Tiphaine Samoyault’s literary soap opera
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“La Traversée de Bondoufle”, by Jean Rolin, POL, 208 p., €19, digital €14.
ON THE EDGE
In the beginning, rabbits, lots of rabbits. Today’s French novel is peopled with animals, which will often be discussed in this soap opera, as their company seems preferable to writers to that of miserable humans. In Crossing Bondoufle, by Jean Rolin, the gray lark four times; two gray herons, a hawk, hens, cows, a nightingale cross the border which separates the city from the countryside, designate it in a way. The search for this border and its description are the motives of this book and lead its author to survey on foot a wide loop leading from Aulnay-sous-Bois to Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis), passing through Val-d’Oise, Yvelines, Essonne, a small part of Val-de-Marne and the “9-3” again.
The line of demarcation between town and country is not as clear as that which separated the free zone from the occupied zone during the war. It is variable, uncertain, fragmented. However, it sometimes resembles a terrain at war: with the memory of the defenses of yesteryear, the second belt forts and the waste which obstruct certain agricultural roads, concrete barriers, pits intended to discourage squatters… Jean Rolin decides that the countryside starts at the Europe roundabout, in Aulnay, on the rabbit site. The circular device, which he draws using Google Maps and a 1/25,000 IGN mape, makes him stand as best he can on this edge between the city and the fields, the pavilions and the forests. In some places, this border is occupied by the construction site of the Grand Paris Express and the ZAD temporarily installed on the spot to defend the rights of the countryside against the interminable nibbling of it. With these slogans: “Down with the empire, long live the spring!” » Where “Vegetables, not bitumen!” »
The descriptive enterprise is part of the tradition begun thirty years ago by Passengers on the Roissy-Express, by François Maspero (Seuil, 1990), diary of a month-long journey with photographer Anaïk Frantz along the 38 stations of the RER B, from Roissy to Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse. You find the same rural relics around the airport, the same bridges crossing the highway, the same pavilions, the same graffiti and roadside restaurants. But many things have changed: food trucks have replaced tobacco bars, and the logistics platforms of Amazon or Fnac, the factories of yesteryear. Above all, while the RER B investigators went from suburb to suburb crossing Paris through the center, Jean Rolin’s trajectory allowed him to forget Paris. To the legendary and franchouillarde Crossing Paris (film by Claude Autant-Lara, 1956), another more comic tradition from which he is perhaps inspired, he therefore substitutes a Crossing of Bondoufleless centralizing, less epic, finally slamming into literature this name of puffy cheeks and carnival.
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