The novel opens with this event: a new waitress arrives at the Café du Cercle. Or rather, the novel opens with this non-event. Not much, in fact, happens in “La serveuse était nouvelle”. Both the title and the opening serve merely to beguile us and to make us listen to the voice of Pierre, the cafe waiter, this remarkably insignificant character who is telling the story. It’s as if Dominique Fabre knows his readers too well, as if he knows that you can’t immediately identify with such a self-effacing character, as if he is going to have to promise his readers, at least just while he’s telling his tale, something more, some adventure, some hidden depths. We soon come to realise, however, that the arrival of a new waitress heralds no great cataclysm. Some things do, of course, happen: the café owner disappears; his wife is distraught and sends Pierre off to look for him… But, paradoxically, none of this is really very significant.
What counts, is Pierre’s narrative voice as he tells us about his daily life, or perhaps it is more that sad but generous gaze of his which he turns upon the world at large and the people he meets: there’s the property developer, a regular client who comes in three times a day and who, month after month, has great difficulty clearing his slate; then there are the shop workers from the nearly stores who sometimes pop in, out of the rain, for lunch. And there’s Amédée, the best cook in Asnières and a great talker. One by one, ordinary lives unfold before our eyes, but in the process they create something extraordinary.
Dominique Fabre becomes the lyrical, compassionate spectator of all these infinitesimal, silent lives – our lives – as they move between leaving the suburban underground station and arriving home. This novel, devoid of pathos but with its concise and natural tone, is life as it slips past. It is time and solitude passing by. It is a tiny fragment of life, simply told and yet touching in the extreme. When Dominique Fabre writes, he “really believes in the possibility of showing you genuine beauty, genuine dignity and places or people that have been somehow overlooked”. Mission accomplished.
|
|
