It is a bibliophile tour de force that falls into the unclassified category of unclassifiable books. Consisting of five books in very different form which are presented in a hardback box, this first singular novel by the Austrian Philipp Weiss, a playwright born in Vienna in 1982, spans more than a thousand pages and several continents.
A sum of paper to try to capture “the invention and the transformation of a world”. And a wide-ranging narrative labyrinth. From the personal story of a late 19th century teenagere century to the Japanese manga, from the Paris Commune in 1871 to the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, from the Big Bang to the France of the Enlightenment, each of the books that form The great laughter of men sitting at the edge of the world has its own identity – and appearance – of its own.
Starting with the autobiographical encyclopedia of the young Paulette Blanchard (1853-1878), “Encyclopedias of a Me”, which draws as much from her discovery of theEncyclopedia of Diderot than of his reading of Madame Bovary. “I would like everything! Grasp everything, understand everything, experience everything. The young Frenchwoman, for whom writing is a “way of shouting without making noise”, is animated by a thirst for knowledge and freedom that is hardly compatible with a bourgeois environment which only seeks to stifle it.
Out of a spirit of rebellion and to burst the corset (especially family), she joined the Paris Commune at 17, where she rubbed shoulders with Louise Michel before heading to the Vienna Universal Exhibition in 1873, from where she signed under an assumed name (and man) some articles for newspapers.
His meeting with a Japanese medical student (and his fascinated discovery of Japanese culture) will change his fate. The young Frenchwoman will marry him and embark for Japan, where she lands in the middle of the Meiji era (marked by the opening of the Japanese archipelago to Western modernity), before experiencing a powerful and frontal shock of cultures.
There, the nascent feminism and the insatiable thirst for freedom of the young woman will make her collide head-on with the heavy shackles of Japanese society.
In “Vacant Land”, Jona Jonas, a somewhat lost photographer, surveys Tokyo in the wake of the 2011 earthquake. Androgynous and bisexual narrator, he is in search of the woman he loved, Chantal Blanchard, physicist and climatologist who is 20 years older than him. “Before meeting Chantal, he will say, I lacked nothing. After that, it’s his absence that fills all the gaps.
The scientist reappears (for us) in the “Notebooks” that she kept between 2010 and 2011, just before disappearing from the radar and from Jona’s life. Her great-great-grandmother is this famous Paulette, of which she is looking for traces in Japan and Siberia. His quest for meaning is nourished by fragmentary reflections on love, existence, the cosmos.
Another part of the Big laughter of the men sitting at the edge of the world, “Akio’s Notebooks” are taken from the transcriptions of a nine-year-old child wandering with a dictaphone after surviving the Fukushima disaster, monologues or encounters made to ward off fear after the tsunami. In his eyes of a child who dreams of a “switch to stop thoughts”, earthquakes are supernatural creatures.
“The Happy Islands”, by Abra Aoki (drawn by Raffaela Schöbitz), a manga in which a young Japanese woman with an amputated arm and a leg, suffering from phantom pain, takes us after her. A kind of trip acid in search of her shattered identity and a question that haunts her and prevents her from sleeping: does reality exist?
Linked to each other by subtle points of contact – including a certain touch of humor – the five volumes can be read in any order, according to the author, who incorporates images and plays as much with the narration as typography.
Taken end to end, all the elements of this five-part novel form a critical history of modernity, probing men’s dreams of progress and their blind quest for self-destruction – whether intimate or collective.
An ambitious novel whose fragmentary essence perhaps fails to avoid an impression of scattering. In doing so, the vast enterprise of Philipp Weiss, Francophile and lover of Japan, somewhat fails to make good use of one of the novel’s magical powers: to bring order to the chaos of the world.
A funny object made of words and paper, and a fascinating reading experience.