By Jessie Tu
FICTION
One Hour of Fervour
Muriel Barbery
Gallic, $29.99
What does it mean to be Japanese? Can a foreigner faithfully attempt to answer this question? At the beginning of One Hour of Fervour, the seventh novel by Muriel Barbery, French author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, an old Japanese man is on his deathbed, preparing to slip into another world. Haru Ueno has led a good life — a life garnered by the pleasures afforded to an art dealer; his only attachments to himself, his friends and to nature.
In post-war Japan, Kyoto is a “heaven where gardens wither”, but life has been tender and sweet for Haru, who has surrounded himself with artist friends, all of whom are introduced against a backdrop of bamboo and ferns.
There’s a subdued quality of sadness to Muriel Barbery’s latest novel.Credit: Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images
They are shaped by their environment, hyper aware of their physical surroundings. After all, so many of them have lost their loved ones to natural disasters. They are constrained by “the misfortunes” of the land. The Japanese soul is “struck full on by disasters and cataclysms”. In attempting to mine the “impossible depths of Japanese feelings,” they transform nightmares into something beautiful. They resist disaster romanticism and moralising the aesthetics of resilience because it desiccates the modern soul.
While talking to a Belgian about the nature of friendship, Haru posits: “We have different relationships with each of our friends: don’t ask me to explain it. Explanation is a Western disease.”
For Haru, the possibility of futurity arrives in the form of a daughter — far away in France — the product of a 10-day love affair with a French woman. But she forbids him from making contact, so Haru hires a private investigator. Every three months he receives photographs and reports about the girl — ostensibly stalking her.
Observing her transformation over two decades, Haru bears witness to another life from afar, entering cycles of malediction and getting out of them. Distance preserves the bond, yet the longing for connection is an ache he cannot ease. The novel yearns to embody a certain type of grace and readers should expect the experience of reading it to be akin to one deep inhalation.
Barbery’s ephemeral prose is illuminated by Alison Anderson’s sensitive translation from French to English. She captures the spatial poetics of the original language in her translation, paying surgical attention to detail without transferring any solidity or clamour.
The novel hums in the key of E minor, which is to say there’s a subdued quality of sadness in its melody while remaining bright. The prose is as delicate as the objects described: tall grey bamboo, irises, dwarf ferns. There’s a lot of sake drinking and star gazing. There’s a lot of philosophising about what makes a good life.
The central narrative is driven by a lively meditation on Cartesian dualism, as viewed through the lens of a traditional Buddhist overcome by a need to possess the “universal desire to give form to matter”.
Haru is always reaching for the sublime; for an unreachable, refined humility. In the metronome to his life, Haru has borne witness to the evanescence of beauty. On his deathbed, he is overcome by the profundity of a lifetime devoted to asceticism. At times, the story is reminiscent of Élise Girard’s film, Sidonie in Japan, which took a rather diaphanous approach to the subject of loneliness, grief and beauty.
Death permeates this novel, but so do the connective tissues of Haru’s existence: art (“the fleshless part of love”), friendship and family. In the fleeting nature of life, one hour of fervour can sustain us for a lifetime. It can leave us in awestruck reverence.
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