C'est la fin du monde. This phrase is passée in your esprit au moment où tout a disparu dans a grand noise.
Thomas Reverdy, Climax
This is the end of the world. This sentence went through your head as everything disappeared with a loud noise.
The silhouette of a man is black; he seems to be holding the moon in the icy night, on the book's cover. Reverdys as an adventure novel or as "real fantasy"? 1 readable book Climax The novel depicts the devastated natural world of northern Norway, near a fishing village, with dying bears and fish, melting glaciers, and an oil platform accident. Young Noah, an engineer, returns home and reunites with his childhood sweetheart Anå and old friends. In role-playing games, he had chosen the name Sigurd, the Nordic form of Siegfried. This will be the name of the platform whose drilling accident is recounted here. The talented geologist Noah has long since sold his expertise to the oil company, while Anders, a researcher, has remained an idealist. As in the Nordic legend, it is a clash of two principles. The end of the world is heralded in this dystopian novel, as dark as it is beautiful.
Il en faut peu parfois, il suffit d'un accident, d'un grain de sable dans l'équilibre fragile des jours, pour que tout s'écroule sans prévenir. Il suffit d'un rien. Le temps coule depuis si longtemps. Les secondes s'ajoutent aux secondes. On n'y pense pas. Et puis soudain, c'est comme s'il y en avait une de trop. Elle n'est la cause de rien, this seconde-là n'est pourtant pas différente des otheres, elle n'est qu'un grain de sable de plus, mais soudain, comme dans un sablier, c'est tout le tas qui glisse et qui s'effrite et qui s'effondre sous elle. Et c'est la fin du monde.
Thomas Reverdy, Climax
Sometimes it doesn't take much, just an accident, a grain of sand in the fragile balance of days, for everything to collapse without warning. It only takes a small thing. Time has been flowing for so long. Seconds pile up upon seconds. You don't think about it. And then suddenly it's as if there's one second too many. It's not the cause of anything, this one second is no different from the others, it's just one more grain of sand, but suddenly, like in an hourglass, the whole pile starts to slide, becomes unstable, and collapses beneath this grain. And that's the end of the world.
Thomas Reverdy is considered the author of The Disappearance and also interprets himself as such. 2 In Climax He tells a post-human dystopia from the perspective of a glaciologist who, instead of writing about his own feelings and longings, writes about the Arctic, observes animals, traverses landscapes, and reports on their disappearance. The beauty of the world, even in apocalyptic climate change scenarios, is a magic that seems to have no need for humanity.
C'est son univers: la banquise des îles, la montagne, le glacier. The darker nature is inviolate, the tourism is poor and developed in many years. La dernière nature, et c'est un desert. De la ice cream.
C'est là qu'il se sent bien, dans le silence de la nature ponctué des craquements du glacier et des cris stridents des chouettes et des rapaces, des croassements des corbeaux aventureux qui quittent leurs forêts, dans la solitude des sommets entourés de nuages roulants, c'est là, baigné dans l'évidence de la beauté du monde sous les étoiles, qu'il se sent chez lui, all à fait dans son corps, rendu à ses sensations de fatigue et de froid, son silence intérieur qui hésite sur les mots. C'est là qu'il noircit son carnet, le remplit de notes, d'études, de réflections. C'est là qu'il écrit, pour se taire.
Thomas Reverdy, Climax
This is his world: the ice floes of the islands, the mountains, the glacier. The last untouched nature, despite the tourism that has developed in recent years. The last nature, and it is a desert. Ice.
Here he feels at peace, in the stillness of nature, punctuated by the creaking of the glacier and the shrill cries of owls and birds of prey, the cawing of adventurous crows leaving their forests, in the solitude of the peaks, surrounded by billowing clouds. Here, in the light of the world's beauty beneath the stars, he feels at home, completely in his own body, returned to his sensations of weariness and cold, to his inner stillness that struggles for words. There he fills his notebook with notes, studies, and reflections. There he writes to be silent.
In recent years, ecofiction has become a part of the themes of novels alongside nature writing, often committed and accusatory, but always committed.
