I ran to buy In the splendor of the night, the latest graphic novel by Dany Laferrière. It is more touching than the others, especially at the beginning, when the veneration of the exiled father hovers everywhere for the Chinese poet of the eighth century.e century Li Po. Laferrière often evokes the night, which envelops the pages like a kind of coat. Carrying around his lantern and reincarnating in the East, the author of I am a Japanese writer now writes: “I am a Chinese poet who knows what awaits him tonight. His drawings often depict snakes, moons and owls. Great occult messengers, as everyone knows.
In the splendor of the night is a charming and poetic work, which adds a stone to the building of his autobiography. Except that we pass through very quickly. previous sound On the road with Bashō read even faster. So little text and a few drawings… We went from one cover to another during the newscasts. I’m exaggerating a little bit. There remains this impression of a writer’s nonchalance… He often claims it, moreover, that one.
In recent years, his graphic novels have largely replaced his novels. Of which we are bored, as much to admit it. Enough to wish that it jumps more often from one genre to another in order to satisfy its readership. After all, the Quebeco-Haitian author is recognized and awarded for his pen, not for his brush.
By dint of following him since How to make love with a nigger without getting tired, we appreciated his literary breath, as we became attached to him, to his grandmother Da, in Petit-Goâve. Following in his footsteps through the exile of Haiti to flee the Tontons Macoutes of Papa Doc to the Montreal of his bohemian. Also saluting his love of literature, especially for the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, this genius of aphorism and metaphysical fiction. To read Laferrière is also to savor its cultural references. It is to love in him the stylist, the humorist, the insolent, the sometimes wise.
I don’t know if his change in literary direction is equivalent to what others call the Prix Goncourt syndrome. You know, this weight of consecration which slows down certain writers who have won great literary prizes, once they have reached the heights. In the past, the extreme visibility that accompanies honors has disturbed many in front of their blank page. For his part, Dany Laferrière had instead received the Prix Médicis in 2009 for The riddle of the return, before entering the French Academy in 2015. It was an extraordinary dubbing. Did he still belong? The hubbub of celebrity, so deafening in France, hardly befits the silence required by long-term writing. Unless he’s tired of being a prisoner of words alone.
Since then, he has been sailing elsewhere. We have long found it fresh and liberating that such a recognized author, partly from our ranks, lays out childish, funny and colorful drawings accompanied by inspiring phrases. After donning the green coat, he could have delivered some pedantic bricks. But no, quite the contrary.
In his graphic novels, his sources of aspiration have not changed. The wanderings through Haiti, Montreal, Florida, Paris always charm us in the middle of the intertwining of his drawings. In the same vein, his exhibition A vsnomadic heart, with texts and illustrations retracing her journey, did she not travel before landing in June in New York at the UN headquarters, in front of the delegates’ entrance? The formula is successful.
But the art of developing a story, of sharpening dialogues, he mastered them really well. So alive, the old novels of Laferrière. The smell of coffee intoxicated us, The cry of crazy birds resounded on our internal walls. In 2021, A short treatise on racism (without drawings), with its short and often punchy sentences, lacked the flair of its American mosaic Is this pomegranate in the hand of the young Negro a weapon or a fruit? Her latest non-graphic novel launched in March 2022, The child who watches, published by Grasset, was rather an elegant 64-page novella, partly intended for young audiences. His drawn works take precedence over the others. When it does not pour into extreme conciseness.
In front of the media, he expresses himself well, Dany Laferrière, mastering the art of responding to journalists with lyrical or comic accents. Such a meaning of the formula is not given to all. He seduces, he dazzles, he even convinces by accompanying sometimes minor works.
I will be told that a writer has the right to take another path than that which was his path to glory. I say. But readers can also be bored of his first way. Just because they had tasted it a lot.