I'm Gone

  Jean Echenoz won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt for I’m Gone. He is the author of nine other novels in English translation and is the winner of numerous literary prizes, among them the Prix Médicis and the European Literature Jeopardy Prize. He lives in Paris.

  Mark Polizzotti has translated over forty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, Raymond Roussel, Patrick Modiano, and Jean Echenoz, and has written six of his own. He directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he lives.

  Lily Tuck’s novel The News from Paraguay won the 2004 National Book Award for fiction. She lives in New York.

  ALSO BY JEAN ECHENOZ

  1914

  Lightning

  Running

  Ravel

  Piano

  Big Blondes

  Chopin’s Move

  Plan of Occupancy

  Double Jeopardy

  Cherokee

  The New Press gratefully acknowledges the Florence Gould Foundation for supporting publication of this book.

  Copyright © 1999 by Les Éditions de Minuit,

  7, rue Bernard-Palissy, 75006 Paris

  English translation copyright © 2001 by Mark Polizzotti

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Lily Tuck

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

  Originally published in France as Je m’en vais by

  Les Éditions de Minuit, 1999

  First published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2001

  This edition published by The New Press, 2014

  Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

  ISBN 978-1-62097-001-0 (e-book)

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Echenoz, Jean.

  [Je m’en vais. English]

  I’m gone : a novel / Jean Echenoz ; translated by Mark Polizzotti.

  pagescm

  I. Polizzotti, Mark.II. Title.

  PQ2665.C5 J413 2001

  843'.914—dc21

  00-064601

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  Composition by dix!

  This book was set in Stempel Garamond

  24681097531

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Publishing in the Public Interest

  INTRODUCTION

  Lily Tuck

  “I’m going,” Felix Ferrer declares to his wife without further explanation, neither to her nor to the reader. He is relieved but also, perversely, put out that she does not make more of a fuss. Then, getting on the metro at the Corentin-Celton stop, he stares at the advertisement panels for floor coverings, dating services, and real estate listings before opening his briefcase and taking out a catalogue featuring Persian art that he reads until it is time to get off at the Madeleine stop.

  Jean Echenoz in I’m Gone, his ninth novel—which won the Prix Goncourt in 1999—with his purposely quotidian and meticulous details that belie an emotional response sets up a pattern of irrelevance (or is it an ambivalence?) that is specific to and indicative of the narrative’s brilliant indirection, a fundamental characteristic of Echenoz’s oeuvre.

  Felix Ferrer (so named, according to Echenoz, because he liked the sound of the name, which reminded him of the actor Mel Ferrer and the singer Nino Ferrer, and also because the initials F.F. pleased him), like many of Echenoz’s heroes, is fiftyish, fairly good-looking, hapless, restless, desperate, and an inveterate womanizer. Ferrer, the owner of a struggling art gallery, learns from his assistant, a man named Delahaye, about a ship called the Nechilik filled with valuable Paleoarctic art (mammoth tusks covered with blue vivianite, snow goggles made from reindeer antlers, a whale carved in baleen, knickknacks made of seal ulna and musk-ox horn, etc.) run aground and abandoned for the past forty years on an ice floe in the Arctic, and decides to go find it and bring back the art.

  Long before writing this novel, Echenoz claims he saw a photograph of the shipwrecked Nechilik in an old National Geographic magazine and, intrigued, copied down the details of the story in his notebook—a commercial boat, 23 meters long, built in 1942 and registered in Saint John, New Brunswick—so that he could use them later. He also claimed that the real Nechilik, which held no artifacts and was by then stripped of everything but two oil lamps, turned out to be his “MacGuffin” (a term made popular by Alfred Hitchcock signifying a plot device in the form of an objective that the protagonist pursues with little narrative explanation or importance), which in itself is a telling fact about the author’s subversive approach to the art of fiction. An art, perhaps, best described by Ken Kesey as “a lie in the service of the truth.”

  Critics have variously called Jean Echenoz a magician, a gambler, and a juggler. Like a magician, Echenoz creates the illusion that improbable events might in fact be probable; like a gambler, he takes risks, such as avoiding a linear narrative, switching points of view, jumping locations, foretelling, and providing his characters with no plausible motives. Gary Indiana in Bookforum writes that Echenoz shows us “a wholly different way of thinking of ourselves and our predicament, a juggler of verbal knives who, if not for his preternatural grace, could easily slice his arm off while displaying a hypnotic and arguably pointless skill. I say ‘arguably’ because the vastly entertaining is often mistaken for pointless.”

