Revers de mémoire by Jack Boland

Baru saja saya selesai membaca buku Revers de mémoire atau secara harfiah Pemutarbalikan Kenangan karya Jack Boland yang kami beli di Festival de Livre Mouans Sartoux. Buku ini tentang kisah cinta yang tak lazim antara seorang penulis dengan seorang wanita cantik bernama Guerane yang memiliki dua bagian tubuh: satu bagian tua dan satu bagian muda.

Love is killing, sounds cliché, but a cliché could be boiled to an inspirative
story when creativity and imagination are present. That, at least, what I found in the Revers de Memoire book, written by Jack Boland. The novel was awarded a prize in 17e Festival de Livre Mouans-Sartoux, 2004, for his originality.


The protagonist who is also the narrator is a lonely writer living in a big house in Amiens.
He pens daily to write on his only friend, his intimate journal and the writing intermingled with his direct narration building the whole novel. It does not take that long however for the protagonist to finally find another friend.It is a man working in a local prefecture who comes giving him a visit braking his absolute loneliness. They then get to know each other and speak to each other, although it is actuallyXeno, the prefecture man, who talks more.

One day, not long after his first visit, Xeno revisits the protagonist with his sublime wife on his side. The woman is a sublime but quaint person who has two parts of body, the part that is brightly shinning of youth and the other part that is defiled of oldness. The woman- Guerane is her present name- showed her interests of the richness of the collection of the narrator and for that reason she rewards the protagonist another visit. She takes her time to read the intimate journal,and the journal immeasurably interests her. Her face full of happiness excites the protagonist and propels him to write the intimate journal for the only purpose: making her happy. He falls in love with her, he is fascinated of her, and the best thing is that it is true for her as well.

The love that they share together rediscovers her lost youth, and cures the oldness part of her body. By offering an exchange of Guerane and a pretty Greek dancer to Xeno for three days, the couple decides to leave the poor prefecture officer alone, and make a romantic trip together. The beach and the sea is the destination, where else should we go to enjoy life? The lady becomes younger everyday, in an absolutely unbelievable celerity , becomes younger one small year every great month. The protagonist - anonym until the end of the novel -must live with this, and does live with this, with the same fascination until the end.

The inner conflict of the protagonist, a lover, testifying the evolution of Guerane - that later becomes Eva, her name when she is young - day by day decorates nicely the interior of the novel. And, the beauty of the story lies there, in the freshness of the idea and on the way the story is narrated, poetic. In addition, the end of the story - I will not write it here-- is yet another beauty on its own.

The book is a nice romantic yet poetic book to read.