Le monde horizontal by Bruno Remaury (review)

Traversing from one historical age to another and interlacing both fictional and historical characters make this unique novel, or chronicle as some would label it, a truly intriguing and challenging read. As the title would indicate, the subject deals with the horizontal world which must then be compared to its alternative, the vertical one. It is 1906, and Félix Régnault discovers the negative hands in the Gargas grottos in the Pyrénées. While pondering his discovery he concludes that the hands, aimed upward, are destined to represent the birth of the sacred. This vertical world is quickly interspersed with a disastrous event when over a thousand miners were killed in Courrières, also in 1906. Both events evoke the awe of fear and the sacred. The novel continues to intertwine stories of one Marie whose bourgeois status gives her feelings of anxiety living above ground. The reader is then transported to a cavernous chateau in 1506, where Francisco, an intern to his master Leonardo de Vinci, recounts his master's fear and obsession with the minacious inner rocky grottos and water. Fear of worldwide flood becomes the major fear of the populace at that time, and floods do create vast liquid plains in the Pô region: "Pour Léonard, la fluidité de l'eau est le recouvrement et l'aplanissement du monde" (91). The liquid plains now become the vast plains of America, and Remaury focuses on the horizontal, which does not necessarily mean for the better. It is 1946, the skyline weighing heavily becomes the motif of expansion, and the development of the Greyhound bus line crisscrossing its new and vast pattern consecrates this new geography. Geography, asserts the author, is the first mythology of America: "L'Amérique se mesure à l'aune de sa démesure. Elle est comme le dit Camus la civilisation même de l'espace et de la quantité" (116–17). Everything becomes horizon and it is in the confines of this horizon that one Issac Woodward becomes the victim of racism. Still 1946, and Jackson Pollock places his large canvas on the floor and paints while walking around it and destroying the horizon. He then places several traces of his hand in the upper corner. Pollock's gesture opposes the artist of the negative hands by turning his back to the skies, and Pollock's taste for large spaces emphasizes his wish to present a space without borders, the infinite. The vertical man was the center of the world, stars above turned around him while the horizontal man is at a crossroad, but it might just be in this ever-expanding horizontal world that the vertical man is still respected. All the images depicted in the novel: hands, plains, mines, Marie, Diane Arbus, et al., intersect with each other, albeit in different worlds. But the interpretation or meaning of this enchanting work remains, however, in the reader's creative imaging.