There are good reasons to stay away from contemporary literature.
Too often it takes the form of painful words that push introspection to the point of neurosis. The dull, pale characters dig deep within themselves, searching for their truth, only to realize in the end that they aren’t much. All of this is likely to discourage the honest reader.
And yet every now and then an unknown literary object turns up.
Black mesa
This is the case of Black Mesa, the first novel by Ophélie Roque, which, through the futile search of a father and his son, immerses us in an unlikely universe that the United States at the end of the 19th century found a new home that they ended up with the desert, in Black Mesa, but will not actually find it.
Ophélie Roque tells us her story and that of many characters who disappear as quickly as they appear because the real character is somewhere else. It’s about that wild, or rather, ruthless nature that crushes people when they’re not busy crushing themselves. Not that they are good or bad – although they are more often bad than good. But mostly because they are mediocre and their very existence is at stake.
At every stage of Ophélie Roque’s story, the vanity of human agency is revealed, and the best efforts go unrewarded – life is so made that the man who thinks he is the center of everything was dust, and to dust will be again .
And that’s what we’ll discover at the end of the book: man is finally nothing, nature has triumphed and all that remains of man is his search for the divine, inscribed in a statuette that runs through the novel without us really knowing it , what she’s doing there, a statuette that from time to time hypnotizes certain characters who see something in it without us really knowing what it is.
Some would consider this vision hopeless, though perhaps it is only a higher form of clarity.
In addition, the 196 pages of this novel contain descriptions that reflect a reflection on the fallen nature of man.
For example: “Their loneliness was terrifying to behold; We felt the man dirty by the pleas of a life so depraved as a slut at the end of his career.
Another, this time referring to a city: “All rotted, decayed and spoiled, in the grandiose indifference of a population in decline with the atavism of a mammal.” No discernible trace of progress in this desert village. Neither telegraph pole, nor train, nor newspapers. Nothing. Forever the great nothing. […] The residents of El Grande were not doing well, but they did not know it, seeing in others only the expected reflection of themselves. They wandered with bent backs, their bodies excessively bony, their tan skin burned in the sun. People whose nothingness was formed by the wind.”
A final word on the mediocrity of human desires. “In the end, the father earns his living. Proud of his earnings, he allowed himself the luxury of a brothel maid; He came out with a ticklish bitch.”
And we could always add more.
fatalism
Without realizing it, anyone who throws themselves into Black Mesa plunges into a world without hope, but which they want to explore to the last page because a strange beauty emerges from it.
Everything is so alien to the codes of contemporary existence that it is like a trip abroad from which one leaves without really learning anything, but with the certainty that the author behind this remarkable work is a true writer with a very personal universe peerless style, surgical and icy, and whose next book is awaited with impatience and strange delight.
