Author's return to fiction

Choses que je croyais perdues is the first novel by Clémentine Mélois since Alors c’est bien, and her first book since she left the Oulipo in May last year, following a putative suicide in front of a bailiff, a procedure never used before.

Narrative and themes

The novel follows Émilie, a thirty-two-year-old professor of engraving at an art school in Drôme, who, the day before her move, packs her belongings in old newspapers and mentally addresses Tristan, from whom she has just separated after seven years. The title of the article comes from a neighbor who brings her a stack of old issues of Dauphiné libéré, suggesting they be used for wrapping fragile things.

Literary comparisons

The book is compared to works by Georges Perec, particularly Things, and the most enlightening comparison is with I Remember. An object, a story, a lesson: the rule is good, and the one who applies it comes from a group where one knows what a constraint produces all by itself when left to work.

Descriptive prose and technique

The book is at its best when Clémentine Mélois stops making fun. Émilie describes her engraving workshop, and the prose changes regime, starting to recite terms like scraper, file, steel wool, burnisher, Judean bitumen, tarlatan doll, Meudon white, and the plate that is brightened on the edges before turning the press wheel. None of these words are translated, nothing serves to make it pretty, and the joy passes without being named.

Personal reflections and symbolism

She draws a sentence on engraving ("every printed thing tells a story to a person and to herself alone") which also applies to the novel where it is read. The comedy works for the same reasons. Émilie empties the bathroom cabinet, which contains expired pills, illustrating the hours of a life with the Aerius of spring allergies, the Biafine of summer, the Fervex of autumn, and the package of urinary leakage protection that Tristan had brought from the supermarket the day she asked him for sanitary pads.

Narrative structure and critique

The novel, however, has a habit that damages its best scenes: it explains them as soon as they are successful. Alone in her bed, Émilie dares not cross the boundary that Tristan had drawn in the middle of the mattress, her "sleeping zone," since he had told her that a woman sleeps on the right. Then she slides towards the center and stretches diagonally. The gesture is written, it carries. Comes the comment: "It was incredible. I was doing something forbidden, and I was freeing myself at the same time." Then the coronation: "I was a new woman, an emancipated woman: the new sovereign of what was your kingdom." Then Napoleon: "This conquest worthy of Emperor Napoleon reassured me." Tristan had finally explained what was wrong: she was not feminine enough, put too much eyeliner, her perfume smelled like an old lady. Followed by stomach aches, dreams where she bleeds out. The doctor prescribes magnesium and asks: "Are you sure everything is okay in your life right now?" The chapter ends there.

Character development and resolution

The next one provides the answer: everything was not okay, but Émilie had too much shame to talk about it, and for three years she applied herself to dampen her spontaneity. The sentence on shame brings something. The rest makes explicit what the general practitioner's question had just obtained. Clémentine Mélois had the understanding of the reader, but she still demands the receipt. The reader who liked the novel will object that what is reproached to the book is what he liked.

Narrative control and resolution

Mélois knows, however, to dispense with the third time. The question of the general practitioner receives no comment in the chapter where it falls; the photo of burned containers that the book reproduces in facsimile, captioned "Only one container burned," receives nowhere. The rupture is well managed: Clémentine Mélois delays the exact circumstances until the last pages, and the reader, installed on Émilie's side, learns late that she had spent the night with a colleague, Sam, while Tristan was waiting for her at home. Émilie does not hide behind the threats Tristan addresses to Sam at that time: she writes that she hurt, betrayed, and cheated on him.

Parody and critique

Jon can see in the book a parody of the love story, and the page where Émilie unrolls her dreamed life with a man she met for an hour gives him reason: bohemian chic wedding in June, long house Maison & Déco, catalog so exact that it can only be a pastiche. Nothing in the chapter comes to say it, and that is why one laughs. Émilie draws a lesson from each object. When one claims that things know things, one should make sure that they know just the right things.

Historical accuracy and context

The book places the Neolithic 12,000 years ago and asserts in the same sentence that pottery was then covered with glaze, a technique posterior by several millennia. And the documentary she watches as she falls asleep makes Constantinople, in 1237, the capital of the Byzantine Empire besieged by the Bulgarians: it is the capital of the Latin Empire, the Byzantine Empire is then based in Nicea and is among the besiegers, and the siege had been lifted the year before. One will answer that she reports what is said on television and that she has the right to be approximate. The argument would hold if the text signaled it once. It never does, and the Féria de Nîmes shows what the book is capable of: refrigerated trucks under the arches of the arena during the bullfight, a banda suddenly emerging from an alley. Nothing there sounds false to someone who has loitered in a Pentecost fair (the author of these lines vegetates in the southwest).

Symbolism and closure

The comparison, with Mélois, between a roll of paper towels and the history of writing supports is a real idea: one unrolls the Sopalin as one unrolled the volume, and she brings the printed recipe back to the hands painted with stencils of the Paleolithic. Émilie then detaches a sheet to wipe her eyes, and holds between her hands, she writes, the material outcome of five thousand years of human history. Five thousand years of evolution, ingenuity, mechanization, and industrialization. Then the fall: five thousand years for this absolute. At this word, one is no longer invited to feel anything, one is asked to stand up. The last chapter adds an anaphora of "I will never again" and this moral: as long as one can tell their story, things are not really lost. Two paragraphs earlier in the book, however, something had moved. Émilie refuses to say if she saw Samuel again, because that is her business. She continues to speak to Tristan, she stops telling him everything. Beautiful intuition, a bit stifled under the big packaging.