Soaked in sake and maples, Muriel Barbery’s One Hour of Fervour offers a cliched view of Japan
- Written by Véronique Duché, A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, The University of Melbourne
French bestselling author Muriel Barbery’s sixth opus, One Hour of Fervour, is a contemplative novel, a poetic travelogue and a homage to Japan. We follow Haru Ueno, a successful Japanese art dealer, whose life is turned upside down the day his French mistress forbids him from raising his child.
Review: One Hour of Fervour – Muriel Barbery (Gallic Books)
Tea ceremony, temples, sake, kabuki: Barbery transports us to an exotic Kyoto with her precise prose including haikus as well as aphoristic Japanese tales. Unknown words abound (shakuhachi, fūrin, matstutake), creating an ambience, and Haru’s philosophical thoughts are interspersed throughout the story.
The book, translated by Alison Anderson, begins with the end of the story, when 67-year-old Haru is about to die. He reflects on the three threads in his life: art, friendship, and Rose, his estranged daughter.
Then we go back 50 years, to the 1970s, following the young Haru as he develops his eye for art and his “predilection for Western women”. His life is regulated like a metronome, between his work as a successful art dealer, his visits to his friends Keisuke and Tomoo, and his weekly walk to Shinnyo-dō, a temple perched on a hill in the northeast of Kyoto, where “at every instant, he would know this was his home”.
His social network expands when he meets Jacques Meilland, a Parisian antique dealer who specialises in Asian art, and then Paul Delvaux, a young Belgian who becomes his assistant. Haru has a string of female conquests, including Maud, the mysterious French woman who will bear his child but deny him the role of being a father.
A profound joy
The novel is divided in six parts, contrasting time and place, and emphasising the radical change that takes place in Haru’s life when he accidentally learns he has fathered a child. At a distance and in secret, from that moment on, his life will revolve around his daughter.
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After diverting to the fantasy genre (The Life of Elves, A Strange Country), unconvincing stories of elves and spells, she returns to a more familiar world, although exotic for a French reader.
Trained as a philosopher, Barbery knows how to structure a narrative, how to craft a punchy title. But if her style is precise, it is often precious. According to the translator, Alison Anderson, the author “tries very hard to avoid repetitions”.
A pedantic use of italicised words emphasises the philosophical concepts. And many platitudes can be found in this pseudo lesson on life, such as, “You’re blind because you only look […] You must learn not to look.” The philosophical-artistic content rings hollow and contrasts shockingly with vulgar language (“Mountain people are real dumbasses”).
Affected and pedantic
Indeed, one might find the book soaked in sake, overloaded with stones, saturated in maple trees. It offers a travel guide of a cliched Japan. The papier-mâché characters in trompe-l'oeil settings embody clichés of Orientalism and deliver a Western vision of Japan bordering on racist.
Characters are stereotypes – like Keisuke, the genial artist, who is so drunk he must be brought home in a wheelbarrow. In this fairy tale for rich people, Haru’s French friend “poor Jacques Melland” – is so infatuated with Japan he is
overcome with disgust at the thought of his apartment in Paris’s eighth arrondissement [the wealthiest], a long succession of rooms with a point de Hongrie parquet floor.
Barbery seems to have taken inspiration also from Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s 1943 fable The Little Prince. Its wisdom, “what is essential is invisible to the eye” resonates in One Hour of Fervour: “what’s invisible is never hidden”.
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A rose and a fox are also present, lending the novel its atmosphere of magic. While the fox doesn’t speak, unlike in Saint-Exupéry’s tale, it walks on the water – in a ford that doesn’t exist. “The fox is the key,” are both Haru’s and the novel’s last words. Barbery integrates the supernatural into the natural – crows are conversing with priests; Sayoko, the house keeper in a traditional kimono, is beset with “astonishing intuitions”.
Anderson, whose many translations include Barbery’s six novels, as well as Nobel Prize winner J.M.G. Le Clézio, takes Barbery’s prose head on and provides an accurate, although smoothed, translation. It is difficult however to translate some poetic metaphors such as “un éventail ne dissipe pas le brouillard” (“You cannot fan away the fog”).
No doubt though, Anderson’s work will cater to a cliched Australian taste for Japan.
Authors: Véronique Duché, A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, The University of Melbourne 
