JUDY KRAVIS

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Saturday 20 July 2019

Daniel Robberechts

Arriving in Avignon by Daniël Robberechts leapt from an upstairs shelf this week: the right book for right now, in need of distraction, in need of kin, neither novel nor essay, just writing inside pale covers, published by Dalkey Archive, with a sketchy town in red on the front cover, propped up by rough black lines, for the arriving, the departing, the not having been there at all.
Approaching may be our most profound vocation. Perhaps we do nothing else in our lifetimes but hedge round, surround things and people with greater or lesser precision, more or less conscientiously, swerving or brushing past them, at most grasping them for a moment, never arriving anywhere for good, except, at the very last, in the earth.
Daniël Robberechts killed himself at the age of fifty-five. His books swerve towards that. Arriving in Avignon is least of all about Avignon, more about a twenty year-old looking for adventure.
What kind of adventure? The kind a twenty-year-old still cares about. Nothing could be better suited to closing the book on the past and yet nothing could be as unadventurous as a commercial traveller's hotel near the train station of vegetable-trade town.  He lacks any experiences of the sort you can hold on to. But wasn't it an experience to look up at the multicoloured radiance of the sky in the morning?
'Where is this report going?' the writer asks. Good question.
It isn't true that the reality of books is more beautiful than that of life, it's precisely the other way round, the reality of life is incomparably more beautiful than that of books, and not for some aesthetic, moral, or philosophical reason: quite simply by definition. Is it possible, this nothing thinks, that one has not yet seen, recognised and said anything real and important? Is it possible that one has had thousands of years of time to look, reflect, and write down, and that one has let the millennia pass away like a school recess in which one eats one's sandwich and apple?
Nearing the end of the book we read a headlong history of Avignon; another way of approaching it, for sure, and definitely not an experience you can hold on to.
These are the facts. Are they the full facts? No, not at all, one can't know them all, one can't even know the facts he knows, and certainly not list them. 
Ten or twenty pages from the end, there is a build-up of sentences beginning: one can also write.
One can also write: One day a man will arrive in Avignon.
The remainder of the book dances around that. One day, one can also write, he'll move into Avignon, 'the real, integrated, Avignon', and he'll observe the vital signs are carefully as any surgeon.
One wonders whether a whole lifetime would be enough to really see this town. To see it with the eyes of a stranger, but also with those of a native shopkeeper, a bum, a housekeeper, a farmer and solder, a priest and poet and patient and day-laborer and whore and journalist and concerned citizen and street sweeper ...

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