“Friday I pushed back in the morning / so hard, we saw the bone several times”, writes Frédéric Dumont in Minimum rooma haunting account, generous in extraordinary unusual images, of this ordeal of gout commonly called everyday life.
Posted at 2:00 p.m.
Portrait of a passive resistance to the small repetitive assaults of the eternal restarting of everything, this fourth collection is the voice of someone who has to withstand one “tragedy in line with expectations” after another. It’s never anything very serious – “several coats of dust / cover my notes” – but each time it’s the end of the world.
The one who speaks through these verses nevertheless harbors reasonable ambitions (“today I just felt like / going to take / photos of potatoes”), but unfortunately lives in a time when words no longer mean anything , where it is impossible to love without anxiety, where happiness is a mask that must be put on so as not to disappoint others.
But rather than mocking the tedious redundancy of the days by copying its breathless language, Frédéric Dumont surreptitiously subverts the banal (“I dream that the word light / is something other / than a creeping metaphor”), by injecting it with a formidable dose of strangeness. Each time the little music on its pages threatens to induce a form of hypnosis, an improbable image emerges out of nowhere and dispels our torpor: “I’m listening to Debussy / while a guy / wearing a mauve mask / is doing an asbestos test / in my wardrobe”.
Magnificently absurd reply to the tyranny of positivism, Minimum room dismisses despair thanks to a series of rebellious grimaces, without Frédéric Dumont ever managing to completely camouflage the unprecedented insight and the crazy originality of his view of this life which too often makes you want to never leave your home again.
Minimum room
Frederic Dumont
Red Herbs
152 pages