What remains when someone disappears? What happens to those who stay? This is the question posed by Dominique Fortier in When will the dawn comea delicate and personal book that comes six months after its previous one, The white shadowsand which is somewhat the other side of it.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
” The white shadows, it was the creation component. This one is a sort of notebook of reflections on the same themes. » When will the dawn come is a sort of journey through the aftermath, when you have to continue to live with absence, lack. This is the path taken by Dominique Fortier after the death of her father, the traces of which she seeks in her memories, and which finds consolation in observing the world around her.
“This is not a book about death, but about life. It’s this search, how to find the things that help us continue to inhabit the world that is changed when someone disappears. »
When will the dawn come is the kind of book that one reads by honing almost all the pages so much the sentences and the thought are concentrated, precise. It is also Dominique Fortier’s first complete non-fiction book, and by far his most intimate.
“That’s why I feel very fragile. And me too. »
sensitive world
It feels like When will the dawn come comes to close a triptych initiated with paper towns, this beautiful book dedicated to the American poet Emily Dickinson who won her the Renaudot in France two years ago. But the author adds to this cycle For memorywhich she wrote with Rafaële Germain, who was already interested in memory, transmission and heritage.
“What unites all of these books is a desire to be attentive to the world around us. »
This “super intense relationship to the world” of Emily Dickinson fascinated her, and there is in When will the dawn come the same attention to detail, an attentive look at colors, textures, objects, places.
The sensitive world is a real presence for me. I have the impression that we have forgotten a lot how to look. We never have time to stop to see what’s around us. And in us.
Dominique Fortier
The idea is to “record on paper” the emotions, the sensations, the impressions which are aroused, and which in essence are “fleeting and fragile”. “Like a butterfly, a dried up flower. So that something remains of it after one or two winters. »
The power of literature
In this short book all in fragments, written very early in the morning when “dreams, mourning and writing melted together”, Dominique Fortier summons things, but also literature. From Ronsard to Rebecca Solnit via Leonard Cohen, a whole constellation of writers come to shine a different light on the world.
Literature protects and consoles, but it also forces you to get out of yourself and go bigger. I think books help us to live, that they have this very real, very practical utility.
Dominique Fortier
This is where the writer has always found refuge, and it is probably the greatest legacy of her librarian father. What else did he leave her? “Sometimes it’s things that people leave behind. In his case, this man who had been careful not to leave traces… left him this need to leave some. “That’s probably part of what got me into writing. »
She inherited his temperament, his qualities as well as his faults, she adds before pausing. “But the real answer is the awareness that life is short and the urgency to do things. This acute awareness that nothing lasts forever, that things are ephemeral, and precious because they are. As in Ronsard’s poem, you have to pick the roses of life! »
At the end of her quest, the writer does not blame her father for having left so few footprints behind him. There is also no resentment in the book, rather love and a lot of benevolence. “He couldn’t do otherwise. It was really his nature. »
Towards the fiction
This very intimate book, she launches it today in the world with a small thrill of dread, but the hope that it will be useful “in its modest means”. Because sharing suffering and vulnerability is “deeply human” for her. “In the book, I quote a postfacer from Emily Dickinson, who says poetry is valuable because it helps us live and prepares us to die, something like that. »
She likes more and more to take refuge with authors like Christian Bobin, who writes this kind of work. “And we always write a little bit of the books we want to read. Does this mean that she will no longer make fiction?
“Well no, I’m going to write some more! I’m writing one, but as a concentrate. A novel from which you would remove the long descriptions, the articulations, the transitions. Where it would remain as an essence of fiction. »
What’s certain is that she’s done talking about Emily…and herself. “It’s good, I’ve done the trick. I have seen myself enough. I had very personal things to explore and I wanted to share them, because I think they touch on something universal. But there, I feel like getting out of myself for real and going completely somewhere else. »
When will the dawn come
Dominique Fortier
Alto
104 pages