Jean Rouaud: Une façon de chanter la vie

Between memory and creation, found in Une façon de chanter (Gallimard, 2012), the familiar world of Jean Rouaud and his final thoughts on music and the work of transfiguration operated by writing. Echo a quote from Rimbaud (in a letter to his mother, dated July 10, 1882) Une façon de chanter is also a way of life - "J’étais […] redevable à mon honnête et généreux cousin de cette espèce de façon de chanter "(p. 59). Elegant and lyrical, the "long sentences" by R. seems to wrap around images, impressions and specific sounds and then move away evoking, not without a fine, subtle irony, the great transformations and cultural revolution of the 1970s, making the soundtrack of fifty anxious and controversial. Thus, a digression to another, from one memory to another without ever losing the thread of the narrative, Jean Rouaud starts listening to this "noise of the world" of ours and draws, also supported by the music, the portrait of a youth which is that of a generation. The music is in Rouaud expression of pain and melancholy, and emancipation; in the fragmented world of his adolescence, punctuated by Sunday Mass, music can be a form of release. Red lead a nomadic thought, the music becomes space of representation and redefinition of a man and of a world. This is analyzed by what processes, literature and language, music prose Rouaud restores the "life", true. Far from a fictionalized biography of the writer, Une façon de chanter is therefore novelistic crossing a part of his life, when one wonders about the possibility that the song is a model for prose daily construction using concrete situations around the sensible world of existence. Through his writing, Rouaud not he would try to give a "tempo" different to live and articulate his emotions? How does life passes by this song so special is writing R., singing raises "the question of the language" as the writer himself watched in an interview in «La Femelle du Requinۚ»(n. 35, fall 2011)?