Le visage tout bleu by Patrice Robin (review)

Reviewed by: Le visage tout bleu by Patrice Robin Warren Motte Robin, Patrice. Le visage tout bleu. P.O.L, 2022. ISBN 978-2-8180-5465-9. Pp. 128. This is Patrice Robin’s tenth book, and his ninth for the Éditions P.O.L, in a career inaugurated in 1999 with a novel entitled Graine de chanteur. There are no writerly acrobatics here, no virtuoso performances; it is, quite simply, a well-written piece of work. All of Robin’s books are confessional in character, either in a frankly autobiographical mode or a thinly-veiled fictional mode. Here, he practices autobiography; but two of the three stories he tells focus principally on people other than himself. There is very little that is out of the ordinary here (with the exception of an explosion), and certainly no adventure, but Robin is extremely attentive to the fabric of daily life, and to the ways the people he speaks about make their way precariously through the quotidian. His own beginnings were precarious enough, for, as he puts it in the first tale, “Je suis né avec le cordon ombilical enroulé autour du cou, le visage tout bleu” (13). Resuscitated with the help of oxygen from an uncle’s forge, that event will take its place firmly in family mythology. It clearly serves Robin as a foundational tale in terms of his sense of himself, as he wonders how those initial circumstances structured his view of the world and his place in it, why he came to feel stifled in his hometown, why he would eventually (and as if inevitably) choose to leave and to become a writer. The second narrative involves the explosion of a steam-driven harvester that came very close to killing Robin’s mother when she was merely four years old. In the narrative present, she is elderly; her memory of that event was a slim one, made still more slight now that she is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. In a sense, Robin undertakes to remember that event because his mother no longer can. He points out that, though it may seem trivial when seen on the broad horizon of History, it was crucial with regard to local history—and, more locally still, with regard to himself, indisputably enough: “J’aurais pu ne pas naître” (29). The third story is that of a young man from Robin’s town named “Richard” who had a brilliant educational record, landed an exceptional job as an engineer in Paris, and killed himself at the age of twenty-six. Robin ponders Richard’s life, thinking about the way he failed to find a place for himself, either in his family’s world or in the broader world to which he emigrated with such apparent success. Robin muses that he shares some of Richard’s fragility, remarking, “parce qu’elle aurait pu être la mienne, j’avais ressenti le désir d’écrire l’histoire de Richard” (64). Death looms thus in all three of these narratives; in two cases it is very narrowly avoided, in one case it is self-inflicted. Throughout, that theme underscores how uncertain things are in any life, even when one seeks to live within the boundaries of reason, breathing freely. [End Page 250] Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French