Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

I walk tirelessly. I’m happy. Yes, happy.

The summits around me are my accomplices. They’re going to hide us. I turned around a few moments ago, near the wayside cross with the strange and beautiful Christ, to take a last look at our village. There’s usually such a fine view from that spot — the village looks small, the houses like tiny boxes. If you stretched out your arm, you could almost scoop them up in the palm of your hand. But this morning, I saw none of that. It was no use looking; I didn’t see anything. Although there was no fog, no clouds, no mist, there was also no village there below me. There was no village anymore. The village, my village, had completely disappeared. And with it, all the rest: the faces, the river, the living beings, the sorrows, the springs, the paths I’d just taken, the forests, the rocks. It was as though the landscape and everything it contained had receded as I passed. As if, at every step, the set were being dismantled behind me, the painted backdrop rolled up, the lights extinguished. But I, Brodeck, am not responsible for any of that. I am not guilty of that disappearance. I have neither provoked nor desired it, I swear.

I’m Brodeck, and I had nothing to do with it.

Brodeck is my name.

Brodeck.

For pity’s sake, don’t forget it.

Brodeck.

Here and there in these pages, the reader will find phrases which I have consciously borrowed from other authors without asking their permission. May they pardon me and accept my thanks.

Alle verwunden, eine tödtet (“They all wound; one kills”) is a motto inscribed on an eighteenth-century German carriage clock made by Benedik Fürstenfelder, a watchmaker in Freidberg, and put up for auction in a French salesroom a few years ago.

Talking is the best medicineis a sentence drawn from Primo Levi’s story “The Molecule’s Defiance.”

Hasn’t the hour of fables come?is a question asked in André Dhôtel’s La chronique fabuleuse .

I’ve learned that the dead never abandon the livingis a slightly altered version of a line I found in Fady Stephan’s lovely book Le berceau du monde .

I write in my brainis, if I remember correctly, a remark made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions .

I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Marie-Charlotte d’Espouy, Laurence Tardieu, and Yves Léon, who through their joint efforts managed to save Brodeck from the irretrievable digital depths of my computer.

I would also like to mention, in connection with this book, several persons who have been important to me at different moments in my life and who, having passed away during the two years I worked on my novel, accompanied my thoughts as it unfolded: Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, Laurent Bonelli, Marc Vilrouge, René Laubiès, Jean-Christophe Lafaille, Patrick Berhault, Jacques Villeret.

And finally, my thanks go to the entire team at Éditions Stock, my French publisher, who, under the leadership of Jean-Marc Roberts, have honored me with their trust and their friendship, and also to Michaela Heinz, faithful reader and dispenser of precious advice from the other side of the Rhine.

Philippe Claudel is the author of many novels, among them By a Slow River , which has been translated into thirty languages and was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 2003 and the Elle Readers’ Literary Prize in 2004. His novel La Petite Fille de Monsieur Linh was published in 2005, and Brodeck won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens in 2007. Claudel also wrote and directed the film I’ve Loved You So Long , starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein, which opened in movie theaters in the United States in the fall of 2008 and in thirty other countries around the world.