Je Nathanaël by Nathanaël

Paperback, read May 2019

“All bodies are guilty of something. All of them. I have decided not to travel any more. Not to dip my feet into the river either. I water the plants. Nobody kisses me. I am a hundred years old.”

Some books, some of my favourite books even, I am very nervous to discuss: I’m worried that I won’t be able to properly articulate what I loved about it, that I will have read it differently than anyone else, that I will be wrong in why I enjoyed it (as though that is even possible). But these are also often the books I most want to talk about! Because they are challenging, they are meant to provoke discussion, they are trying to be hard to talk about. They want their readers to think, think hard, think differently, think newly. And I love to be asked to think, to engage.

Je Nathanaël is one of those books. It’s a short book of sort-of-poems, of short poetic sections that challenge the capability of language to really capture or describe experience, identity, desire. It is a story and a question and a statement, an exploration of how language fails us, how we are much more than we can say or write. Written in French and translated to English by the author, this edition – a 15th anniversary edition – also includes incredibly interesting additions from the author (a postface) and from the scholar Elena Basile (an afterword). In fact, I’m now very interested in a book mentioned in Basile’s bio: Queering Translation/Translating the Queer (eds Brian Baer and Klaus Kaindl).

This is a book that will not meet its reader, but will demand the reader climb as many steps as necessary to meet the text. It isn’t inaccessible, though: once you’re there, it is patient and slow and insistent, it will carry you through its interrogation. It is gentle, somehow, while being entirely abrasive at the same time. I can’t wait to read it again.