For three weeks beginning on March 19, the remarkably prolific and wildly imaginative French writer Éric Chevillard (M&L no. 8) kept a daily quarantine journal for Le Monde. (It has since moved to his blog, L’Autofictif, where he has mused that maybe he should change its name from “Sine die”—Latin for “indefinitely,” in the sense of postponement—to “Ad vitam æternam,” or “for eternity.”) Plenty of sheltered-in-place writers are doing similar work, of course, as he took care to remind us on day 15. But none have been so resolute, or so refreshing, in their refusal to take present conditions at face value. Instead, Chevillard is up to his old trick of finding a single loose thread in the fabric of daily life, winding it around a finger, and gently pulling until reality itself seems to unravel—a practice likely becoming, at the moment, more and more familiar to the rest of us.

—Daniel Levin Becker

My older daughter doesn’t like Jerusalem artichokes, her younger sister doesn’t like rutabagas, and just you try preparing a meal in such conditions! All in due measure, of course—except that we’ve lost all sense of measure: our compasses spin endlessly in a vacuum, our tape measures are the streamers of an undertaker delighted by so many mensurations. All out of due measure, then, our current situation calls to mind the great historical restrictions, the siege of Paris, periods of war and occupation.

Some people, as we know, fearing famine, have built up massive stocks of food. Enough not just to eat until the end of time, but to pack it away like never before. Had to take the first wife out of the freezer just to free up some space. Ah, so then she didn’t go off to Honolulu with her lover? And yet that’s what the investigators chose to believe.

I too had the reflex to stockpile provisions for the long winters to come, but, naively, having never seen anyone but squirrels do it, I chose to follow their example. Much to the consternation of my daughters. Why is Dad filling our cupboards with acorns and pine cones? Well, they’re crispy, and not any worse than cauliflower gratin. Anyway, we’re not all as lucky as those who live near the Vincennes Zoo and will soon be able to feast on giraffe and panda.

So we water down the soup, so to speak. We’ve reinvented pound cake: a pound of flour, a pound of flour, a pound of flour, and a pound of flour, meticulously mixed. (You can also not add apples.) The situation has stimulated our creativity, dulled as it had been by ready-to-eat supermarket meals. In Narbonne, they enjoy fried fish bones, even in times of plenty, and it’s exquisite, so I assumed you could substitute a comb without too much difference. And indeed, if the taste caught me somewhat off guard, my intestines were no less deliciously perforated.

As for the faithful dog, our dear old companion, he jumped into the Crock-Pot without even being asked. After devouring all of him, we placed our plates on the ground and reflexively whistled for him to come feast on his bones, as in the cruelest Ambrose Bierce story.

Yesterday I noticed we were out of coffee, so I scraped the tires of my bicycle. My companion grimaced while drinking this ersatz; nonetheless, she kept her eyes open the whole night long. So it works.

Until tomorrow.

Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker

(25 March 2020)

 

Éric Chevillard was born in 1964 in La Roche-sur-Yon in the west of France. He published his first novel, Mourir m’enrhume (Dying Gives Me a Cold), at the age of twenty-three, and has since gone on to publish more than twenty works of fiction, including The Crab Nebula, On the Ceiling, Palafox, Prehistoric Times, Demolishing Nisard, and The Author and Me. His novel The Brave Little Tailor is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Daniel Levin Becker is an editor, translator, and Oulipian based in Paris.

Banner: “Measuring flour” by Slice of Chic. Reproduced under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.