"The most secret memory of men", by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr: the literary soap of Camille Laurens

The gold of the world

To inaugurate this literary school year, no novel is better than the most secret memory of men, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.At little more than 30 years, this writer, born in 1990 in Senegal and already crowned with the Ahmadou-Kourouma Prize, signs his fourth book there, and his mastery impresses as much as his refusal of concessions.If he has fun with such a fashionable writer who, "by dint of being in tune with the times, will end up", we are not worried about his own health: he breathes literature without concern foranachronism.

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Opening the season with this novel, however, is not without risk for the soap operator. He indeed tells how a young contemporary Senegalese writer, Diegane Latyr Faye, having taken a passion for a cult book published in 1938 and now almost not found, the labyrinth of the Inhuman, leaves in the footsteps of its author, T. Elimane , mysteriously disappeared after a violent controversy tarnished its reputation in Paris. For this, he immerses himself in the reviews made at the time and discovers that all the criticisms having spoken of the novel, in good or bad, died soon after. Coincidence? Certainly not. "I'm going to give you advice: never try to say what a big book is talking about. Or if you do it, here is the only possible answer: nothing. A big book never speaks only of nothing, and yet everything is there. "The only acceptable commentators must speak of literature" from the inside, in practitioners, in haunted and in inhabitants, in love, crazy, in furious madness, those for whom it means the essential, even if the Essential sometimes disguises itself as anecdote or in futility ”.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's novel is not disguised, nothing is futile, and even the great moments of humor have the density of necessity. Like the object book object of the quest, he presents himself as a vast labyrinth, but a human labyrinth - genealogical, political, aesthetic - where the author, without holding us by hand, never loses us . In this Borgéesian construction which has something of a police investigation, stories and testimonies are woven and enlivened, leaving the narrator and the reader to identify together a little better, over the course of conjectures soon denied and floating interpretations, the ghost of Elimane. The women who loved him, the friends who knew him and his loved ones, his writings themselves draw an ambiguous, fragmented portrait, composed of successive "biography". Who holds the end of this opaque destiny, placed from the outset under the sign of melancholy? Is it the powerful novelist Siga D., "the spider-queen", cousin or perhaps Elimane's sister, we don't know? Or the Haitian poet who shared his life by erotic intervals? Is the key in her childhood, in the terrible story of her parents? What was he looking for far from his home-or who?

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