Ravel is a novelistic depiction of the last ten years of Maurice Ravel´s
life. In this portrait of an artist being ravaged by disease while also at
the height of his glory, Jean Echenoz has written one of his most sober and
poignant books.
The novel is short, barely a hundred pages long, and made up of nine
chapters. The central chapter (5) describes Ravel´s triumphal tour of
America in early 1928, when he was 52 years old. The first four chapters are
devoted to his preparations for the trip, then his departure for Paris and
Le Havre (chapter 1) and his voyage to New York (chapters 2, 3 and 4).
Echenoz has chosen to stick extremely closely to his main character´s life
and emotions, but he also conjures up Ravel´s world and the period
atmosphere in several close descriptions. The particular charm that results
successfully mingles feelings of proximity but also of distance, through
passing of time, as though we were watching a black-and-white film from the
1930s.
However, the end of the first chapter immediately introduces a
dramatic tension: “He left for Le Havre railways station in order to sail to
North America. It was the first time that he was going there, and it was
also to be the last. That day, he had exactly ten more years to live.”
The
four chapters that come after the tour of America (6 to 9), and which begin
with Ravel´s return to his house in Montfort-l´Amaury, are an orchestrated
crescendo that leads the composer from his greatest glory to his death. Just
as Ravel had finished his Bolero and, “with this hopeless object”, attained
a totally unexpected success, the first signs of his debilitating illness
began to show. He was being fêted throughout Europe but his memories loses
were worsening, as was a sensation of fatigue and dullness. A car accident
seems to have suddenly accelerated this process of degeneration and, despite
the care of his friends and a series of stays in hospital, he finally found
himself “buried alive inside a body that no longer responded to his
intelligence”.
The book´s final chapter is astoundingly beautiful. In its
restrained yet precise notations that depict the final months of this
decline, which is all the more tragic because its victim is conscious of it,
Echenoz gives his readers an intensity of emotion which in general can be
attained only by music itself.
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