Lyonel Trouillot. L'amour avant que j'oublie.

Cordova, Sarah Davies

Lyonel Trouillot. L'amour avant que j'oublie. Arles, France, Actes Sud. 2007. 183 pages. 18 [euro]. IBN 978-2-7427-6955-1

Following his award-winning novel Bicentenaire (2004), Lyonel Trouillot creates with L'amour avant que j'oublie a moving reflection composed with skeins of musical and color-filled blues on the human experience of broken dreams, desire, and love and the writer's relationship to fiction. Its frame--a literature conference and its concomitant literary discussions--sets the scene for the in medias res opening of the novel and situates Trouillot, a literary activist on the litterature-monde stage, extradiagetically in relation with l'Ecrivain, his first-person narrator.

Drawn to a young participant yet feeling inadequately versed in amorous discourse, l'Ecrivain resolves to share with her, in a "roman d'apprentissage," his most profound experience, when as a twenty-year-old he lived in a pension in Haiti's Port-au-Prince alongside three older boarders known as the Aines (elders): l'Historien (Robert Amboise), l'Etranger (Ricardo Mazarin), and Raoul (a retiree from the Service d'eau potable). Having written the manuscript quickly, he leaves it outside her hotel room at the end of the conference, hoping for her response. Imagining that she is the same age as the young woman who, he vaguely remembers, had rejected him, he asserts that these men were his life at twenty, much more so than the absent feminine figures serving as his poems' theme. The boarding house was their world, and no one entered it with a surname, but with a nom de guerre or peace name, the one that remained after a long course or forewarned of an eventual drifting off course, an essential defect, a lost quality. The old men were real, his true life, what he had.

In an intricate nonlinear web, arranged into three act-like chapters titled after each of the Aines and recounted with multiple voices using free-indirect discourse, dialogues, quasi-legendary tales, and interspersed literary criticism, L'amour avant que j'oublie draws together various narratives of the characters' real and dream worlds, whether it be l'Historien who, too late, finds out that the woman he loves is nothing but a beautiful picture and state peon; l'Etranger who has never even left the capital and slips to his death in his room; or Raoul who communicates with his "messagere des eaux," a young girl whom he did not manage to save from drowning even with his strong large hands. Crossing back and forth to different moments in his and the Aines' lives, during and since the Duvalier dictatorship, the narrator reveals his growing understanding of the threesome as triggered by l'Etranger's death and by the chorus-like role that Marguerite, l'Historien's visitor, played unstintingly for each of them.

The haunting intimacy of these characters' interrelatedness in L'amour avant que j'oublie lies with the philosophical musing about the quest for happiness and trust in (a) being. Memory, imagination, and illusion-as-truth that carried the men through life transmute in this short novel into a dramatic portrayal of these men's desires and woundedness as witnessed through the eyes of l'Etranger, the non-contesting silence of l'Historien, the practical Raoul, and the love story of l'Ecrivain.

Sarah Davies Cordova

Marquette University