Without further ado
fromSylvie Durastanti
Tristram, 208 p., 19 €
Without further ado alternates the voices of two women: ” the mistress», whose sad interior monologues are addressed to her absent husband, who left almost twenty years ago for a distant war, and whose return she no longer knows if she should still hope; her servant, the old but energetic Eri, who worries about her, and opens up at length to the swineherd Eumos.
It is because threatening “intruders” have taken up residence in the palace, gorge themselves on grilled meats and wine, seduce the young servants, mock the young “Télém” who grew up without his father, and urge his mother to marry the ‘one of them. No doubt, despite the ellipsis and the lack of proper names: we are in Ithaca, a few years after the Trojan War, and the identities of the mistress and her absent husband are without mystery. Why keep them quiet then? Coquetry? Scholarly game? Not at all. By concealing her frames, Sylvie Durastanti (a brilliant translator of Burroughs or Virginia Woolf) emancipates herself from Homer’s poem but does not cut herself off from it. She appropriates the material without enslaving herself to it.
Turn expectation into action
The Odyssey returned like a glove: the journey is followed by confinement in Ithaca; to the incredible adventures, the daily weight of the island; to supernatural perils, the concrete dangers of ordinary life; above all, the feminine replaces the masculine. Mistress of the house without real power, old servant: these subordinates show an intelligence in the face of adversity that has nothing to envy to that of the “man of a thousand tricks” – as well as the French translators of Homer call his hero. Through Durastanti’s precise and sensitive prose, Penelope is much more than a beautiful, touching figure: her sadness, her motherly worries, her strategies against male violence take on a striking density. His expectation is not simply endured, it is reflection and action.
Playing with the wind in the dunes or a brutal earthquake, emotional memories of her child son, tormented dreams in which the loved one appears, Pénélope apprehends and manipulates all forms of time – the interminable tapestry is just one example. At the end of the wait, the narration heats up, the voices multiply, and the return happens, furious and bloodthirsty. The ghost, then, seems less glorious, its stories less consistent in front of the heroine emerging victorious from the toughest of fights. Listen to Eri: «All will believe that she was simply a woman who had waited, crying and sleeping. But who will understand that she has run out of time? »