Je m’en vais
One of the first 99 copies on vergé de Vizille (no. 26), the only paper.
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Henri Clarac, ces quelques variations sur le thème des adieux, avec mes amicales pensées, Jean Echenoz. 9. XII. 99.”
Je m’en vais is the counterpart to Echenoz’s earlier novel, Un an (1997): the story is essentially the same, but here lived and recounted through the perspective of Delahaye and one of Ferrer’s conquests, Victoire. The title comes from the opening line of the novel: “Je m’en vais,” Félix Ferrer announces to the woman he lives with. But leaving one’s wife is not enough; one must go further still. His colleague at the gallery he runs, Delahaye, informs him that a “treasure” awaits him, buried beneath the ice of the Far North: and so Ferrer is launched into a grand “adventure”…
The clichés commonly applied to Echenoz’s work — crime novel, adventure novel, anti-hero novel — cannot do justice to the marvelous style that defines it: “It is manual work more than intellectual work, a craftsman’s work in which one must fiddle with words. They are bits of string. A serious writer cannot be interested in anything else, otherwise he is a historian or a sociologist, or a bad novelist. The absolute master of this game is Jean Echenoz. He is the best stylist writing today.” (Philippe Djian). François Nourissier, in his back-to-school review for Le Figaro littéraire (September 1999), even awarded him a “First Prize for Narration”! As president of the Académie Goncourt, he followed through on his enthusiasm, helping to crown the title two months later with the Prix Goncourt 1999.
A very fine copy.