In a hotel room in Vancouver, one day far back in 1995, Hazel Brown woke up with the feeling — and the certainty — of having written the work of Baudelaire (1821-1867). Identical and conflicting, his relationship to poverty, to lyricism, to beauty. THE flowers of Evil, The painter of modern lifeit was her, her work, her words.
“I received it entirely, as one puts on a jacket, assuming the different gestures it imposes”, tells us the narrator of The Baudelaire Fractal, the first novel, as brilliant as it is cerebral, by the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. A major voice in English poetry, born in Toronto in 1961, she has lived in France since 2003.
From the small house in the south of France, where she writes in 2016, this woman who has reached “the middle of life” tries, she says, to slip into the heart of her first period of learning. Revisiting her notebooks and diaries, “archivist of the ephemeral”, she seeks to tell “the perfect improbability of a girl’s youth”, passed from dream to reality, from Toronto to Paris, “the city that premiere welcomed the fantastic project of my future”.
The first stop on her trajectory, in the grayness of London in the fall of 1984, a simple stopover for this young woman of twenty-three, already “sounded by the glamour of literature”. A few weeks later in Paris, barely out of the station, pacing the streets of the Latin Quarter, she was struck by the first of a series of revelations: “It was indeed the city that I had invented for myself from the books . »
A string of maids’ rooms, as cold as they are cramped, will soon follow, poetic and short-lived encounters, kisses and leaks. A theater of desire and learning. “I was a girl; time was my body. »
An ocean of time, deep and elastic, on which float visits to museums, long days spent reading and thinking, in search of a “mystical portal” to access poetry. Thinking about the country of Debord, Deleuze and Rousseau? “I didn’t care. If it wasn’t thought, I reasoned, at least it was mine. »
Along the way, between nostalgia and deconstruction, Lisa Robertson’s alter ego is also interested in the way in which poetry – and the poets themselves – destroy women poets, they who “died under the weight of the beauty of contempt “. See Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Smart or Jean Rhys. See Sylvia Plath.
Feminist puzzle, clever and daring patchwork, autobiography of a reader, The Baudelaire Fractala poet’s novel written with a knife, reminds us of the sinuous confessions of Deborah Levy, the material reflections of Anne Boyer, the questions of identity and the theoretical sidesteps of a Maggie Nelson.
As fluid as it is sharp, the remarkable translation by Jeannot Clairil (to whom we also owe, under the name of Jean-Michel Théroux, that of Argonautes by Maggie Nelson) must be highlighted.
Beneath the angular, sometimes difficult, somewhat catch-all exteriors, The Baudelaire Fractal is the dense and diffracted story of a double birth: that of a woman and that of a vocation for poetry. Or how one becomes oneself through one’s readings — and often also against them.