The Life of an Unknown Man Read Online Free PDF

smiling.
    The broadcast began. The African was on first and revealed himself to be a brilliant professional. Everything about his little performance was polished: his voice, his laughter, his lilting delivery: then a veritable comic interlude in which, quoting from his novel, he played the parts of both the rich lover and the cunning mistress, amid a whole host of relatives, storytellers, and tribal magicians. A born actor.
    After such a display the Chinese writer, despite his obsequious facial expressions, appeared dull. This was because he could hardly speak French. And yet this was the language he purported to write in and in which he was published by one of the best houses in Paris . . . What Shutov heard sounded, yet again, like something from a surrealist play. “Yang is joined to yin . . . so yang with yin is making . . . And Confucius is saying . . . Red dragon mountain . . . Yin completes yang . . .” These last words were repeated so many times that the presenter himself became confused: “So your character, yin fact—excuse me—in fact . . .”
    But Shutov’s performance was a real disaster. He began with a long, elegant sentence: the duty incumbent on a writer to bear witness, the quest for truth, the way the psychology of the characters can subvert the author’s own preconceptions. For example, a battle-hardened soldier, confronted by the bodies of an old woman and her dog, bursting into tears. The presenter scented danger in this monologue and, with a deft intervention, found a way to limit the damage: “So, according to your book, it seems as if the Russians have a lot to answer for . . .” This journalistic vagueness created an opening for a recovery. But Shutov was already getting out of his depth. His tirade was compressed like a concertina, in it the writer’s mission, the Taliban, Tolstoy rereading Stendhal to write the Battle of the Borodino, surface-to-air rockets, and the obscenity of aestheticism in a book about the war were all mixed up together . . . A gleam of compassion appeared in the presenter’s eyes. “So there we have it,” he summed up. “Can it ever be possible to write about war in a novel?” This coup de grâce saved Shutov. He froze, his cheeks burning with shame, and with only one thought in his head: “Léa was watching all that.”
    The contributions of the others gradually distanced him from the appalled dummy he had turned into. “When a man caresses his sexual partner,” the psychologist of happiness was saying, “the nucleus of her dorso-median thalamus begins to . . .” The young witch novelist took up the tale, her eyes widening in a trance: “The other is always the bringer of evil . . . The evil we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves . . .” It was already past midnight and the dreamlike aura was rapidly intensifying. Shutov felt less ridiculous. The tension within him finally relaxed, giving way to a melancholy clarity.
    He told himself that this mildly weird charade was being played out in a country that had given the world Promethean geniuses, whose words had once confronted exile, death, and, worse still, attacks by philistines. A prophetic daring, lives sacrificed on the altar of truth . . . In his youth that was how he had seen this great and ancient literature. Now, on the other side of the table there was this elegantly smiling Chinese writer, whose books had been rewritten by an obscure editor (a living author brought to life by a ghost). On his left was this young woman setting out to shock the viewers with her demonic appearance. Facing him, an African from a land covered in millions of corpses was spinning pornographic yarns, lubricious anecdotes laced with folklore of dubious authenticity . . .
    Shutov did not grasp what it was that dispelled this feeling of absurdity. His neighbor, the woman with graying hair, had a faint voice, or, rather, she employed no vocal tricks. It seemed as if she had serenely