MATHIAS ENARD
Undertaker’s Guild Annual Banquet
translation by Sophia Dionysopoulou
ed. Stereoma, 2022, p. 584

IN “Undertaker’s Guild SymposiumBy Matthias Enar, the genre of the novel restores its elemental characteristics, as the great Kundera defined them: a game with paradox, a space of assumptions, a field of unlimited freedom, a place of endless cheerfulness, perhaps a parody of oneself. authorship risk. Everything converges, converges and converges here: selective realism and metaphysical leaps, pleasures of the body and the quest of the intellect, folk traditions and modern environmental concerns, obscene and sublime, obscenity and seriousness, humor and melancholy, exuberant language and thoughtful contemplation. Whirlwind of life and hurricane of death. Recording the history of the region in the inexhaustible book of a mortal but ever-reborn humanity.

Here we encounter clashes between farmers and police over water, the same clashes that are currently flaring up in the Des Sèvres region.

A young “Parisian” anthropologist travels to a small village in the Des Sèvres region to study life in rural France in the 21st century. At first, he feels like Malinowski did when he studied the insular population of Guinea, even going so far as to call his humble dwelling “Wild Thought,” borrowing the name of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s classic study. Gradually, he gets to know the locals, drinks with the village mayor and the undertaker, meets Max, the enigmatic artist, becomes impressed with Lucy, who “grows zarzavats” and sells them in the market, and moves from indulgence to interest and interest. sympathy.

The van he buys to move around the area, comfortable if “smelly and hot” is a “kick” that will turn the tide to move to the central part of the novel. Death reigns here, or rather an endless cycle of reincarnations. People, animals, insects die, make a short transition through the Bardo, “the world between worlds” and go “to immediate rebirth” in new bodies, on “the great Wheel of suffering, where everything sinks.”

In this part of Western France, rich in history and legends, washed by the waters of the North Atlantic, eras overlap and intertwine, the layering of stories reveals duration, the past invades the present, Caesar fights in the “druid forest” of the Marais. , Charles Martel defeats an Arab army at the Battle of Poitiers, the House of Lusignan sets out to conquer Jerusalem and Cyprus, Napoleon passes in his failed attempt to escape to America, Nazi troops regroup in the nearby swamps.

Everything merges in a brilliant narrative, beautifully translated into our language by Sophia Dionysopoulou, which recalls everything that makes up the place: war and love, pain and joy, crime and kindness, literature and food. Because in the heart of this place, the rambunctious mayor and undertaker hosts his guild’s annual banquet.

If Henry Fielding, author of the explosive comic novel Tom Jones (1749), called himself a “restaurateur” and his book a “many banquet,” then Matthias Henar he turns the metaphor into a literal one and boldly opposes Rabelais. A hymn to the common joy of eating, a tribute to the rich French gastronomic traditions, a celebration of French viticulture and winemaking, a pangruelle festival that sharpens the scythe of death for three days and sends it on a forced vacation, the undertaker’s holiday. the feast could not fail to be adorned, like any banquet worthy of the name, with songs, stories, and quasi-philosophical discussions, while the invisible but all-present, friendly or disturbing ghosts of history and legend roam between the tables.

However, there comes a point when the story settles. A young anthropologist abandons his dissertation in favor of Lucy’s rural life and sights, and the narrative takes on a political tone. Here we are faced with clashes between farmers and police over water (the same clashes that are causing a fire these days in the Des Sèvres district, where the “Symposium” is also taking place), the problems of French farmers, an acute environmental problem, “perverse and short-sighted logic” of development. But the ending is happy.

Happy, like the life force of nature, the greatness of the human condition even in its smallness and the power of the novel, the times when he manages to cast a captive and at the same time clear and disappointed look at the world.