Memoirs.

Brown, John L.

Philippe Labro. Rendez-vous au Colorado. Paris. Gallimard. 1998. 240 pages. 110 F. ISBN 2-07-074915-0.

Colorado continues Philippe Labro's series of autobiographical works, beginning with Le petit garcon and including L'etudiant etranger, Un ete dans l'Ouest, and, most recently, Un debut a Paris (see WLT 69:3, p. 553). It deals largely with his youthful years in Colorado during the war (the family had fled Nazi-occupied France) and in the period immediately following. Labro attended the state university, where he studied journalism and subsequently spent a few months as a lumberjack in the Rockies, since he wanted "to affirm his virility" and to experience the exaltation of feeling "un homme parmi les hommes." He then returned to Paris to begin a successful career as an international journalist.

After many stressful years in a highly competitive vocation, Labro fell dangerously ill and for several years went through "re-a," reanimation treatments, which deeply troubled him, as he recounts in La traversee (1986). During these treatments, he frequently had hallucinations in which a young woman named Karen, whom he had known very briefly forty years before in Colorado, would appear to him. On his release from the hospital, he is determined to return to the Garden of Eden of his youth in the mountains of Colorado to recover precious memories and to "renew his life" in contact with the beauties of nature, far from the heartless great modern cities which he detests. He longs to search for wisdom in the myths of the Ute Indian tribe. Like his contemporary J. M. G. Le Clezio (see WLT 71:4, pp. 669-744), who spent several years as a member of an Indian tribe in Panama, he seeks to understand the Amerindian cultural heritage, which had been brutally destroyed by conquistadores both Spanish and North American.

But Labro is also obsessed with a desire to find out "what happened to Karen," to revive memories of "la fille grelee" (the pimply girl) whom he had met so long ago when she was a waitress in a saloon (the Lone Cone Cafe) in a mountain village. She was the object of scorn and derision for the brutal lumberjacks, since her face was covered with pimples. As they threw back their whiskey, they would make contemptuous fun of her as "peau de rat" or "face de lune." The narrator himself, wanting to be "a man" like the others, took part in the abuse. Subsequently, he felt deeply ashamed, since in his "youthful euphoria" he could not realize "the sorrow and the humiliation" of the humble. Following this incident, Karen quits her job in the saloon and leaves with her mother (also a waitress and a former prostitute) in their trailer to get better jobs in the city. Karen "had discovered independence," and Labro notes with approval that "it's a free country" is an expression used constantly in American English. The narrator never saw Karen again.

In addition to his hallucinatory account of Karen, the narrator dwells at length and more readably on the role of nature in "the renewal of his life." After years of stress and illness, he now lies on the grass high in the mountains and listens, enchanted, to "the music of the aspens," which fills him with the joy of being "in unison with the earth." That is the meaning, he feels, of his "rendez-vous au Colorado." He also seeks to communicate with the wild animals that are so numerous on the prairies, with the deer, the antelope, the elk, the bears, who "have something human about them." During his entire stay in Colorado, he did not watch TV, did not listen to the radio, did not read the newspapers, for he was wholly absorbed by the inexhaustible beauty of nature.

Although Labro dwells at length-indeed somewhat excessively-on Karen, "the phantom who haunted his adult years," he writes more attractively when he is evoking the beauty of the mountains and the forests, when he is recalling the local color of villages high in the Rockies, with their saloons frequented by lumberjacks who smelled of "sweat, of fir trees, and insecticide" and never stopped throwing back the whiskey. Preparing reluctantly to return to Paris and the pressures of urban life, he wishes to "embrace this country" and to press "cette terre contre mon cour."

John L Brown

Washington, D.C.