“He thought of life as a waiting room for third-class travellers. From the moment he purchased his ticket, there was nothing left for him to do but watch men pass him by on the platform. An employee would let him know when the train would depart; but he was still clueless as to its final destination.” I am Jean Dézert and Jean Dézert is me. At so many times in my life I have felt exactly this. The feeling that yes I am alive, but somehow I don’t really feel I should be, to live is for everyone else, and not for me, I’m just waiting to get off at my stop.
Self-published Jean De La Ville de Mirmont just a few months before he met a terrible, violent death at 27 fighting on the front lines of the First World War (he was buried alive after an artillery shell struck his trench) here describes through the character of Jean Dézert a condition which has only become more and more common since his unfortunate passing. As the introduction says “Jean Dézert is still alive and well among us – in fact, his tribe grows in number – even if his author is not.” The tribe of Dézert answers the ever growing emptiness and despair of their outer lives with an even greater void in the inner life. Jean Dézert and his people have, in a way, found a perfect stalemate to life. The kind of life even suicide cannot solve or fix.
Jean Dézert is me at my lowest, completely devoid of any mental or physical vitality, and beyond even an inkling of hope that the current norm can ever change, and yet I can do nothing but love him. “O, Jean Dézert, how many hours have you spent staring at an empty wall before you! And how many more to come!…” For me he is absolutely one of the greatest figures in all of fiction. As much as I’ve learnt from, and tried to move past the absolute desert of life presented through him, as much as I strive to actually give my existence something that can be called life, I don’t think I’ll ever be rid of the, for me, strangely comfortable nothingness that is the condition of Dézert, and am at all times expecting to overtake and engulf me after I finally show some genuine emotion and get met with “Oh, I hadn’t noticed your face is so long. Oh God, why didn’t I take a better look at you earlier. It’s over! I could never, never love you under such conditions” or something of the kind, as happens to Jean in his one singular show of emotion, the one proof that he really, truly lives, to his young fiancé Elvire and she instantly breaks the engagement off.
Even in translation the prose of this novella is beyond beautiful. There were countless passages that have had me re-reading them over and over again just for pure pleasure. That coupled with the constant gentle irony and humour, and the tone and rhythm, not just purely in the writing, but also its structure, makes for an incredibly pleasurable and engaging read, even just for the sake of reading it. One of my favourites comes just after Jean’s first meeting with Elvire, his future love interest, at the zoo and here Jean feels the still waters of his existence finally come alive with the disruptive ripples of a new potential relationship. The two separate and “Jean Dézert goes off on his own to gaze at the alligators who, floating in their cement basins of warm water, dream of the shiny legs of young negresses crossing a river in the moonlight.”
Cannot possibly recommend this any higher, this is now my 5th or 6th time reading this and every time I only get more and more out of it. I’m not sure how popular it is in it’s native France, but I’ve really never come across it being mentioned anywhere and therefore, for me at least, The Sundays of Jean Dézert is quite easily THE forgotten masterpiece of 20th century literature. A book so short is can be enjoyed over the course of a single afternoon, containing countless lifetimes worth of beauty and emotion in less than a hundred pages.
5/5
by marqueemoonchild