The novel is prefaced to have it published (posthumously) in 1973 by Pierre Mertens, an admirer of the author, which he evokes LOEUVRE in its entirety and which warns about the Hauts-Neighborhoods, a formula in which the exact turns out narrowly over reading: "Only a real exegesis would report the dimensions of a world which DONT we wanted and could only suggest the importance. Its solar side and nightlife opportunities; its profusion and its nakedness; his quiver and rigor; his fervor and fragility as a huge fern seized by frost. "This is actually leaves the impression that this novel by little and yet abounding as few are. Because in the end, like many great novels, Les Hauts-District does not tell much: a dozen of years (the novel ends in 1954) in the life of Didier Aubert, an intellectual author of a book entitled Aspects of Contemplation, struggling to draft a "singular thesis on the conditions of life Mystique" in the "Hauts-Neighborhoods» dIrube, the excess petty bourgeois city in the South of France. During these years sécoulent, it faces Catholic-bourgeois hypocrisy and love, two or maybe three times. And that's all.
On these foundations thin narrative, Paul Gadenne built a fort novel almost eight hundred pages exciting, with a main character tuberculosis exposed to a middle bougeois contemptible in multiple incarnations, the most grandiose in their littleness of mind, a Didier Aubert forced to live in the "intimacy swine" - not his contemporaries suffer dun lack of hygiene, on the contrary, they are clean on them, but that they have a curious and endemic "Lady rot." In the Hauts-Districts, where poverty or the real Nont no right of citizenship, one has indeed the right word bourgeois held by "good Christians", led by a priest, Singler, as lon will evolve towards the ladies right-thinking to that of a very right-wing newspaper, both politically quéconomiquement and, above all, spiritually and each evocation of this journal is to Gadenne occasion dune supports both subtle and total against the press "left" but to bourgeois values.
So this is the story of a man of high spiritual aspirations ("Eckhart [] and other spiritual teachers, both those of India as Occident, recommended patience, self-control."), Faced with "villainous and sordid uses" bourgeois , those we could say under the Occupation, "They are very good, but very very good, the current regime. [] The order reign. The occupation saves the popular jeopardy. "These citizens are represented mainly by women, Fernande Chotard, in which, in this France in crisis housing for direct postwar Aubert is brought to live: she goes, she spawning with the clergy through his bookstore pious, the pillory, make judgments on his every move, turn any situation to peddle about unfounded rumors intended to harm him yet lobliger blame him for it, to take such measures, to take such remarks. In this sense, Les Hauts-District is a humorous novel by loutrance Fernande Chotard by hypocrisy she and the rest of the bourgeoisie, and the clergy (advice of a priest in Aubert to be happy: "Become owner!" demonstrated with a majesty, a plumb and a formidable bad faith in the true sense of ladjectif: that generates fear.
Other characters are worth seeing, Whether it Colonel, Mrs. Dhem, Rosa future wife or mistress of the Nickel family showmen, but lenrichissement definitely ranks the side of triumphant bourgeoisie. All seem navoir quun one goal: prevent Aubert working, keep his great work to emerge and thus prevent the world from reaching mysticism. In the gallery of characters wrapping it, retains a particularly attention: a Brocquier, hilarious dégocentrisme force daveuglement facing its own social harms: Gadenne painted with it the absolute caricature of bourgeois bohemian without any conscience.
However, we realize the pages, of great beauty, of a perfect style that Les Hauts-Neighborhoods multifaceted: a multiple of love novel, with beautiful reflections on the subject ("He also said that love him provides so many misfortunes that he can never be long guilty. But the greatest misfortune was certainly want to avoid them all. "), a novel about mysticism and its possibility in the middle of the twentieth century (all references to Eckhart, Peguy , Kafka, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and other thinkers, brought wisely blended into the narrative flow), and especially a huge novel about the bourgeoisie, its self-righteousness and stupidity watered silver, "for there was quune race to slaughter , delete, where what is should find (and no nation had nen no doubt the privilege) cétait race of Loggers, oppressors of those who denied the earth, nature as an enemy, as something to use, and which dealt men in the same way. "
This existence could lead to despair, and there is in these pages where cross almost all human feelings, and Aubert means dailleurs to a priest ("Stop the wheel generations []. This world means nothing.") but still this is a start, due to hatred (ha! that experienced towards Nickel! ...) or love, because "before this world, we could have quun desire labattre, change it to root out root of evil. But he also had to change humanity. "And to do that, at least publish a" Glossary "of mysticism, where it is also about the relationship between" humor and prayer, "as if to emphasize that lon does not sink far sen need. And even if the material life, and its hardness, quon saperçoit fact that "there may be a God for drunkards, but good people, it ny none for the poor", and knows that quon " one day the earth will be covered dépiciers of garage tinkerers and small rentiers, and spring naura Instead of being more ".
One can look for congruence between biography and Gadenne this story, since the author was dailleurs tuberculosis and died, and since the author lived in the South of France and was also professor needy. It would be simplistic and lon might fall in the throes of contemporary auto-fiction in which it has most vile; Gadenne back at Dangot, in short. There is nothing nen: a real work on the language (what fun that the sentence Gadenne, by a beautiful classicism hit by lépoque ...!), Gadenne sublime that it could be to narrate the confrontation between David and mysticisant Goliath-righteous; and so what if no winner David nen fate: at least the fight, and his narration, were epic.
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