The bloke from the grave next door–in Paris

One day last month I noticed a poster in the Metro with this intriguing title: Le mec de la tombe d’à cote.  On closer inspection, I saw that it was an advertisement for a play,  so when I returned to my apartment  I searched on TickeTac to find the dates and some details. It was playing at a small theatre in the 3rd. I bought tickets for myself and a friend, and then went in search of the book. My French is not yet quite reliable enough to allow me to follow a play with full comprehension, so I always try to read the text first. I’d just done this with Dis-leurs que la verite est belle, which had given me nearly 95% comprehension when I attended the play, although fabulous acting and crystalline enuncation from the actors had played a role in that too.

But I couldn’t find a copy of the play about the graveyard mec, and was told by my local bookshop L’arbre à lettres that it only existed in the form of a novel, originally Swedish by Katerina Mazetti,  translated into French by Lena Grumbach and Catherine Marcus, and only recently adapted into a stage play. The book (pictured above) looked as intriguing as the poster for the play, so I bought that and tried to read as much as I could in the two days left until the evening of the play.

Although it is a comedy of sorts, it also contains some important truths about relationships, especially when two people are from different worlds–in this case two different occupational worlds. A newly-widowed city librarian meets a farmer from the depths of the country in a city cemetery (the farmer’s mother has recently died). That’s as much of the plot as I’m prepared to give away at the moment. The play telescoped all of the action beautifully, and the half-dozen characters in the novel were pared down to the two protagonists, who were seamlessly converted into French characters complete with French names. The acting was perfect (in fact all of the acting I have seen in the French theatre has been perfect–from Fanny Ardent and Patrick Chesnais in various productions, through to all of the relative unknowns). The only downside for me was that for the sake of verisimilitude the character of the farmer had to speak in a rural and slightly uncouth accent which marred my understanding somewhat (when oh when does one get to the stage of fluency in a foreign language that enables one to understand bad enunciation and thick accents? Maybe never, as I’m not very good at that in English either).

After the play, which my friend A-M and I enjoyed enormously, I put the book aside, and have only just had the time to take it up again. What a delight it is to return to it, to discover the twists and turns of the relationship, but now with the pictures of the two characters in my mind–she so thin and pale and refined, and Jean the farmer so honest and straightforward, with thick black curly hair and stubble, his check shirts and overalls.

The insights I am discovering, about connecting the self with the other, are gently humbling.

The book can be bought from Amazon France for a good deal less than I paid for it, and they ship to Australia for a reasonable rate.