Canada – sans retour

« I have always counseled my students to think on the long life of Thomas Hardy. Born, 1840. Died, 1928…I try to encourage in them the development of a « life concept »; to enlist their imaginations; to think of their existence on the planet not as just a catalogue of random events endlessly unspooling, but as a life – both abstract and finite. This, as a way of taking account. » (p. 483)

Une fois n’est pas coutume, le « hasard » fait bien les choses.

Avant de partir dans la vallée de la Clarée (https://lorenztradfin.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/mode-vacances-vallee-de-la-claree-3-fin/) j’ai fait des emplettes de livres….Parmi la LLAL/PAL : le roman « Canada » de Richard Ford (en v.o.) sans savoir que le livre fera partie de la rentrée littéraire 2013….

Roman d’apprentissage quasi tchekovien d’un garçon (Dell) de 15 ans (et – un peu – de sa sœur jumelle) dont les parents vont attaquer une banque, se faire prendre, laisser donc les enfants seuls….Sa sœur s’enfuit, lui sera emmené  par une amie de sa mère au Canada et placé auprès d’un home mystérieux….et il y apprendra rapidement la vie (et la pensée) d’adulte. Tout cela dans une nature

Tout ça raconté du haut de sa bonne soixantaine (Dell est devenu prof’ d’université) dans une langue chatoyante, mélancolique, precise par laquelle est raconté une période charnière de sa vie, qui l’a marquée pour toujours. Le narrateur revient sur toutes les pensées, réflexions, impressions de ses 15 ans. Ses descriptions sont assorties non pas d’un filtre de l’âge mais juste enveloppées par quelques réflexions d’une personne dans sa dernière tranche de vie….Toute occasion de tomber dans un « thriller » est désamorcé en dévoilant quelque pages, parfois quelques chapitres plus tôt le(s) résultat(s) des actions….ainsi le lecteur se concentre sur la petite musique mélancolique, sur les tremblement et secousses de la vie de ce garçon tombé trop rapidement dans la vie d’adulte.

La première phrase du livre:  ­«D’abord, je vais raconter le hold-up que nos parents ont commis. Ensuite les meurtres, qui se sont produits plus tard»

« First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed. Nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.”

“My sister and I could easily see why my mother would’ve been attracted to Bev Parsons: big, plank shouldered, talkative, funny, forever wanting to please anybody who came in range. But it was never completely obvious why he would take an interest in her — tiny (barely five feet), inward and shy, alienated, artistic, pretty only when she smiled and witty only when she felt completely comfortable. He must’ve somehow just appreciated all that, sensed she had a subtler mind than his, but that he could please her, which made him happy. It was to his good credit that he looked beyond their physical differences to the heart of things human, which I admired even if it wasn’t in our mother to notice.”

 “She said Canada wasn’t an old country like ours and still had a pioneer feel, and nobody there really thought of it as a country, and in fact in some parts people spoke French, and the capital was back east, and nobody respected it the way we did Washington, D.C. She said Canada had dollars for money but theirs were different coloured and were sometimes mysteriously worth more than ours. She said Canada also had its own Indians and treated them better than we treated ours, and Canada was bigger than America, thought it was mostly empty and inhospitable and covered with ice much of the time.”

Parfois des accents d’un Paul Auster de la première période…et très différent de « The ultimate Good Luck » (roman lu il y a des décennies…). Richard Ford a reçu le prix littéraire Lucien Barrière pour ce roman.

Pour être complet – j’ai vu sur le net quelques critiques (en anglais) qui disent que le livre est « ennuyant » que Ford essaie de gonfler un « plot mince » sans un vrai point de vue, ni un quelconque message….Les sages critiques français ne parlent que d’un chef-d’œuvre….

Moi j’étais conquis par la mélancolie, l’observation détaillé de la vie quasi-incantatoire… – et l’extrait mis en exergue est pour moi tout un programme qui valait bien ce livre….

Extrait du NYT:

We are quite fortunate that the remembered story of Dell Parsons is composed, through Richard Ford, by Dell himself, now a teacher in his 60s. Not only are we served abstract gems (“the nervous American intensity for something else”), we are also anchored in young Dell’s experience by concrete details like this description of the shack he comes to live in in Saskatchewan, the guest of a union-hating radical anti-authoritarian named Arthur Remlinger: “There was almost no room for me, only the iron cot I slept on and the one that had been reserved for Berner, and the ‘kitchen room,’ with the bumpy red linoleum and a single fluorescent ceiling ring and a two-burner hot plate where I boiled tar-smelling pump water in a pan to make my bath at night.”

It is Dell’s boiling of pump water for a bath, his search for a school, his trying to make a normal life for himself among dangerous adult chaos that is so gratifyingly heart-rending about his story. “Canada” is a tale of what happens when we cross certain lines and can never go back. It is an examination of the redemptive power of articulated memory, and it is a masterwork by one of our finest writers working at the top of his form.