Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

NOT ONE DAY (novel excerpts) By Anne F. Garréta

E* The image your memory proffers resembles this: a confusedly Gothic conference hall, tables in the shape of a stretched ellipse, your head held in your hands probably to keep it from drifting, and, inside the space where an I resides, a dizzying void resonating with the words of someone from far away, all the way at the other end of that never-ending ellipse. The distress, the intense distress at being condemned to sit there, holding your head. For it will never finish. This feeling you haven’t felt since high school. Enduring the surge of endless words, so devoid of passion, so solemn, so full of faith and certitude in what is Good and True. A conclave of true believers babbling and pontificating about a counter-reformation of the articles of literary scripture, post-second coming of the subject. So you were bored to death at this symposium where, under who knows what pretext, a palette of academics and sundry writers had been gathered. (You would only have to rummage through the shelves of folders that clutter your office and make up the archive of your life to find the symposium program and the text that you read there, but what’s the point? You said you would write

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