We live in a gingerbread house: In Life by Eugène Savitzkaya

“In this house, we live relentlessly, filling eternity with our detritus.”

Life sometimes holds the smallest, unexpected surprises. Unassuming, they come along and sit there quietly waiting to catch your attention until one day…

For me, those unanticipated gifts are invariably books. When, several months ago, In Life by Eugène Savitzkaya arrived, I was uncertain what to make of this slight novella with its simple cover featuring a still-life painting of flowers and vegetables. Savitzkaya, the publicity insert advised, is a French language Belgian poet, playwright, novelist and essayist, but what caught my attention was a link to an article about the author in Weird Fiction Review. Weird? That would not have been my first impression, it looks like such a simple text, yet as Edward Gauvin argues in his essay, the prose is minimal rather than abstract, but it is as if :

something has been subtracted from it, making us work harder for a fuller picture of what is being described. The result is a certain destabilization, dislocation, an alienation that does not distance you so much from the text as lock you alone inside it. Hence the usual adjectives: hallucinatory, intense, incantatory… the feel and unease of Weird.

With In Life, weird fiction is rendered domestic if you will, softly surreal, stubbornly anachronistic. In it, nothing happens and, yet, everything happens. Magical imagery, strange and wondrous, is applied to the quotidian ritual of hearth and home—cleaning,  cooking, repair and maintenance,  tending the garden, and nurturing of the soul of the house and its inhabitants. No task, no bodily function is unworthy of attention, often in unlikely detail. This is a book that revels in the minutiae of existence—the shed eyelashes and flakes of skin, the lost buttons, the crumbing walls, the weeds pushing through cracks in the walkway.

Above all, this is the story of a house surrounded by a garden, a neighbourhood, a town, hills, the sea and sky. A self-contained universe, from the crumbs that fall under the dining table to the scents that arrive on the breeze. At the heart of this universe, the house is a physical and metaphysical entity that must be maintained by those who dwell within, its contents sorted and preserved:

There isn’t only one way to tidy, but thousands—each necessary for structuring and mapping out the existence of the house, which is (well before it appears to be a system of doors, windows and walls) a whole system of alveoli. The simplicity of domestic life flows from the vast complexity of these alveoli. Just as you need a place for soap, you need a place for books. A place for sleeping and a place for sitting. A place for thumbtacks and a place for salt. A place for perfume and a place for stench. She who knows the place of each thing is capable of measuring the household’s degree of destitution or richness.

The narrator is a writer, a man with a fiancé and two children, a son and a daughter, echoing Savitzkaya’s own family, but this is not an autofiction, at least not in any biographical sense. His writing seems a secreted activity, gathered in snatches. He is aware of being unusual in that he is home at all hours of the day, actively engaged in caretaking, yard work, cleaning, ironing and, with special attention, preparing meals. His voice, however, is singular and plural, and shifts between perspectives. “We” might be the family, or a more comprehensive designation; second and third person may be employed to speak of others—for example the reader as an imagined guest—or to expand the universal nature of his reflections on the simple, most fundamental elements of life and the art of living.

Reading like an extended prose poem, this novella is a sensually charged evocation of the ordinary moment at its most ephemeral and most enduring. The narrator delights in unexpected imagery, sparking everyday rituals such as the family meal with fairy tale magic:

Thus assembled, we are ready to gobble a mountain of potatoes, loads of lamb, a cow, even an elephant. Animals fear us. But eyes are always bigger than bellies. They have a good sense of excess. As for us, we content ourselves with little, but have a yen to devour the world. We live in a gingerbread house. We drink birch sap from glasses made of sugar and when grief torments us, drops of brine fall from our eyes. We need light to eat—sun, honey or incandescent light.

Victuals are a central feature of life in this house, as one would anticipate. The meditation returns repeatedly to the growing, the preparation, the sharing, the bodily elimination and the disposal of leftover food. For vegetarians like myself, the meat content is considerable and carefully detailed, but, in fairness, the question of the respectful consumption of animals is not overlooked. Still, the passages on food are some of the most wonderful. After all, more than simply seeing to the nourishment of the family, the provision of food is an act of love with existential dimensions. Take for example, the act of peeling apples:

You can watch the blade as it slides under translucent skin. And, in your hand, you see a sort of phylactery unfurl, detailing the surface area of the fruit. This is a job that, if left only to me, would be eliminated evermore from the manuals of domestic life because an apple is a whole; the skin belongs to the flesh, the flesh is complete with the skin. Be that as it may, it’s worth the trouble. No activity, apart from washing dishes, is as soothing. From the instant that children ask for their slices of apples to bestowed on them without the peel, peeling becomes necessary and eminently interesting. Peeling becomes a way of being, a way of weighing the pros and cons, of conducting yourself in relation to objects, of searching under the skin for the illumination of flesh.

Love holds the house inhabited by Savitzkaya’s alter ego narrator and his family together. But the details fleshed out are not personal. It is as present in the cement troweled into cracked walls and the odours, fair and foul, that rise into the air, as it is in children’s laughter, or lovers in their shared bed. And embracing it all, is the garden. Here, as everywhere else in the universe contained within the pages of this small novella, reality is porous. It contains us but cannot be contained.

The garden’s only goal is abandon; it lives on abandon and thrives on the smallest opportunity to liberate itself and break through its imposed limits. Where is the garden? Between four walls or around the house? In the center or surrounding? In which garden am I sitting? In my garden. I am always in my garden, even when I’m not the gardener, and I don’t need anything, neither to move nor to identify what’s mine. It’s my garden because I’m there, because I live in it for just one second. And I part with it the next.

In Life is a small miracle of a book. It is a slippery object. Although it is filled with images and reflections on the tasks of daily life, it offers nothing firm to hold on to. In a way it is exactly like everyday existence—small moments, the beautiful and the mundane alike—slip by so quickly that we struggle to grasp them lest they be lost. We cling to impressions, to bits and pieces. Sometimes, we might even capture a few on the page.

Eugène Savitzkaya’s In Life is translated by Andrew Colpitts and published Quale Press. They have previously published a collection of his prose poetry, Rules of Solitude. In life is the first of his novels to be made available in English .

Author: roughghosts

Literary blog of Joseph Schreiber. Writer. Reader. Editor. Photographer. View all posts by roughghosts