Murder

by Danielle Collobert, Nathanaël (Translator)

“One does not die alone, one is killed, by routine, by impossibility, following their inspiration. If all this time, I have spoken of murder, sometimes half camouflaged, it’s because of that, that way of killing.”

Murder is Danielle Collobert’s first novel. Originally published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard while Collobert was living as a political exile in Italy, this prose work was written against the backdrop of the Algerian War. Uncompromising in its exposure of the calculated cruelty of the quotidian, Murder‘s accusations have photographic precision, inculpating instants of habitual violence.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, French Literature, France, Literature, Novels

98 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Born in Rostrenen in 1940, Danielle Collobert left Bretagne for Paris at the age of eighteen where she worked in an art gallery and self-published her first poems in a book entitled Chants des guerres (1961). Both of Collobert’s parents, and her aunt, who survived deportation to Ravensbrück, were members of the Résistance during World War II. Herself a supporter of Algerian independence, Collobert joined the FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Front), precipitating her exile in Italy, during which time she completed work on Meurtre, first published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard with the unwavering support of Raymond Queneau. She worked for Révolution africaine, a short-lived journal created at the end of the Algerian war. Collobert’s extensive travels, to Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Egypt, etc., did not prevent her from becoming a member of the group formed around Jean-Pierre Faye and the journal, Change. Her other works include Dire I et II (1972), a radio play the following year, Polyphonie, aired by France Culture, Il donc (1976) and Survie (1978). Upon her return from a trip to New York, Danielle Collobert took her own life in a hotel in Paris on her thirty-eighth birthday. Her complete works, in two volumes, edited by Françoise Morvan, augmented by several unpublished texts, were published by P.O.L. in 2005. Collobert’s works available in English include In the Environs of a Film (Litmus Press, 2019), Murder (Litmus Press, 2013), Notebooks, 1956-1978 (Litmus Press, 2003) and It Then (O Books, 1989).

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

An oblique litany of desolation, non-specific to the point of nightmare and abstract essay, but guided by the atrocities and destructive death throes of empire that hacked jagged lines through the heart of the 20th century. The more specific context is that Collobert penned this during political exile in Italy for her support of Algerian independence, but the motions of dread and horror that compose this unclassifiable work are much more universal. Whether painting in terrible instances violence, dreamlike terminal points, or more mundane destruction, the images here are indelible.

I'm in the completely dark room, completely dark with this thick night of wishes, because I always wish for that thickness, but rarely does the world, do things, bother to go all the way to the end.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not so much a single narrative as a serpentine network of fragments, character sketches, and poetic-philosophic meditations, many taking place in a generic city, possibly the same one, peopled by unnamed and sometimes ungendered characters, narrated either in first or third person. Stylistic shifts occur with frequency, sometimes approaching more straightforward realism, other times recalling the interior journeying of the philosophical fiction of Maurice Blanchot (both pre- and post-Murder) and Hélène Cixous (post-Murder). Also present are shades of Kafka and Beckett, particularly in the wearying resignation to carry on in the face of inexplicable callousness and outright violence, the continuing threat of ignominious defeat, the fear of one's inability to reach the end.

There is a restlessness to Collobert's prose, a perpetual unsettled feeling, and an underlying current of menace, carried through scenes of implicit and explicit violence, both physical and emotional, likely informed in part by her involvement in the Algerian independence movement, yet transcending any specific historic moments. As with her poetry in It Then, she is able to write her way around events and experiences without naming them, yet still branding their implications upon the reader's mind (though in the later It Then her approach is even less direct, employing an impersonal pronoun, and leaving a certain distance between the reader and the text, allowing one to touch the edges of the isolation and pain without fully absorbing it). Here, in Murder, a fractured yet forceful portrait forms of the bleakness of existence, with no hope beyond that same beleaguered resignation to keep moving forward to the end.

Little by little, abandon sets in. One does not die alone, one is killed, by routine, by impossibility, following their inspiration. If all this time, I have spoken of murder, sometimes half camouflaged, it's because of that, that way of killing.

[Óscar Brox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Novela/artefacto/fragmentos de esos que te hacen explotar la cabeza.

[Vendedor de rápida · Rating 4 out of 5]

Danielle Collobert se suicidó a los 38 años y cuesta no leer una obra tan oscura y fúnebre como 'Asesinato' pensando en ello. En el libro de esta admiradora de Pavese hay monstruos y seres abyectos, muchedumbres y ciudades solitarias, ruedos en los que se hacen sacrificios humanos y una pulsión de muerte que quizás sería menos escalofriante si no conociéramos su auténtico desenlace. Una vez más felicidades a La Navaja Suiza Editores por descubrirnos y traernos al castellano a otra autora poco conocida por aquí (nunca olvidaré el relato de la persecución de la anciana por la noche parisina, por ejemplo) y también por incluir un epílogo del traductor, Pablo Moíño, que cuenta algunos de los retos a los que se enfrentó y que iluminan mejor que cualquier texto erudito-literario el misterio que sigue siendo Collobert.

