of roman defeats me as this in English would be described as a collection of fictional stories or observations about a character called Crab. Crab, like his name suggests, is shape-changing: he may be essentially humanoid, but he can hardly be called human as, for instance, he comes out in sympathy with lilacs he's smelling and his hands turn into a mauve bunch of flowers. And he doesn't always have all of his limbs: for example, one day he wakes up without his legs. Another day he has difficulty moving because his knees fuse together and he can no longer jump over puddles.

The reader can't work out who or what is the character in this book, but then neither can Crab, who is constantly trying to figure out what his nature is, what the things he's capable of are. There's some kind of otherness at work here, and his drawings of all the swallows (animals frequently appear in this work) he sees (having an excellent enough memory not to draw the same bird twice), and spending years writing a mountain of paperwork made me think of something like Asperger's Syndrome.

But then there are no constants in the book, all is as changeable as Crab. Different times can be fused into one, as when people are sent to the wrong church when invited on the same day to attend Crab's christening, marriage and death. Such is his effacement from the the social world that he puts up commemorative plaques about his visits to places, and although a local cinema shows a film about his life, not only is he the sole person in the cinema to watch the only two showings of it, but the film is so mind-numbingly boring that he falls asleep at the beginning of the first, and walks out of the second after a few minutes.

Chevillard says that he has no preconceived ideas, no thoughts in him at all, when he begins writing a book. Nevertheless, this book appears to have been influenced by Henri Michaux's prose poem Un Cetain plume first published in 1930, then various amplified versions until the final version in 1963. La Nébuleuse du crabe is one of the oddest things I've read, although a number of people find it very funny. One amateur reviewer even said he'd choose it as his desert island read.

My Éric Chevillard posts:
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Éric Chevillard: Oreille rouge | Red Ear (2005)
Éric Chevillard: L'Explosion de la tortue (2019)
Éric Chevillard: La Nébuleuse du crabe | The Crab Nebula (1993)
Éric Chevillard – Au plafond | On the Ceiling
Éric Chevillard: Le Désordre azerty
Éric Chevillard: Dino Egger
Éric Chevillard: Le Vaillant Petit Tailleur
Éric Chevillard: Le Caoutchouc décidément
Éric Chevillard: Palafox
Éric Chevillard: Un fantôme
Éric Chevillard: Du hérisson | Of the Hedgehog
Éric Chevillard: Démolir Nisard | Demolishing Nisard