I’m getting old, and of course my friends are getting old, and there are now quite a few people whose death I’m afraid to wake up to, but Benoît wasn’t one of them. I just didn’t see it coming. The news of his death plunged me into a state of horrified shock, and deep down I still can’t really believe it. I’m often about to call him to ask if he wants to do something together, visit a monument, eat in a restaurant, see a show, before reality catches up with me. This must be what the shrinks call denial. It’s strange because I don’t go in much for denial; I usually take tragic news on the chin, without my mind assembling the slightest escape. In the end, I don’t think you ever come to terms with the death of someone you love all at once; you have to come to terms with it over and over again, sometimes many times. The last people I had to mourn died after long illnesses, and you gradually resign yourself to it with each visit to the hospital. But with a sudden death it’s afterwards that you have to kill them inside yourself, and even then you can only kill them little by little.
It’s probably for the same reason that I didn’t manage to write the tribute to Benoît Duteurtre that I’d planned, so I’ll have to make do with my memories. I had put my favourite books by Benoît on my desk, and suddenly I realised that I couldn’t read them, that I couldn’t even physically open them. I was afraid to open them. I felt that reading the words in them would sign his death warrant. Since he won’t be writing any more, the words would become definitive, and I don’t want there to be anything definitive between us. We’ll be seeing each other again soon enough, anyway.
Strangely enough, our first encounter was an argument in print. At the time Jean Ristat was attempting to revive Lettres françaises, the magazine run by Aragon after the war. Ristat asked me to write an article on Prévert, who had just been published in the Pléiade. I wrote the article, which was frankly negative (and in fact I still don’t like Prévert), and sent it to him, though with some trepidation – the magazine was still financed by the Communist Party. Jean laughed out loud at the piece, and published it without the slightest hesitation, without the slightest cut; but in the following issue he published an article by Benoît, in which Benoît defended Prévert. (Jean Ristat was a rather peculiar Communist; he died in 2023.) I didn’t meet Benoît until two years later, in 1994, at one of the meetings held by another magazine, L’atelier du roman, where I also met Philippe Muray and Sempé. Milan Kundera came more rarely, as he was no longer on top form. There are more and more dead people in this article, I can’t help it.
I don’t know when I’ll be able to read his books again, but in any case it will be brutal. There will be gentler things, like how I’ll never be able to order an œuf mayonnaise in a restaurant without thinking of him – literature can do that, when the description is perfect. His description of the ideal œuf mayonnaise appears at the start of Le Retour du Général (2010). The novel belongs to a genre he was very fond of, which could be called ‘soft speculative’, by which I mean books set in a plausible version of the future, which don’t involve sweeping scientific and technological changes. In the novel, we learn in the first few pages that the European Union has just banned mayonnaise, which, after all, is not that far-fetched. They’ve already come close to banning raw-milk cheeses. There’s no telling what those people are capable of. This reminds me that one of my fondest memories of Benoît was being with him at the Cirque d’Hiver, during what was billed as an evening of debates about Europe. It wasn’t much of a debate at all, as we agreed about everything, and shared the same hostility to a federal Europe.
Basically, Benoît’s books come in two main types; I like both, I really don’t have a preference. The first are the ‘soft speculative’ books, which can get fairly polemical. A perfect example is La petite fille et la cigarette (2005). The second type, which aren’t fictional at all, are memoirs of childhood and early youth. It’s a world that feels distant, almost unreal in its naive optimism. An example of these is Les pieds dans l’eau (2008).
I can easily locate myself in these remote memories. We were essentially of the same generation, and our sensibilities were shaped by similar experiences. We discovered the same poets and rock bands at around the same time, and we both went on language exchanges in Germany at the same age. Back then, Benoît would cycle miles to buy the latest Led Zeppelin album. Personally, I’d have only gone out of my way for Pink Floyd. Not a huge difference: I liked Led Zeppelin, he liked Pink Floyd. I never really asked Benoît why he liked ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’, that weird Pink Floyd song. It starts with a bit of music, but mostly what you get are the actual sounds of someone making an English breakfast, with dishes clattering, the distinct sound of bacon slices frying in the pan, etc. Little by little, the music develops, expands, until it takes up the entire sonic space. I think the delight he took in this song tells us something about his aesthetic. Music played almost as important a role in Benoît’s life as literature. Almost. In any case, it’s easy to imagine one of his novels beginning with a simple scene like that: making breakfast.