[Javier Avilés · Rating 3 out of 5]

Relatos o poemas o poemas relatados o relatos poetizados. No sé que son los textos de Collobert en Asesinato. Veo la angustia y el desamparo y la influencia de Beckett.
Ya sé, ni los poemas ni los relatos acaban de convencerme. Algunos poemas, algunos relatos.
Lo que sé, es que este libro de Collobert me ha desperezado. Ahora tengo ganas de escribir.

[ipsit]

This is the first novel by Danielle Collobert, an experimental French writer who killed herself in a hotel on her 38th birthday. Known perhaps most widely for her poetry, which often combined small, strange, nearly robotic fragments that somehow disturbed physics and sleep in the same breath, Murder is the first work of longer prose to appear in English, and like the rest of her writing, it’s as unsettling as clouds of smoke rolling through low dark. Despite what its blunt title might suggest, Murder is an extremely sleek and mystifying book, bent on the exploration of a destructive feeling looming over all. The narrator has trouble remembering her name, often gets lost in public as if being pushed into a labyrinth in daylight, finds dead bodies in fields, animals go insane. She keeps waiting for something to happen, and yet it is the weird meditative pauses, the blank between the signals, that is the most unnerving. Memories might carry the worst damage of all. “They tortured me,” the narrator tells us, “kneaded me, dilapidated me, trampled me. My bones are an erosion. I have no more support. I’m lying down, forever paralyzed. If someone had the idea to stand me up, on my feet, I would spread out like an enormous drop of some liquid, formless. A mass.” The same way a murder mystery is most stabbing leading up to its reveal, Murder lingers long inside the blank before death, haunting anyone who will get near enough to share its air with calm-faced corridors of sentences.

[Tatyana · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Fear. All the possibilities for destroying us. They have all the possibilities, against us. Our powerlessness - our voiceless howls - our too burning flesh, too entangled. A single breath."

"I took the habit of living at night. The beginning of the night always brings me a sort of strange serenity… I have the impression that my body relaxes, loosens in the dark, that the mark is attenuated, diminished, that the outlines fade little by little."

"How will we find one another again, in the midst of what path.
I lean my head against the chair and I wait."

"I have the impression that I am experiencing a death. I no longer have a center — not that it moves around inside me, in constant, even perpetual motion — but no localizing of it is even possible any more."

[Jacob Wren · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing interview with the translator Nathanaël:

http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight...

[La Central · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Si tuviéramos que determinar un momento preciso para la lectura de esta obra, no podría ser otro que el final del día y comienzo de la noche, ese momento cuando el arrebol comienza a desdibujarse del horizonte. La lectura, de esta forma, se conjugaría con el proceso creativo de estas páginas que, como en el texto se nos confiesa, fueron concebidas al comienzo de la noche, cuando el ambiente se envuelve de una suerte de extraña serenidad; cuando el cuerpo y la mente se relajan, se desatan en la oscuridad, y los contornos se difuminan poco a poco. El telón de fondo sobre el que se desarrolla Asesinato puede ser cualquier país, cualquier hogar; no hay resguardo frente a la muerte.

La narración constituye un mar interior donde el agua se abalanza contra los diques. El narrador, o narradores, porque no llegamos a identificarlo con precisión, es a un tiempo la humanidad que no puede pronunciar su nombre, que describe con la crudeza del que admite la muerte como parte ineludible de su existir, una sucesión de estados de ánimo y situaciones en las que se alternan el testimonio atroz, y lírico, de quien es espectador de la guerra, de sus perversiones, ruinas y masacres, con el enfrentamiento a la muerte en soledad." Luis de Dios

[Maureen Alsop · Rating 5 out of 5]

...I need to soften the word by employing French, but even in that beautiful, rich, resonant, uncontested romance language, the undertone of mortem/death, being a fact of the word, muertre, I can not say I love the word. I do, however, love Nathanaël’s extraordinary translation of Danielle Collobert's Meurtre, (Murder). “Little by little abandon sets in. One does not die alone, one is killed, by routine, by impossibility, following their inspiration. If all this time, I have spoken of murder, sometimes half camouflaged, it’s because of that, that way of killing” (p.96), or said another way: “Every day, a new portion, tiny little portion of me, is used up. I know there is nothing I can do. I’m cold. One morning I will have to turn down the day’s strain, all the strain of days to come. I will have to leave (p.71)”. Collobert awakens the underplay of reality, age, loss, what grief’s tenderness avails. It is a discomfort only appreciated through incantation.

Read the full review at Rain Taxi VOL. 18, NO. 3, FALL 2013 (#71)
http://www.raintaxi.com/fall-2013/

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like a series of poems or accounts of vaguely unsettling dreams than a single narrative, but all beautiful and haunting.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moody, atmospheric, gothic character sketches of unnamed and unknowable people. Dread, anxiety, and death described tentatively, warily: the contemporary French take on Poe.

[David Peak · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review at the Rumpus:

http://therumpus.net/2014/08/murder-b...