The Courier

Photo of Dany Lafferrière. Courtesy of Edition Grasset.

© D.L.-C. Beauregard

Dany Laferrière once responded to us: “I wrote books to sleep with girls and to make money. I have slept with lots of girls and I have made lots of money, but I am not going to spend the rest of my life as a writer.”

The successful writer of Comment faire l'amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired) is back. After provoking both laughter and tears and a romanticism that is not all tears, crinoline and lace, in a series of works from L'odeur du café (An Aroma of Coffee) to Charme des après-midi sans fin (the charm of endless afternoons), he turned his attention to other projects such as screenplays including Vers le Sud (Heading South). He puzzles the reader.

Firstly, he makes you believe that he only talks about himself. “What else is there of importance in life,” he told us. In Je suis un écrivain japonais (I am a Japanese writer) – where the central character uses the first person “I” as in an autobiography – he recounts an official of the Japanese administration asking him to confirm that he was actually writing a book on Japan: “I only ever write about myself.”  His response came after a Japanese dancer threw herself from a window at his home. The Canadian mounted police also launched an enquiry into the incident.

The author (the central chracter) admittedly freely talks about himself and his life in Haiti and Canada: firstly about how he came to write his new book entitled, Je suis un ecrivain japonais (I am a Japanese writer). To get an advance of ten thousand dollars from his publisher, he came up with title off the top of his head.

He then started writing. He visited some shady places like the café Sarajevo with its red-hot Japanese dancers, almost perverse, almost deities. He focussed on Basho (1644-1694), whose work he had vaguely touched on in the past, adopting his poem La Route étroite vers les districts du Nord. He literally enters into the book. Or rather this cunning monk and vagabond poet takes him over. His ramblings about Basho and the Japanese of the ‘Baisers Incorporation’ in Sarajevo will be costly. What suspense!

When Laferrière speaks about himself, he gets to the very essence of things, love and death. He especially talks about you in poetic slam with a jazz staccato ecstasy like a sensual pleasure that both soothes and makes you shudder.

To keep the suspense of my adventure with the author, I wanted to talk about the book with him without firstly having read the final pages. So? Beware of Dany Laferrière. Excuse me whilst I finish my reading.

Je suis un écrivain japonais, Dany Laferrière, 268 p, 2008 Editions Grasset, Paris France