“The Accident” by Jean-Paul Kauffmann, the lost smell of childhood

The Accident

by Jean-Paul Kauffmann

Ecuadors, 336 p., €22

It is an understatement to say that Jean-Paul Kauffmann's new book has been long awaited. Finally, the story of his childhood in Corps-Nuds in Ille-et-Vilaine, in a family of bakers, the subdued evocation of a lost country, his return with muffled steps towards the past and the threads he knows how to stretch, with this share of suave half-light that surrounds his imagination.

Accident in the village

To open this intimate exploration, with multiple ramifications, from the altar boy to the hostage, he exhumes a news item, which gives its title to the book. The accidental death, on January 2, 1949, of 18 football players from his village, returning from a match, caused by the mayor's son, fairly drunk at the wheel of an overloaded Dodge. The echo of this tragedy was national but the town closed in on itself, surrounding it with a persistent unspoken thing that Jean-Paul Kauffmann tries to fill. Primal scene, founding memory. He claims to have forgotten nothing of this fateful evening (he was 4 and a half years old) but does not rule out reconstructing it, nourished by what he was able to hear later.

Kauffmann never ceases to question the "distortions" of memory, which transmute "the junk of memories into gold" , an alchemy comparable to the making of bread. Marvelous, olfactory and crisp pages on the work of his father who, from the kneading trough to the oven, accomplished, before his eyes, this daily miracle which, he thinks, is sacred. "The lost smell of childhood, that is what I never cease to seek", he confesses.

Country priest

Jean-Paul Kauffmann reconstructs the last fires of a rustic civilization, steeped in mutual aid and solidarity, and the atmosphere of his village in the 1950s, dominated by an austere country priest, an uncompromising steward of souls, administering with all his clerical loftiness a "pastoral of fear" . A "Christianity of fear" inexorably condemning sinners to eternal damnation. Kauffmann plays, until the end, with a subtle suspense to delay the details of a scandal that will bring down this dark director of conscience.

A turbulent and quarrelsome child, who cherished the fleeting dream of becoming a bishop, the young Kauffmann tasted the joys of boarding school. Another form of seclusion awaited him, more dramatic, "my Lebanese years" , he said with the restraint for which he is known, establishing an obscure continuity in "the esoteric parade" of an existence governed by the sense of mystery and the inexplicable. "However, " he wrote, "it will take me many years to reach this conclusion: every gain implies a loss, every appropriation a dispossession or abandonment. At the end of every victory there infallibly appears the shadow of defeat."

He does not avoid the boredom of this childhood in a frozen town, huddled around the drama, living on little, but which knew how to give birth to fertile reveries, escapes into which the hostage will rush during these three years in the dark, deprived of hope. Should we put down to this his belief in redemption? "I am a pure product of the French provinces", he proclaims, rejecting the terms "territory" or "region" which have supplanted it, before drying up its flavor. With his talent for showing and feeling this bygone era, and his style where each sentence is chiseled like a jewel, Jean-Paul Kauffmann agrees that retracing one's steps is wanting to hold on to a mirage. With time, everything slips away and flees.