L'oubli by Philippe Forest (review)

Have you ever forgotten a word? If you have, this novel will fascinate you. One morning, its narrator wakes up aware that he is missing a word. He has made a career from his knowledge of words. But now, one of them has escaped him. The ensuing narrative beguiles its reader, as one wonders how a whole story could ensue from such a simple, universal problem. The narrator admits that this has happened to most people, but then for him it has become an obsession to retrieve that word. He calls the obsession une maladie (52), seeks its etiology, and even consults medical experts to find out what this experience tells him about his body and/or mind. Meanwhile, the writing style of his presentation resembles some of the novels since 1982 by Philippe Sollers, in that there are fragmentary reflections on diverse problems (e.g., the remains of a whale on a seaside) that impact the narrator's search, even though they seem to be, at first glance, elliptical and irrelevant to the story at hand. Of course, Forest has published incisive and informative books on Sollers (Philippe Sollers, 1992) and company (Histoire de Tel Quel, 1995). However, Forest's narrative takes place in an artist colony, on an island where the narrator sees activities parallel to his own loss of that crucial word. As one of the painters at this resort, he pretends to be a Chinese photographer who has a contract for a visual exposé from his employer in Shanghai. Photography helps the narrator in his quest for the forgotten word because words have a visual integrity for him. In addition, the prior occupant of his apartment was an artist who left an unfinished tableau in his domicile, as if to comment that his own art of painting was marked by loss. A similar loss haunts the narrator who has made a career from his mastery of words and now recognizes how feeble all that glory is, if he cannot recover the verbal mastery that has given him so much success. The same paradox haunts this writer who has already published so many of his own novels. Yet there is still the problem of trying to recover the lost word. His various methods are intriguing, as he tries to understand how his loss of memory happened and what this loss means in the larger sense of life, especially if we accept the assumption that memory and forgetfulness go hand in hand. Various vital experiences of loss mimic his forgotten word and contribute to his sense of working his way through a labyrinth of processes to retrieve what was forgotten. All around him he observes loss and tries to understand how the compensations for it can assist him in his verbal quandary. There is much to appreciate in his odyssey for the next time this happens to any of us.