Taba-Taba by Patrick Deville (review)

Deville is currently pursuing one of the most intriguing projects in contemporary French literature. After his first five mildly minimalist novels at Éditions de Minuit (1987–2000), he emigrated to Éditions du Seuil and undertook to retool as a writer. Since then, he has produced a series of books that are difficult to describe using traditional taxonomies. They can best be imagined as "biographies of place," wherein Deville proposes to tell the"lives"of different sites around the globe (Central America, the Congo, Cambodia, Mexico, for instance), as if they were people. In his latest book, he takes on a rather different task. Having inherited several trunkfuls—three cubic meters, by his own estimation—of archives from an aunt, he sets out to tell the story of four generations of his family, from 1860 to the present. Along the way, he gives us a personalized history of France from the Second Empire onward, paying particular attention to those events that impinged most directly on his forebears. Alternating between close focus and long, between now and then, the personal and the historical, family and nation, his account of things becomes more and more detailed and sustained as it reaches toward the present. Deville is especially interested in the people of the generation that preceded his own, for they seem to have endured more than their share of vicissitudes, many of which were largely beyond their ken. "Quatre personnes ordinaires essaient de mener leur vie ballottée par l'Histoire," he says of them (355). That lapidary formulation articulates an important dimension of Deville's purpose. Just like in his other recent books, he is both an explorer and an archeologist here, but the sphere of his activity in those areas is more restricted. Nevertheless, he is still driven by the will to seize "la simultanéité du monde" (204), firmly persuaded that events signify in ways that can be reconstructed, if one ponders them with enough diligence. "Depuis 1860, tous les événements sur la planète sont connectés,"he remarks in a kind of profession of faith (269). Insofar as his own family history is bound up in that broader historical record, perhaps the one can be used to understand the other, turn and turn about. Georges Perec once observed that if he wrote the story of his ancestors, they would descend from him. I wonder if a similar consideration animates Taba-Taba, because if the arrow of history ineluctably points toward the present moment, so too does the teleology of the family saga point to the teller of that saga. Clearly, one of Deville's concerns is to get a better grasp of his own situation with regard to history, both collective and more intimate, in an effort to determine how one may be in the world. If, that is, one aspires to do anything more than mutter senselessly, like the "Taba-Taba" of the title, a man long confined to an asylum, for whom history has proved to be too much to bear.