We weren’t on the same level when we talked about music. I can’t remember a single time when I mentioned a musician he didn’t know, whereas the opposite happened quite often. Our sense of literature was more comparable, and our tastes often very similar. If I had to define what the writers of my generation who met at L’atelier du roman meetings shared, I’d say it was the desire to return to realism. In Benoît’s novels, as in mine, you know where the characters live, what their jobs are, how much they earn. Neither of us had the ambition to equal Balzac, to take up his overwhelming project of describing the whole of the society of his time, but both of us tried to grow in his great shadow.
Jacques Prévert aside, we were almost in complete agreement about poetry. In retrospect, we’d mostly written our pieces on Prévert for the pleasure of polemic. Perhaps I was drawn to the early nineteenth century, to early romanticism, more than him. He was partial to the fin de siècle, to the symbolist movement. But basically we agreed on the essentials. He was someone I was always happy to talk to, and there aren’t that many people I’m happy to talk to. All of a sudden my life has gotten poorer.
We still had a lot to live for, a lot of discoveries to make together. I’ll never get to show him the masterpiece that is the Limoges train station. He would have loved it so much, it’s exactly his favourite period, architecturally speaking. But I have wonderful memories of those few days when he showed me around the New York he loved. As for wild game, we had mixed results; we discovered this shared culinary passion too late. There was one magnificent hare à la royale, but we didn’t get around to the grouse. Without him, I won’t be as interested in game. Hunting season is short; so is life.
When I come across a breed of cow I don’t recognise, I’ll think about Benoît, because in my opinion, with À propos des vaches (2000), he came close to writing the definitive book on this remarkable animal. Were there any breeds of cattle unfamiliar to him? I imagine so, but you’d have to go pretty far afield, outside of France at any rate.
And whenever I take a train with a proper restaurant car, I’ll be thinking of him. He so aptly evoked the sensuous little pleasures you find on old-fashioned trains in La nostalgie des buffets de gare (2015).
The word ‘nostalgia’ has to be singled out. It’s certainly the one that first comes to mind when you think of his work, and it’s one of the sensations I most enjoyed in his writing, especially as I’m incapable of it myself. It’s true, though, that in some ways things were better in the ‘good old days’. But the nostalgic is not a reactionary, a word that has become a mark of infamy, and it’s wrong that he sometimes got called one. The reactionary wants to turn back the clock; the nostalgic knows full well it’s impossible. And yet this is where things get so surprising and beautiful. Because there’s something not entirely sad about nostalgia. It goes hand in hand with the incongruity that you sometimes feel in life. It comes with a strange smile, half resigned, half ironic. I can’t think of anyone other than Benoît who, in that tone of cheerful incredulity, could say to me, some thirty years after our first meeting: ‘It’s strange, we’ve become old.’ And it’s a pity, a real pity that he couldn’t say to me, in the same tone: ‘It’s strange, we’ve become dead.’
In the end, I’m going to have to talk about what’s unbearable about this loss. Benoît intersperses many of his books with autobiographical elements, but he didn’t write a real autobiography, even though no writer had more talent for one. He had what I utterly lack, the power of acute sensorial recall, which allowed him to recover an instant of the past, to bring it to life in all its colour, its every luminous flickering, its familiar sounds. Just think of the pages of Les pieds dans l’eau where he writes about the afternoons of his childhood on the beach at Étretat. The time would have come, it would certainly have come, in a few years perhaps, when he would have wanted to gather all his memories, to offer us a wonderfully delicate and sensitive history of the second half of the twentieth century. That’s what his readers have lost.
I’m a writer too. I take literature seriously. It means a great deal to me. With a little difficulty, I suppose I can see how it’s respectable to mourn all the books a dead author wasn’t able to write. But there’s also something inhuman about doing that, and I’m not ready for that kind of asceticism. And for me, anyway, there’s something even worse about Benoît’s death. He wasn’t meant to die, not now, not at this age. He possessed all the ideal qualities of affectionate generosity, tolerance, mischievous irony and, not least, wisdom that would have made him one of those old codgers who manage to make you like old age, who almost make you want to grow old. Now it’s going to be harder.
Photograph by Rebekka Deubner for Granta, Oeuf Mayonnaise, 2025