- Thomas B. Reverdy, Climax, ed. Flammarion (Oil drilling accident and collapse of a glacier),
- Emmanuelle Salasc, Hors gel, éd. POL (Threat to a village from ice masses),
- Jean-François Hardy, La Riposte, éd. Plon (Paris devastated by the ecological crisis: food rationing, heat wave and disease ),
- Jérémie Brugidou, Here, the Beringie, éd. de l'Ogre (global warming in Siberia and Alaska),
- Wilfried N'Sondé, Women of the world and the tempêtes (Gas extraction),
- Corinne Royer, Pleine Terre, éd. Actes Sud (Collapse of the peasant world),
- Éric Fotorino, Mohican, éd. Gallimard (Wind turbines, agricultural pollution).
Fanny Arlandis's list of titles places Reverdy within a trend of new releases in 2021; she writes this with reference to recent literary studies on the genre of Climate Fiction by Jean-Christophe Cavallin and Pierre Schoentjes, 3 Reverdy sees his role in this context, but contemplative, testimonial and explanatory rather than combative:
If I am content to write a recitation of the disaster in the course, this will happen to the fairer. C'est modeste, comme rôle, pour lutter against the fonte des glaces et the réchauffement climatique. May it be sure that the thunder of histoires arrives in life. After the catastrophes, there is nothing left that the mots pour témoigner de ce qui ya mené.
Thomas Reverdy 4
I'm content to write a report about the ongoing catastrophe while we still can. It's a modest role we can play in the fight against melting ice and global warming. But it's certainly useful to have stories to live by. After disasters, there are only words left to bear witness to what led to them.
Reverdy's afterword reports on the alarming special reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concerning the Arctic and the cryosphere, describing them as a "programmed disappearance" in the "Anthropocene." The novel explicitly refers to the name Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). Ragnarök (from Old Norse) røkkr(Darkness, but actually "fate of the gods"), and thus references Norse mythology and the works of Wagner and Tolkien; the Norse Ragnarök is also preceded by natural disasters such as the three-year Great Winter. In the novel, the author presents a climate chaos of drought, forest dieback, extreme weather, and species extinction, and when the stock markets react with alarm, the narrator compares the two mathematical models of financial mathematics and meteorology. 5 The status of Reverdy's climate fiction links science and imagination:
Je n'ai pas établi de hierarchie entre les études scientifiques et les enquêtes historiques d'une part, les récits d'aventures et la fiction d'autre part, parce que je crois que ce que nous appeals l'imaginaire – l'imaginaire des légendes et des mythologies, mais aussi des jeux et des romans dont nous faisons nos vies – fait partie de la réalité des choses. La fiction façonne notre monde. Sans elle, tout cela serait irrémédiable. Sans elle, la banquise, ce ne serait jamais que de la ice.
Thomas Reverdy, Climax, Author's Note
I haven't established a hierarchy between scientific studies and historical research on the one hand, and adventure stories and fiction on the other, because I believe that what we call the imaginary—the imaginary of legends and mythologies, but also of the games and novels we make our lives—is part of the reality of things. Fiction shapes our world. Without it, none of this could be undone. Without it, the pack ice would be nothing but ice.
The landscape is shown to us in sometimes breathtakingly beautiful images, and man disappears into it, for example in the snow:
Les averses de pluie gelée des premiers jours du voyage et leurs fleurs de grésil qui rebondissaient sur la mousse et le tapis d'aiguilles ont laissé place à la neige qui recouvre et dissimule les racines. Elle tombe tout le jour, mollement, inlassablement. Elle brouille la vue, étouffe les bruits de la forest. Elle rend le ciel indistinct, la terre incertaine, les arbres fantomatiques. Parfois, vos propres silhouettes vous semblent des spectres cherchant à disparaître.
Thomas Reverdy, Climax
The frozen rain showers of the first days of the journey, with their crystalline flowers bouncing off the moss and the carpet of pine needles, have given way to snow, which covers and hides the roots. It falls all day long, gently and relentlessly. It obscures the view, settles over the sounds of the forest. It makes the sky indeterminate, the land uncertain, the trees ghostly. Sometimes one's own silhouette seems like a ghost, longing to vanish.
