Crossing Bondoufle (POL editions) is not a crossing in slippers. It’s rather a wandering in winged Pataugas. Jean Rolin, 73, is doing his solitary and rurban hike in the large suburbs surrounding the Paris conurbation. It takes place in stages, especially in winter and spring, during and after confinement. It crosses Van Gogh’s fields, roads, interchanges, villages, industrial areas, bizarre tunnels, the cave intended for the V2s of the Nazis, Gypsy camps, cultivated or uncultivated gardens. He comes across rabbits, cows, larks, dogs, other rare birds, strange holes, gardeners, silhouettes that seem to fall from the sky or from a Bruno Dumont film. He observes a considerable number of wild dumps that he describes with the distance of a dandy, the precision of a second-hand dealer and the greediness of a child at the foot of the tree. From Veolia buildings to Santa Claus adjusting his big white beard “in anticipation of the show he is to host later at the medico-educational institute of Bois d’en Haut”, everything is a gift, to read probably more than to see. The author’s objective is as simple as his path and his prose are sinuous: to survey these spaces which set the floating limits between town and country. Spaces between memory and dumping ground, where the little that one crosses takes on a particular density, as if in a vacuum, on the edge of existence, suspended from the vagaries of fate. By his tangent lines, the writer draws little by little the circle inside which a society, ours, is agitated, as if it were going to last.
Since The Front Line (1988), where he traveled in the neighboring countries of South Africa under apartheid, Jean Rolin is a regular in no man’s land. Whether it concerns Christians in Palestine, the ring road, the Strait of Hormuz or stray dogs, he draws up a Proustian state of life which clings or develops in an almost always unforeseen way, between resistance, do-it-yourself and fantasy, in places that men avoid and humanity ransacks. This book, like the previous ones, could be titled like the third part of On the Swann side : “Country names: the name”. Jean shares with Marcel a taste for place names, which are often old. He places them in his verbal melody, like little musical phrases, while unearthing their sources (when he finds them) and their evolutions. He could almost write, like the author of the Research : “But names present people – and cities they accustom us to believe to be individual, unique as people – a confused image that draws from them, from their bright or dark sonority, the color with which it is uniformly painted. »
Almost, because in the areas that Rolin explores to write them, the color of the names is never defined. These are rather gray zones devoid, a priori, of any fantasy reverberation: zones of social and ecological fog. Proust dreamed of the names of Venice, Parma, Florence. Rolin frequents phantom places, in a wordless world, as if it were the day after. Toponymic poetry, however, brings them together. Armed with his IGN maps, he fell thus, near the Frépillon station, on two fields, the “horse cemetery” and the “bois des culs des anges”: “It’s easy to imagine how curious I was to see what the latter might look like, even though I suspected, despite everything, that it was a field like the others, nothing special. But after having unsurprisingly verified this lack of particularity, at the time of noting, in a notebook, that I had just crossed or rather skirted the wood of the bottoms of the angels, by looking more attentively at the map at 1/25,000th, I noticed that in fact of angels, it was angles whose ass this field celebrated. » Jean Rolin, him, familiar with the ass of the angels. A great stylist, a good geographer, a confirmed ornithologist, he is the Humboldt of peripheral worlds, which he describes as a cabinet of curiosities. As for the crossing of Bondoufle itself, it does not last long, but provides one of the best scenes in the book. The author is heard saying, in full confinement, in front of a food truck, by one of the regulars he observes: “Excuse me, sir, but since we haven’t seen you before, I hope you’re not here to hurt working people. » •
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Rolin in the ass of angels – Charlie Hebdo
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