Une memoire vagabonde: Le prehistoire que nous vivons.

Brown, John L.

Now in his late eighties, Maurice Rheims has retained his unquenchable zest for life and pleasure (he constantly dwells on "the necessity for pleasure"), which seems only to have increased with the years. He remains tirelessly productive, with a couple of dozen works to his credit, volumes of art history and criticism as well as several novels, of which the most recent, Les forets d'argent (1995; see WLT 70:3, p. 653), appeared in 1996.

Une memoire vagabonde is truly "vagabond," with its "creative disorder" ranging far and wide: from the author's affectionate reminiscences of his Jewish parents, to bitter recollections of his confinement in the concentration camp at Drancy (from which he managed to get out alive) and of his experience as a volunteer parachutist in the Free French forces, to often ironic comments on his colleagues in the French Academy (to which he has been elected thanks to the faithful support of his friend Paul Morand, an anti-Semite and Petainiste; in fact, he frequently refers to himself as "le Juif de Morand"). He prides himself on the fact that he is probably the only member of the Academy with no formal education, "not even a bachot," and that instead of being a diplomat, a politician, or a professor like most of his fellow members, he had earned his living as a commissaire-priseur, an auctioneer of art works and precious objects. (He uses this experience very effectively in his novel Les greniers de Sienne [1987; see WLT 63:1, p. 67], a work revealing the skullduggery so rampant in the world of international art speculation, which had become a huge business.) He loved his profession, loved beautiful pictures and beautiful objects, but he loves "less belles dames" even more.

What was the real-life incident which inspired Une memoire vagabonde? Many years ago, when his car broke down between Nice and Turin, he encountered a group of archeologists who were digging for remains of prehistoric man on the slopes of Mount Bego. The project fascinated him and gave him the desire to search for the "prehistory" of his own family. "Who are we anyway?" This concern about the identity of his family and of himself persists throughout the text, which comprises four major sections. The first, "La somme des memoires," deals principally with his family, with the fragility and the randomness of human memory, and with observations on "pleasure, the motor of memory." "La mosaique des savoirs" contains speculations on the problem of seeking to explain the inexplicable - the origins of man, the origins of language and its techniques - on "Art, the pleasure of the Gods," on time and mortality: "The silver leaves of my olive trees move gently in the breeze," "insensible a la mesure du temps des hommes." Section 4, "De la tete de l'ange," reminds man of his mortality, "neither more nor less eternal than that of prehistoric man." To confront his destiny, Rheims recommends that man should seek his pleasure, "prendre le plaisir comme venait."

In "Epilogue ou Astrologue" the author admits that there are many past events in his life which he simply cannot remember, a lapse that makes him feel like "un homme prehistorique." As he ages, the past becomes more and more remote. He belongs to "l'age plombique," the age of the printed word, and he does not understand the inhabitants of "the new galaxy, Microsoft" when they "surf the Web." But he doesn't despair. Sunny days still lie ahead for those who, like himself, "aline a se divertir." After such a wealth of exuberant and undisciplined "randomness," the closing words of Une memoire vagabonde return to a classic concision. Rheims has no desire "to conclude" but simply offers the final comment that "nothing ends," that "everything begins again," and that "we are all the prehistoric man of someone."

John L Brown Washington, D.C.