Hic par Amélie Lucas-Gary (review)

The title of this novel, Lucas-Gary's third, seems to promise us the here, but it is the now that we get first. Not our own "now" perhaps, but a narrative "now" some years in the future, on 5 August 2036, at about five in the afternoon. A young woman named "Irène" (who will appear later in the novel in a far younger version of herself) has discovered a rusty knife in the basement of her childhood home. The second chapter provides a more precise notion of place, flashing back to 30 December 1950, when a boy named Jean hides that same knife in that same basement. We learn that the house is located at 20 passage Volta, in the Port-à-l'Anglais neighborhood of Ivrysur-Seine. And that, we imagine, is the hic—at least until the final pages of the novel, when a rather different interpretation is put on display. Lucas-Gary focuses on that place in a series of leaps into the past that become more and more vertiginous and hypothetical. She gives us "Ivriacum" in the spring of 887, as the Norman army of occupation slowly withdraws along the Seine. She visits Magdalenian culture next, where a hunter, pursuing a magnificent buck, comes upon a nummulite fossil. Next is the Lutecian, when living nummulites competed with rays, sharks, and giant oysters for sustenance, and when meteors regularly blazed through the skies. And that is only the beginning of the pyrotechnics, as Lucas-Gary leads us through the protosolar cloud, the recombination, the moment of baryogenesis, and (inevitably) the Big Bang. The second part of the novel brings us back, with no little jolt, to the present; and many readers will be glad to return there. The hic has changed, though: we are no longer in Ivry, but in Wellington, New Zealand, in the company of a young woman who has accepted an invitation as a writer-in-residence. She is accompanied by her husband and their infant daughter, the "Irène" of the first chapter. Once again, the narrator's thoughts turn toward history, but this time she does not feel the need to go quite as far back as the Big Bang. Mostly, she thinks about the former inhabitants of the cottage where she is staying, and what their lives must have been. She ponders the notion of place, and how that notion helps to certify her sense of herself: "Quelque chose me liera à cet endroit si je me prête au jeu: on ne pourra pas dire que je n'étais pas ici" (134–35). An earthquake shakes her confidence in the idea of place, however, and causes her to take flight. Yet that is not the only instance where the ground moves under one's feet in this novel. That phenomenon is particularly striking in the shift from the first part of the book to the second, where it is difficult to see how one gets from here to there—and maybe back again.