Bristol

“Bristol had just stepped out of his building when the body of a naked man plummeted from above, crashing to the ground eight metres away from him. Paying it no mind, Bristol headed briskly towards the Seine. It was autumn, early in the morning – very early for him – and too chilly for the season: ten past nine and six degrees Celsius.” This is how “Bristol”, Jean Echenoz’s latest novel, recently published in Italy by Adelphi, begins. In just a few lines, almost everything is already there: a man who has died in mysterious circumstances; a protagonist who, lost in his own thoughts, fails to notice anything and carries on walking his own way rather than stopping; a narrative perspective that seems to attach exactly the same importance to the temperature as to a body that has just fallen from the sky. It is precisely in this paradox that Echenoz’s narrative game reveals itself, for just when everything seems to be beginning like a conventional detective story, the perspective is immediately overturned with perfect nonchalance. The camera thus leaves the dead man on the tarmac and instead begins to follow the man who carries on walking. There could be no better introduction to Robert Bristol, a film director by trade who, despite having accumulated more flops than anything else in his career, stubbornly refuses to give up. We soon discover that he is about to shoot a new film, “Blood-Stained Gold”, based on a bestseller that has sold millions of copies worldwide, written by the queen of romance novels, Marjorie des Marais, and set in the heart of the African continent. A story in which ‘the fragile Chloè and the intrepid Jean-Claude’ will face mercenaries, sorcerers, secrets and duels to the death. On set, of course, things will not go according to plan, and while Bristol is forced to navigate a thousand twists and turns to complete his work, back in Paris a police inspector will begin investigating the mysterious fall of the man who plunged from the building, gradually coming to suspect Bristol himself. The point, however, will not so much be what happens but the way in which Echenoz chooses to tell the story, drawing on cinematic techniques and editing the narrative as if it were a film, delighting in the use of cuts, ellipses and sudden changes of shot, as if the page were a screen. At the centre, however, will remain Robert Bristol, an obscure director whom it will nevertheless be impossible to resist.

Jean Echenoz
, Bristol
, Adelphi, 156 pp., 18 euros