This negative beauty is not ecofiction in the sense of a balance between humanity and nature. But especially in the case of the idealist Anders, the perceived cosmological connection can certainly extend into the dreamlike and existential:
C'est un ciel à l'envers et le monde paraît s'être retourné. Au-dessus de la tête d'Anders, the voûte céleste and son poudroiement d'étoiles ont l'air plus solides, plus profondes ins leurs ténèbres que la neige opalescente dans laquelle il plante ses pieds pour ne pas glisser, se donnant l'impression de marcher sur un nuage, comme s'il partait à l'ascension du ciel lui-même, vers des vallées de vide et des sommets d'étoiles, suivant la Voie lactée comme un chemin de crête de ce mont analogue où habitaient les dieux.
Thomas Reverdy, Climax
The sky is upside down, and the world seems to be turned upside down. Above Anders' head, the sky and its powdery stars seem solider, deeper in their darkness than the opalescent snow into which he places his feet to avoid slipping, and which gives him the impression of walking on a cloud, as if he were climbing the sky itself, towards the valleys of emptiness and the peaks of the stars, following the Milky Way like a ridge path of that symbolic mountain where the gods lived.
The landscape photographs of Thomas Reverdys Instagram profile They give a glimpse of how beautiful nature can be. Here, he is interested in unspoiled landscapes, light, movement, and the seasons.
What convinces me most about the novel is its ambivalence: In its economy of waste, the end of the world is presented to us in an exuberantly sensual way, a magnificent dystopia, so to speak, a sublime mythology of the end, an aesthetic natural spectacle of disappearance, a performance of Ragnarök with such a dark background:
La montagne craquait. Elle a basculé dans le vide, dans la night. Elle s'est détachée dans un craquement monumental et sinistre fait de millions de crepitements et d'explosions simultaneousés, comme le final d'un monstrueux feu d'artifice. Elle a glissé. This is part of the derrière and the dernier écran de powder scintillante. Il n'y a plus eu que la night. The silence that is suivi était also assourdissant que le vacarme de sa chute. The montagne is available separately. You have regard to the loin, to the sea, to the city, but the lights are also available as a soufflé and a bougie. La ville n'était plus là. Il n'y avait plus jusqu'à l'horizon que le black de la terre et de la mer confondus, sous un ciel encore bleu en train de s'épaissir, de tomber tel un rideau de theater qu'on aurait descendu à la fin du monde comme à celle d'une comédie, un vieux rideau troué d'étoiles.
Thomas Reverdy, Climax
The mountain cracked. It plunged into the void, into the night. With a monumental, eerie roar, a million simultaneous crackling and exploding sounds, it shattered, like the finale of a monstrous firework display. It began to slide. It left behind a final layer of glittering powder. There was nothing left but night. The ensuing silence was as deafening as the roar of its fall. The mountain had vanished. They looked into the distance, toward the sea, toward the city, but its lights had gone out, as if a candle had been blown out. The city was no longer there. To the horizon, only the intermingled blackness of land and sea remained, beneath a still-blue, thickening sky that fell like a theater curtain, lowered at the ends of the earth as if for a comedy, an old curtain with star-shaped holes.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- "Alternating between realistic ecological stories and fantastical projections, scientific studies and Norse mythology, Reverdy invents a new literary genre: 'Real Fantasy', in which Greta Thunberg (euphorically) plays Dungeons and Dragons in a lush fjord, Climax by Thomas B. Reverdy.” Marine de Tilly, “La «real fantasy» de l'écrivain Thomas B. Reverdy”, The Point, 1er October 2021>>>
- See, for example, Florence Bouchy, “Thomas B. Reverdy, un romancier against le chaos”, Le Monde, 18. September 2021.>>>
- Fanny Arlandis, "Réchauffement du climat, dégradation de l'environnement... La littérature se saisit, enfin, des questions écologiques. Romans et dystopies nous alertent. Et explorent, also, des mondes où l'homme n'est plus au center", Télérama, September 22, 2021. This refers to Jean-Christophe Cavallin, Valet noir: pour une écologie du récit (José Corti, 2021) and Pierre Schoentjes, Littérature et écologie: le mur des abeilles (José Corti, 2020).>>>
- In Florence Bouchy, “Thomas B. Reverdy, a novelist against chaos,” Le Monde, 18. September 2021.>>>
- “Les mêmes modèles mathématiques étudiaient la complexité du climat et les variations folles de la finance.” – “Dieselben mathematischen Modelle Untersuchunge dieKomplex des Klimas und die wilden Flöpfungen der Finanzmärkte.”>>>