  Echenoz’s prose is grimly and hilariously funny, as Mark Polizzotti’s excellent translation proves. The description of Ferrer’s lover’s door, which, instead of bearing a name, has a photo “depicting the lifeless body of Manuel Montoliu, an ex-matador-cum-banderillero, after an animal named Cubatisto had opened his heart like a book on May 1, 1992.” A description of the stable of artists represented by Ferrer’s gallery is risibly recognizable: “naturally some painters, like Beucler, Spontini, Gourdel, and especially Martinov—who was rather visible these days and worked only in yellow—as well as a few plastic artists. Eliseo Schwartz, for example, who, specializing in extreme temperatures had invented closed-circuit blowers . . . or Charles Estrellas, who haphazardly installed little hillocks of glazed sugar and talcum powder. . . . Marie-Nicole Guimard, who deal
t in blow-ups of insect bites . . .” (In this case, Echenoz is not sure where he got the names except for Eliseo Schwartz and Charles Estrellas, who made an appearance in his previous novel, Chopin’s Move.) During a tryst, he describes a woman’s black bra falling to the floor and looking like a pair of out-sized sunglasses. “Better to laugh,” Echenoz has told an interviewer, “otherwise things tend to be . . . un peu catastrophique, n’est ce pas?” Likewise, the description of the Inuit guide’s weapon is not easily forgotten: “Napaseekadlak’s knife had a handle made of oosik, the bone that acts as a walrus’s sexual organ and whose qualities of suppleness, resistance, and porosity give it an ideal grip.” (The Arctic guides Napaseekadlak and Angoutretok, according to Echenoz, have real Inuit names that luckily, he says, work out well, as the names are fittingly romanesque—i.e., fanciful.)

  Inert objects, cars, the metro, and especially the weather are freely anthropomorphized: “Those clouds don’t look so good, lined up and determined like a professional army. Moreover, the weather has turned suddenly, as if winter were losing patience, threatening to be in ill humor and shoving autumn aside with hostile gusts to take its place as soon as possible.” The fabulous is evoked with an equal amount of ease, as the description of Suzanne, Ferrer’s ex-wife, shows: “It’s just that she has always been a neolithically violent person, and Ferrer sometimes wonders if he didn’t meet her at the mouth of a cave: Suzanne holding a club in one hand, a flint hatchet stuck in her belt. That day she was wearing a pterodactyl-wing suit under a trench coat cut from an ichthyosaur’s eyelid, and sporting an iguanodon’s nail fitted to the shape of her head.”

  No stranger to the vagaries of human behavior—Echenoz majored in sociology—he makes observations on character that are pithy and perfect; one of my favorites is his description of the judge who grants Ferrer and Suzanne their divorce: “The judge was a gray-haired woman, at once calm and tense: calm in that she felt accustomed to being a judge, tense in that she knew she would never be entirely accustomed to it.”

  Meantime, in I’m Gone, the gallery assistant Delahaye has died—mysteriously, of course—only to be resurrected later in the form of a murderous character named Baumgartner in a twist that echoes the denouement of Graham Greene’s The Third Man.

  Echenoz’s novels are not easy to classify, and harder still to describe is his style, where the terms “postmodern,” “minimalism,” “experimental,” and so on are both overused and too facile to provide any meaningful clarity or application. The French have tried by hailing Echenoz as the leader of the “école du dérisoire” (the school of the derisory), which refers to how French authors subvert the now overly familiar and clichéd conceits of spy novels, detective stories, and thrillers. Echenoz’s work has also been compared to that of Raymond Queneau (one of Queneau’s most influential works, Exercises in Style, tells the same story in ninety-nine different ways), to Michel Houellebecq, Haruki Murakami, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and, most especially, to Jean-Patrick Manchette, probably the most critically acclaimed and innovative French crime novelist of his generation.

  A book that Echenoz claims greatly marked his adolescence was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens; today, he is probably more apt to say that Samuel Beckett has had the most influence on his work. In fact, he ran into Beckett a few times at the office of his publisher, Les Éditions de Minuit, and was so intimidated that he could not utter a single word to him—except for the one time when his editor, Jerôme Lindon, introduced him to Beckett as the young man who had just won the Prix Médicis and, terrified, Echenoz mumbled something incoherent. Afterward, Beckett told Lindon that the prize must have greatly impressed Echenoz, when of course it was Beckett who had greatly impressed him. There are definite echoes of Beckett’s prose in I’m Gone. The most obvious is Echenoz’s take on the first line of Murphy: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on nothing new,” which he reshapes into an homage: “The days ran their course, having no alternative, in the usual order.”

