2024-01-16 15:30:37
The Vaudois author Alain Freudiger uses his phenomenal memory to offer us, in a text that is both torrential and controlled, an autobiographical stroll through the exultation of his early childhood. “Arpenté” is an ode to the omnipotence of feeling.
It is in the constraint of confinement that the roots of this introspection lie and the wish, for Alain Freudiger, to lend himself to this playful exercise which consists of putting adult words to the raw and pure wonder of a young person. boy between the ages of four and seven. Throughout the pages of “Arpenté” discoveries follow one another which, put end to end, form a small collection of happy memories, gleaned from the few square kilometers formed by the villages of Pailly, Oppens and Orzens, not far from Yverdon.
I have to talk regarding the floor. Because in this experience and this memory another very clear thing emerges: in early childhood, the importance of the ground, and of what we see there, what we find there, what we feel there. , of the foot or the hand, is considerable.
Alain Freudiger, extract from “Arpenté”, ed. La Baconnière
Spatial and geographic perception
After the discovery of the ground, of the tarmac roads which, in the summer, despite the traces left by passing Swiss army tanks, retain “a certain majesty”, comes the spatial and geographical perception, that of farms, villas . Then the ugliness of the cedar hedges, the wonder aroused by the tractors, the taste of “hedgehogs”, these desserts made of halves of pears topped with chocolate sauce and studded with flaked almonds.
Because “Arpenté” is also a tribute to the Switzerland of the eighties, that of Henniez Rouge and its “joyfully hard” bubbles, that of Aromat, “chemical aromatic conglomerate”, of which the author likes to sprinkle a buttered toast. It is also that of the albums of “Yok-Yok”, a strange character drawn by Etienne Delessert and whose cuckoo clock left an impression on little Alain.
(…) and I vaguely feel that time and its passage, its measurement, are also a survey that I must tame, which will mean a lot to me later.
Alain Freudiger, extract from “Arpenté”, ed. La Baconnière
Respect the spirit of childhood
With the precision of a cartographer drawing from memory the coasts of a new continent, the author of “Mauvais Génie” (2020, La Baconnière), carefully chooses from the rich vocabulary of adults the words that would least betray childish spontaneity. : “I wasn’t interested in making a book of memories, even less a nostalgic book. What was important for me was to rediscover wonder,” he told QWERRTZ on January 16, before to add that the adult quickly forgets that as a child, everything is new and dazzling, because everything is the first time.
It is undoubtedly for this reason that no truly traumatic memory emanates from “Arpenté”, apart from being unfortunately tied up to a post for a few hours. “I was in a dense, powerful presence,” writes Alain Freudiger who, with this story, holds up a welcome mirror to us and invites us, too, to remove one by one the filters imposed by adulthood.
Ellen Ichters/mh
Alain Freudiger, “Arpenté”, ed. La Baconnière.
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