Maylis de Kerangal’s Naissance d’un pont: Birth of a literary monument
On Thursday 12 November, I got the chance to lead what turned out to be a most fascinating discussion of Maylis de Kerangal’s prize-winning novel Naissance d’un pont (2010), when the Institut français du Royaume-Uni played host to the Reading Group, a modern-day version of a salon littéraire.
It’s particularly exciting to be able to engage with the work of living writers because it means that we are among the first to comment and critique it. As such, we decide which texts will be remembered and which will fall by the wayside.
It seems highly unlikely that the latter should occur with Maylis de Kerangal’s work, given that it is attracting ever-increasing critical attention. From her first published novel Je marche sous un ciel de traîne (2000) to her most recent work A ce stade de la nuit (2014), de Kerangal describes highly evocative places or spaces in detailed, documentary fashion. In Réparer les vivants (2013), for instance, the focus is on a hospital intensive care ward, but what is most surprising, despite the novel ostensibly dealing with the death of a young man, is how characters’ lives are featured, are given space to breathe.
Naissance d’un pont takes us to an imaginary California, where a huge building project is to radically change the socio-economic situation as well as the landscape. A bridge, a metaphorical hyphen between oppositions and contradictions, but also a very real construction project, is set to expand the city at the detriment of the forest. In Naissance d’un pont, Maylis de Kerangal has written an epic tale that explores human endeavour through analysis of compromise.
As a discussion group, we enjoyed sinking our teeth into a book that evoked the Great American novels of the nineteenth-century: a literature of perspectives, shifts and wide-open spaces rather than closeted bedrooms. We thought about how literature might reconfigure space, the evocative nature of place names, and how the building of the bridge acts as a metaphor for the writing of a novel.
We considered issues of translation through analysis of narrative voice and the textured layering of language in the novel. We evoked different sources of inspiration, from Balzac to Woolf, from Deleuze to Baudrillard. Over the course of an hour and a half, we shared our points of view, exchanged sometimes quite different ideas, agreed and disagreed. Above all, for a short period, we put literature at the heart of our lives, and showed that there are still people very much interested in reading, and in reading critically.
I think it’s fair to say that we’re all looking forward to the next session on Thursday 3 December when we’ll be delving into Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov. We may even open another bottle of wine pour la peine.
Dominic Glynn is Lecturer in French at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR).
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