First, there's the story of the Floridian pet baby turtle Phoebe left in the bathroom of the narrator's flat in Paris while he went on summer holiday with his live-in girlfriend Aloïse, with (as he thought) enough bath water to survive (and survival is a key theme throughout Chevillard's work). But the water ran out – a fault of the plug, the turtle's lack of survival instincts?, etc. Anyway, the narrator finds the turtle almost dead, which he finalises by accidentally pressing on the decalcified shell too hard with his thumb and breaking it. He agonises and agonises, full of what Sartre would have called mauvaise foi (or self-deception).
Second, we move to a different tale in which the unfortunate Bab (short for babouin or baboon) is hung from the fourth floor of the narrator's school when he was young, and Bab nearly dies because of his loose (Chelsea-kind) of boots. Bab is a souffre-douleur (a punch bag or scapegoat), and Le Souffre-douleur is a short story in (the fictional) Louis-Constantin Novat's five-story collection Pagure, the name of which relates to crabs of the hermit variety, but I'll leave that there as it might lead to confusion. The narrator continues the talk of torment though and he and two of his schoolmates manage to extract a false confession from Bab that he had sex with his mother, as it seems to be normal because the three bullies appear to have done so, or had it done to themselves, by their mothers.
Third, there's a very short section twenty years later in which the narrator meets Anton, the guy who sold him Phoebe. Anton talks about an improbable trans-Atlantic journey of a hippopotamus (recalling the much sought-after hippos in Chevillard's Oreille rouge), which is evidently an allusion to Novat's 'Le Voyage de ''hippopotame', again a short story from Pagure.
Fourth, the works of Louis-Constantin Novat (circa 1839-92), which the narrator has discovered in the possession of Novat's (now late) great-great-great-great-niece. This is a (fictional) writer whose complete works the narrator has intended to (re-)write (much of the book is about re-writing) and publish, although the publisher has gone behind the narrator's back, so to speak, and chosen the academic Malatesta, who gives the narrator a headache. A number of Novat's works are précised here.
Fifth, a résumé of more of Novat's works are mentioned and/or summarised.
Sixth, there has been an underlying story of the young missing girl Lise, and all along it's been evident to the reader that she's been kidnapped by the concierge. The police raid, in which a battering ram is taken to the concierge's flat, clinches it, although with a weird turnaround (which of course (?)) is the narrator's joke, isn't it? Apparently this has resemblances to Novat's only play La Portière et le saute-ruisseau.
Seventh is what Afeissa calls the strangest, and with some reason. Novat's works are taken up again, first Novat's unknown poems to Euphémie Flers, a young girl he unsuccessfully tried to woo. The narrator re-writes these seventy-seven poems in modern French to win over his girlfriend. No, that's not strange at all. But what is numbingly weird is that the narrator – annoyed with Novat's novel Queue coupée, in which Novat agonises and agonises over cutting a lizard's tail off as a young kid – decides to rewrite the novel as L'Explosion de la tortue: in other words, on an analogy with Chevillard's L'Œuvre complète de Thomas Pilaster – the title of this book should really be L'Œuvre complète de Louis-Constantin Novat.
And that's not even talking about the ecological message in the book, the turtle seen as metonymic of the destruction of the planet, or even the irony, the comedic and absurd elements that many readers love about Chevillard. This work is not a story, nor even the number of stories that it contains, but a kind of contemplation on the nature of the writing, the re-writing (and therefore the reality) of literature, and reality itself. Without hyperbole, one of the most annoying, irritating, confusing, profound and brilliant books I've ever 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
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