  Jean Echenoz was born in Orange, in the Vaucluse, in 1947 and has lived in Paris since 1970. His first novel, Le Méridien de Greenwich (not yet translated into English), was published in 1979 and won the Prix Fénéon; in 1993, his novel Cherokee won the Prix Médicis; and then, of course, I’m Gone won the Prix Goncourt and was elected the best French novel of the year. In 2001, Echenoz published a sixty-four-page book with the title Jerôme Lindon, a remarkable tribute to his longtime editor, who had died six months earlier. The book is described as a “promenade” that takes place between two very different but equally dedicated men over a twenty-year period. Neither a biography or a hagiography, the book recounts anecdotally how, for instance, after being rejected by a host of other publishers, Echenoz finally, out of desperation, gets up the courage to send the manuscript of Le Méridien de Greenwich to Jerôme Lindon at the very prestigious publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit, and then how, the very next day, Lindon telephones Echenoz to tell him that, now, he, Echenoz, can afford to buy a new car! It also recounts how, for many years despite their close association, they called each other only by their last names until one day, fed up, Echenoz tells Lindon to call him “Jean,” and soon after he receives a letter from Lindon that begins: Cher Jean. From that day on, Echenoz recalls how he calls Lindon “Jerôme,” a name that until then he had used only to call his own son.

  To date, Echenoz has published thirteen novels, not including a sixteen-page text called Plan of Occupancy that describes the desolation felt by a man and his son as they contemplate a portrait in the form of an advertisement on a wall of a building that is about to be demolished, which is the only trace that remains of the woman they loved. Surprisingly, with the help of a Hebrew scholar, Echenoz has also translated the two Books of Samuel and the two Books of Maccabees for a modern version of the Bible, published by Bayard Press.

  Modest, private, independent, eschewing membership in institutions and academies, Echenoz does not like calling himself a writer but prefers saying that he writes books. For him, writing is a game with language and with form; it is the movement, the scansion, the rhythm, the sonority, the point of view, the perspective that counts, in other words everything good writing desires to be. He strives, according to an interview, to find the “just phrase,” which ideally for him is the convergence of a rhythm, a melody, and a suspense that fit together and that propel and feed the apparatus of the narrative. One of Echenoz’s great accomplishments is the way he uses language to reinvent the world anew, a world threatened by urbanization and technology, and injects it with both humor and poetry.

  Many of Echenoz’s works have to do with a disappearance, an escape, a search, a quest, and perhaps, after all is said and done, it is not so surprising that this novel both begins and ends with the words “I’m going.” Going where? The reader may well ask, and that may be Jean Echenoz’s great unanswerable question.

  November 2013

  I’m Gone

  1

  “I’m going,” said Ferrer. “I’m leaving you. You can keep everything, but I’m gone.” And as Suzanne’s gaze drifted toward the floor, settling for no good reason on an electrical outlet, Felix Ferrer dropped his keys on the entryway table. Then he buttoned up his overcoat and walked out, gently shutting the front door behind him.

  Outside, without a glance at Suzanne’s car whose fogged-up windows kept silent beneath the streetlamps, Ferrer began walking the six hundred yards toward the Corentin-Celton metro stop. At nearly nine o’clock, this first Sunday evening in January, the train was all but deserted. Only a dozen men were inside, unattached, as Ferrer seemed to have become in the last twenty-five minutes. Normally he would have rejoiced to find two empty facing benches, like a little compartment for himself alone, which in the metro was his preferred seating arrangement. But on this evening he scarcely gave it a thought, distracted but less preoccupied than he would have imagined by the scene that had just been played out with Suzanne, a woman of difficult character. Having envisioned a more vehement respo
nse, cries interspersed with threats and fiery insults, he was relieved, but somewhat put out by his own relief.

  He set down his valise, which contained mainly toiletries and a change of underwear, and at first he stared straight ahead, mechanically skimming over the advertising panels for floor coverings, dating services, and real estate listings. Later, between the Vaugirard and Volontaires stations, Ferrer opened the valise to remove an auction catalogue featuring traditional Persian artwork, which he leafed through up to Madeleine, where he got off.

  Around the Madeleine church, strings of unlit Christmas lights hovered above streets still more deserted than the subway. The decorated windows of the high-priced shops reminded the nonexistent pedestrians that they would survive the end-of-year festivities. Alone in his overcoat, Ferrer skirted the church toward an even number on Rue de l’Arcade.

  To find the building’s entry code, his hands forged a path under his clothing: the left one toward the address book slipped into an inside pocket, the right toward his glasses stuffed into a breast pocket. Then, having passed through the main door, ignoring the elevator, he firmly attacked the service stairs. He reached the sixth floor less out of breath than I would have imagined, in front of a badly repainted brick-red door whose hinges bespoke at least two attempted break-ins. No name on the door, just a tacked-up photo curling at the corners, depicting the lifeless body of Manuel Montoliu, an ex-matador-cum-banderillero, after an animal named Cubatisto had opened his heart like a book on May 1, 1992: Ferrer tapped lightly on the photo twice.

  While he waited, the nails of his right hand dug into the inner surface of his left forearm, just above the wrist, where numerous tendons and blue veins intersected under whiter skin. Then, her hair very dark and very long, no older than thirty nor shorter than five foot ten, the young woman named Laurence who had just opened the door smiled at him without saying a word before closing it behind them both. And the next morning at around ten, Ferrer left for his studio.