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Le monde horizontal
Ce texte, qui mêle fiction et faits réels, entrelace petites et grandes destinées prises dans les mouvements invisibles du monde. S'y croisent un préhistorien amateur, des ogres, des mineurs rescapés, des figures bibliques, August Sander et Christophe Colomb, Léonard de Vinci, un lettré, une jeune émigrante, un chauffeur de bus, des essais nucléaires, Jackson Pollock ou Diane Arbus. Fonctionnant par fragments et associations, Le Monde horizontal dessine en la suggérant l'évolution de notre rapport au monde, de la verticalité des astres et des dieux du début des temps à l'horizontalité indéfiniment répétée de la civilisation qui nous entoure. Au bout de ce parcours, dont le lecteur est aussi le traducteur, reste la figure de l'homme, sa place dans le monde, les multiples visages de sa détresse. Au fond il s'agit d'une chronique au sens qu'en donne Walter Benjamin : une narration faite d'une superposition de couches minces et transparentes, qui se passe d'explication, et à laquelle le récepteur donne sa signification.
171 pages, Paperback
Published August 22, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 19, 2025
Imagine standing at the threshold of a cave, feeling the gravity of millennia pressing gently on your shoulders. You light a torch, shadows spring up, and suddenly you're aware that above and below are not just coordinates—they are ancient metaphors, hints of transcendence, terror, and belonging. But what if, instead of delving deeper or looking higher, the human urge was to spread out endlessly across flat ground, eliminating mystery and shelter as we went? This is the provocative premise at the heart of Bruno Remaury’s El mundo horizontal, a book that challenges how we map history: not through rulers and battles, but through the shape and feeling of our collective psyche.
Remaury’s writing does not fit comfortably into a single genre; it is at once a meditation, a collage, a whispered fever, a dream from the margin of civilization. With the curiosity of a wayfarer and the precision of an archivist, he threads together histories of miners and migrants, artists and explorers, weaving individual stories into a vast tapestry that shows how our vertical world (of gods, secrets, and shelter) has been leveled into the endless expanse of industry, surveillance, and relentless exposure.
What sets El mundo horizontal apart is the panoramic way Remaury handles time and space. He draws connections from prehistoric cave painters to the chaos of modern ports, from the intimate hush of Arbus’s photographs to Pollock’s convulsive swirls. The old world was defined by its vertical axis: up to the heavens, down into the underworld, inward to the soul. The new world, Remaury suggests, is horizontal and unbounded: our fears, our migrations, even our search for refuge become two-dimensional, lacking the shelter and awe that gave earlier lives texture and meaning.
You do not read Remaury; you wander with him. His chapters aren’t merely analytical, but experiential, passing through Ellis Island with trembling feet, descending into the mines with miners who have traded vertical risk for horizontal exploitation, or drifting with the “intrahistoria,” those invisible threads that knot together accident and destiny, dread and hope. His prose, nimble and pensive, feels as close to poetry as it does to anthropology.
There is, at the core, a sense of loss. The “horizontal world” offers progress, wealth, and infinite possibility, but also delivers solitude, exposure, and a terrifying absence of sanctuary. We lose not just mystery, but the very possibility of upward yearning; comfort becomes mere surface. Yet Remaury resists nostalgia. Instead, he invites us to listen for the rumblings beneath the horizontal, to trace the imprints of collective fear and resilience, to imagine new refuges in a world that never stops expanding outward.
Remaury’s influence is quietly subversive: much like Quignard and Michon, he refuses grand narratives, preferring the nuanced, the fragmented, the personal. His writing is for those who seek not just answers but the texture of asking: the reader who lingers, who hesitates, who wants to stand at the edge of the cave and remember what it means to look up, or dig deep.
If you open El mundo horizontal, prepare to be unsettled, inspired perhaps, to reorient your maps, to feel both exposed and strangely at home on the unending plains of history. Here is a book for wanderers and archivists, for those yearning to rediscover the hidden axes of belonging in an ever-flattening world.
Remaury’s writing does not fit comfortably into a single genre; it is at once a meditation, a collage, a whispered fever, a dream from the margin of civilization. With the curiosity of a wayfarer and the precision of an archivist, he threads together histories of miners and migrants, artists and explorers, weaving individual stories into a vast tapestry that shows how our vertical world (of gods, secrets, and shelter) has been leveled into the endless expanse of industry, surveillance, and relentless exposure.
What sets El mundo horizontal apart is the panoramic way Remaury handles time and space. He draws connections from prehistoric cave painters to the chaos of modern ports, from the intimate hush of Arbus’s photographs to Pollock’s convulsive swirls. The old world was defined by its vertical axis: up to the heavens, down into the underworld, inward to the soul. The new world, Remaury suggests, is horizontal and unbounded: our fears, our migrations, even our search for refuge become two-dimensional, lacking the shelter and awe that gave earlier lives texture and meaning.
You do not read Remaury; you wander with him. His chapters aren’t merely analytical, but experiential, passing through Ellis Island with trembling feet, descending into the mines with miners who have traded vertical risk for horizontal exploitation, or drifting with the “intrahistoria,” those invisible threads that knot together accident and destiny, dread and hope. His prose, nimble and pensive, feels as close to poetry as it does to anthropology.
There is, at the core, a sense of loss. The “horizontal world” offers progress, wealth, and infinite possibility, but also delivers solitude, exposure, and a terrifying absence of sanctuary. We lose not just mystery, but the very possibility of upward yearning; comfort becomes mere surface. Yet Remaury resists nostalgia. Instead, he invites us to listen for the rumblings beneath the horizontal, to trace the imprints of collective fear and resilience, to imagine new refuges in a world that never stops expanding outward.
Remaury’s influence is quietly subversive: much like Quignard and Michon, he refuses grand narratives, preferring the nuanced, the fragmented, the personal. His writing is for those who seek not just answers but the texture of asking: the reader who lingers, who hesitates, who wants to stand at the edge of the cave and remember what it means to look up, or dig deep.
If you open El mundo horizontal, prepare to be unsettled, inspired perhaps, to reorient your maps, to feel both exposed and strangely at home on the unending plains of history. Here is a book for wanderers and archivists, for those yearning to rediscover the hidden axes of belonging in an ever-flattening world.
July 13, 2025
Original y algunas partes, fascinantes. Me lo he leído en un rato porque enganché desde la primera línea. Una propuesta atractiva y una escritura (brava la traductora) muy ágil. Recomiendo este ensayo.
November 10, 2025
¿Qué acabo de leer? Inclasificable pero muy interesante.
August 23, 2021
Récit entre fiction et faits réel où l'intrigue se développe comme une toile d'araignée, évoluant par association d'idées et avec une fluidité folle. Une plume splendide (ce passage dans les mines de charbon !) qui illumine tout le premier tiers du livre d'une profonde atmosphère et d'une aura mystique. Plusieurs destins croisés, une critique en fond de la modernité et de l'industrialisation du monde, un voyage à travers les continents, les mythes et la réalité.
January 13, 2023
Très bien écrit. Les passages dans la mine, ou à Ellis Island, sont vraiment impressionnants.
Ceci dit, pas sure d'avoir compris le bouquin...ce monde horizontal, les passages d'une image/scenario à l'autre.
Ceci dit, pas sure d'avoir compris le bouquin...ce monde horizontal, les passages d'une image/scenario à l'autre.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews