The French author André Dhôtel, who died in 1991, is little known in Germany. Peter Handke considers his work to be more contemporary than that of Jean-Paul Sartre, François Mauriac or even Albert Camus. Mauriac saw in him “the creator of the strangest of all our novel worlds”. Describing them is an impossibility. Here’s an attempt at it with the Novelist Anne Webertranslator of Dhôtel’s 1952 novel “Bernard the Lazybones” to do anyway.
SZ: Insider tip, discovery, revelation – these are words that are easy to say. How did you come up with this author?
Anne Weber: My father-in-law, the poet Philippe Jaccottet, had been friends with André Dhôtel since the 1940s and often spoke admiringly of him. I then started reading him a few years ago, at about the same time as Peter Handke. And we were both immediately taken with him, it’s a tremendous pleasure to read. I said to myself I would like to translate that.
What do you think is special about him?
That he never ceases to amaze. “The wonder of the visible world” is a quote from La Bruyère, which is the motto of one of his novels, but could apply to all of them. Everything appears as new, things appear as if from the back. Figures, situations and moods turn into their opposite. Or rather: you carry it with you from the start. Hate turns into love, stubbornness disguises itself as politeness. In this way, behind the apparently simple story, a reality emerges that immediately escapes again.
There is indeed a retellable plot, also in this novel.
Certainly, but that says little. The main character is a young man named Bernard Casmin. He lives in a French provincial town. Relatives offer him shelter and get him a job. He meets a young woman, and now something happens that you could call “hate at first sight”, or at least that’s how it seems. As a result, the young man loses his job and, socially speaking, continues to go downhill. It all has a bad ending. Or maybe it’s not bad at all? It has something of an inevitable natural event.
Even the quality of laziness mentioned in the title is surprising. Because this “lazybones” is constantly on the move, cruising around on his motorbike, crossing forests, climbing mountains.
Far from being idle, he is lazy in the sense of being lazy about his social standing. He completely lacks social ambition. The word “lazybones” is therefore not necessarily the ideal translation, but “sluggish” would certainly not have fitted. This Bernard walks through the world without looking for anything in particular, but always with an open mind. This alert detachment from any concrete goal can perhaps also be understood as a kind of wisdom. There is an impressive passage in the book where Bernard, lying in the grass, lets his gaze wander aimlessly over the landscape and suddenly sees a game warden’s eye watching him in a crevice. One could say of Dhôtel’s figures that the gaze becomes sharp when it is not looking for anything in particular.
The strange love-hate relationship between Bernard and young Estelle is described in the French text as a “coup de foudre à l’envers”, a reverse lightning bolt. They translate that as “reverse love at first sight”.
“Coup de foudre” is a very common expression in French, just like the German “love at first sight”. What would have bothered me about expressions like “lightning bolt” or “love bolt” would be the effect of a pictorial poeticization. André Dhôtel is a wonderful storyteller with a naturally flowing poetic undertone. When translating, you have to be careful not to additionally poeticize your prose.
This probably also applies to the very special mood in his novels, which results from the always precise and factual description of the landscapes, streets, plants, bodies of water, between which the characters move and in which one believes one can recognize the Ardennes.
I know that the Ardennes were important to him personally. As a reader, that seems secondary to me. As precisely as things may be described, the geography in his novels shows a certain fuzziness. The place names are fictitious, and the author succeeds in making a specific somewhere out of the concretely described topography. In this respect, his books are anything but homeland literature. The only thing that can be said is that his stories don’t take place in extreme locations, not on high mountains or by the sea, but always in the middle. This corresponds to the simplicity of his presentation. But you shouldn’t fall for him, because what is depicted is more complex than it appears. When reading, one gets the impression that these characters live in an extended world and have a sense for things that are only perceptible to them.
In his foreword, Peter Handke speaks of the “form of clearly defined riddles”.
I think that’s a particularly nice formulation. The opposite of nebulous.
At first glance, this author lacks any political dimension. Dhôtel lived a secluded life and did not interfere in public debates. Nevertheless, Bernard falls into a milieu of obscure fellows who want to draw him into their machinations “against those up there”.
The novel contains no direct social criticism. But an image of society emerges, and it is not very sympathetic. It is characterized by ambition, striving for success, social status, rumors and slander. Bernard, this always polite man, is increasingly ostracized by her. He’s an outsider who doesn’t fit in. He doesn’t want a better job or a higher salary, doesn’t want to belong, but doesn’t make that a principle. He just wants to be left alone. This is also a kind of social criticism, maybe even a much more radical form. A social criticism through indifference or through dissidence.
Dhôtel did not belong to any literary school and kept aloof from the movements. Like the authors of the Nouveau Roman, however, he also exploded conventional storytelling by hollowing out its course from within.
With the difference, however, that he didn’t need any theory for it. He told stories, albeit in an unconventional way. This makes his work independent of literary fashions or movements and perhaps also explains why such different people were interested in him as Maurice Blanchot, his editor Jean Paulhan, Philippe Jaccottet or today Peter Handke.
André Dhôtel: Bernard the lazybones. Novel. With a foreword by Peter Handke. Translated from the French by Anne Weber. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2022. 282 pages, 24 euros.