Éric Chevillard: Préhistoire | Prehistoric Times (1994)

Éric Chevillard's Préhistoire, set in the fictional La Grotte de Pales, is obviously based on a tourist site such as La Grotte de Lascaux, Montignac-Lascaux, in Dordogne, where there are caves with, er, prehistoric paintings: a definition of 'pre-historic' is given by the unnamed narrator of this novel as being before the written word.

In Brian Evenson's review of the book in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4 (1995) he calls this sixth novel 'difficult yet satisfying', with a 'semblance of a plot, but a plot reduced to its bare bones'. The narrator is a guide and guard to this per-historic site, being an archaeologist who has had his kneecap shattered in a fall. Professor Glatt (an expert on Pales along with his learned opponent Opole, an equally fictional expert Chevillard mentions in passing in several books) is expecting the narrator to re-open the site after the death of the previous guide Boborikine, whose ill-fitting uniform he has inherited, and which Boborikine in turn inherited from Crescenzo, who only had one leg.

There are a number of absurd pages about the uniform, which includes a hat and pair of shoes too, one of which Crescenzo had no need of, so the pair consists of one badly used shoe and one in good condition, and, oh it's too long to explain.

Chevillard is of course noted for his digressions, and several pages here are devoted to the biography of Nicolas Appert (1749-1841), born in Châlons-en-Champagne (then called Châlons-sur-Marne) and the inventor of food preservation, sterilising by heating in hermetic containers; he established a factory in Massy using this process, which was the first of its kind in the world. Chevillard doesn't mention that the town now celebrates his existence by the huge Statue-colonne Nicolas Appert, and a room in the Musee des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie.