After resurrecting 1970s Italy and exploring spirituality in a Pyrenean monastery (The Pasolini Trail, The Good Boys and Simple Souls published by Équateurs), Pierre Adrian publishes with Gallimard Let those who are far come back. Augustian and family holidays in the depths of Brittany.
After years of absence, the young narrator returns to spend a few weeks in the Breton property where all the branches of the family meet each summer. The generations mingle, from the eldest, soon to be a hundred years old, to the youngest cousins whose names had been almost forgotten. An ideal vacation where time merges for a moment with the horizon: infinite.
“The days followed each other without event, all similar to the previous day. Nothing happened. The morning lengthened until lunch at one o’clock. day was spent on the sand where the young parents had occupied their children for a long time.
It’s a strange feeling one gets when reading Pierre Adrian, 31 years old. His writing seems to age him before his time. He has the nostalgia for the past of those who have not yet lived enough and the wise distance skated by those who have known too many years. Perhaps this is the mark of the writer. Like Colette’s novels, which I also adore, the story is not carried by a great romantic breath. The bag and the surf of the sea punctuate the narration as we turn the pages and, without realizing it, we are already at the end. As in life.
Memories are followed by summer reunions, unfulfilled teenage love affairs and the first audacity. The narrator rediscovers the child he was in the seriousness of little Jean, his cousin, and in his childish carelessness. As for Anne, with whom he played on the beach, she offers him the salty taste of pleasure.
“We evoked memories together. Childhood brought us together. The discussion was comfortable, shrouded in the certainty of the past, its reassuring fixity. It was painful at the same time since we would never experience that again. But I no longer believed that rehashed memories were wasted time.”
The return to this common home where everyone experiences freedom is a form of homecoming for this narrator “unable to know or say from where [il] forestay[t]”, lost between the world of childhood to which he no longer belongs and the insecurity of the adult world.
“Also, I had understood that I should no longer listen to those who said that I was still a young man. I no longer felt like such and, every day, Jean and his cousins had reminded me of that. I had I’m done being a son. I was a childless father.”
Just as in suspense, this month of August in Brittany, between the prospect of a long idleness and the urgency of living before the start of the school year sweeps away the summer like the tide the towels on the sand. “The last fortnight of August was the time of confusion, days in suspension. Enjoyment gave way to resolutions, disorder to organization.” Live everything in a few days, before time resumes its course. But some have more time than others…
In the manner of memento mori, Let those who are far come back could be the literary sketch of a vanitas. Time never suspends its flight. Dramas and memories remind us of this. Pierre Adrian too, in the story of these holidays, so similar to ours and yet so unique. The present invades everything even in the refusal of the looming future. It remains to find how to enjoy it.
Adrian, Peter, Let those who are far come back, Gallimard, 08/18/2022, 1 vol. (240 pages), €20.
Chronicle written by Marc Decoudun