Do I Love You Yann Moix

"Il n’en reste pas moins que nous trions les femmes pour jouir au-dedans, ce qui ne nous empêchera jamais de voir à l’intérieur de leurs yeux des fleurs sèches et aplaties quand elles sont tristes, des fontaines de papillons vibrionnants quand nous leur prodiguons le bonheur qu’elles méritent. Elles sont là qui nous inventent, nous traversent, nous habitent : une fois aimées, elles restent en nous comme des œuvres, des livres relus, éternelles comme les reflets du bronze."

The fact remains that we sort women to relish inside, which will never prevent us from seeing dry and flattened flowers inside their eyes when they are sad, fountains of vibrating butterflies when we lavish on them the happiness that they deserve. It is here that they invent us, pass through us, live in us: once loved, they remain in us like works, books reread, eternal as the reflections of bronze. Yann Moix, from Naissance (Birth)

Do I Love You, Yann Moix?

Do I love you, Yann Moix, and I am not a woman, a homosexual, or a member of your immediate or distant family? Do I love you, Yann Moix, since I like many words but most of your words, since I love your looks, which are often overloaded with kindness crossbred by the human condition but never sparing, and since I love your beautiful but usually sad or reflective eyes? Do I love you, Yann Moix, since I cannot otherwise, we cannot differently?

There are of course those who do not love you, but with no good reason. It is like a gratuitous hatred of the Other. It is like racism, or even anti-Semitism (like Philip Roth, I prefer to name it, Judeopathy) that you despise endlessly like an immutable torrent. Do I love you, Yann Moix, for this too?

I prefer your Judaism, your affable approach to the latter, your BHLed (BHL is an acronym for Bernard-Henri Levy) learning, your supra-Jewish intelligence, your Nietzschean discernment, your scientific humanity. Do I love you, Yann Moix, for all this and more?

I discovered you on the French television show, On n’est pas couché (We Are Not Sleeping). I could not sleep from then on without watching and listening to you. I observed your presence as a chroniqueur (commentator) in this show for three years, standing out as a matador for the truth, and as an amazing guest with a dazzling frankness some years earlier.

Books and Movies

I ordered all your books, except Transfusion, that I read in the order in which they were published. I also ordered your movies, which I watched as soon as they were received. Serendipitously, Podium, your first movie, arrived first. It was madly amusing to say the least. Then came Cinéman (Cinemaman), your second movie, which I enjoyed immensely, notwithstanding its poor reception elsewhere. I read each novel with palpable impatience to read the next and fear of reading the last. Jubilations vers le ciel (Jubilations Towards the Sky; perhaps towards space in my case, where an altruistic extraterrestrial could return my lost wife to me), Les cimetières sont des champs de fleurs (Cemeteries Are Fields of Flowers), Anissa Corto, Partouz (Threesom without the final e; à la Philip Roth, Milan Kundera?), Panthéon (Pantheon; French, Greek and or Roman?), Mort et vie d’Edith Stein (Death and Life of Edith Stein), Cinquante ans dans la peau de Michael Jackson (Fifty Years in the Skin of Michael Jackson), La meute (The Pack; since it isn’t fiction, I read it after Jubilations vers le ciel), Naissance*(Birth), Une simple lettre d’amour (A Simple Love Letter; perhaps like this one), and Terreur (Terror). I later read your following novel, Rompre (To Break Up; I would have preferred to have lost my wife that way). I may have cheated a second time by reading your 2007 essay, Apprenti-juif (Apprentice Jew), first, after discovering it on the Web. A few months later, I read your novel, Orléans (Orleans; a brief follow-up to Birth), followed by Reims, Verdun, and Hors de moi (Out of Myself). I cannot wait to read your latest one, Visa.

* An opus of the first order, a masterpiece among masterpieces, already a masterwork by the end of the first 300 pages (it numbers around 1,400 pages).

Do I Love You?

You are admirable. Yet, do I love you, Yann Moix, particularly? I remember your detrimental critique on the show, On n’est pas couché, of Saphia Azzeddine’s seventh novel, Sa mère (Her Mother), especially concerning her abysmal mediocrity in comparing the optical illusion created by jobs at an employment centre to the showers in the concentration camps. Yet, you may have committed a more terrible mediocrity in your first novel by equating Nestor’s ardent desire for anal sex with the Holocaust, and his technique of delaying his ejaculation by thinking of Auschwitz and Ethiopia. It does not necessarily mean that you sanction these associations, but coming from the mind of the novel’s key character, with no indication whatsoever of his less than commonplaceness up to that point, past the middle of the novel, on the contrary, presenting him as a hero, it is difficult not to construe it as your own appalling mediocrity. However, it is possible that Nestor’s lone, voyeuristic existence from that point of the novel onwards may have represented a particular type of punishment for his intolerable carnal intimations. It remains distasteful, to say the least, and hurtful, perhaps more to a Jew, although it would be difficult to find someone, even Jewish, more Jewish than you. I may love you, after all, Yann Moix.