In 2014, five months before the publication of his next travel narrative Berezina, Sylvain Tesson attempted to climb the façade of a friend’s house in Chamonix. An experienced climber and notorious risk-taker, he fell 33 feet and went into a coma. Upon his recovery, the then 42-year old Tesson told a reporter, “The fury of living is over, I risk an epileptic seizure at the slightest drop of alcohol, and I blame myself for having had so much energy and spending it on sterile things.”
Tesson’s early furies took shape in 1991 when he crossed the uninhabitable volcanic desert of central Iceland on a motorcycle. He went on to explore caves in Borneo, hike for 5000 kilometers across the Himalayas, and cross the steppes of central Asia on horseback from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan, among other treks and trials. In December 2012, Tesson went to Moscow with two French Russophiles, teamed up with two adventurous locals, and prepared to set off westward on three Ural motorcycles with sidecars “to recreate the itinerary” of Napoleon’s catastrophic retreat from Moscow to Paris in 1812. Tesson attached the French tricolor to his bike’s basket, placed a bicorn on his head, and the three Frenchmen took off, soon joined by the Russians. (Thomas Goisque, one of Tesson’s compatriots, provided photos of the trip for the Gallimard edition of Berezina.)
The reader’s path through Berezina follows their arduous progress through wintry Smolensk, Minsk, Vilnius, Warsaw, and Berlin, coping with hazardous conditions, mechanical failure, and fatigue. The locations trigger bursts of Napoleonic history. I would recommend the book for the travel episodes and historical chronicles alone. But in the end, Berezina succeeds brilliantly as a sly commentary on – and a challenge to conventional thinking about — today’s contention between Russia and the EU, and the rutted habits of the popular Western mind. The crossing of borders provides occasions for tart assessment of national psyches. Berezina is also an eccentric meditation on the slaughter demanded by the leaders of kingdoms and nation-states. Ultimately, Tesson’s obsession isn’t travel at all but the state of our humanity.
For Tesson, history is cyclical and classical, the resurgence and persistence of grand visions and destructive effects. He yearns for a cross-cultural humanity that acknowledges our hungers and activates our values: “We knew that Verdun and Stalingrad, Buchenwald and Hiroshima were the Fall of Man and we were haunted by that. From now on, the idea of conquest sounded absurd.” But Tesson, whose temperament bristles at cant, has no patience for neo-liberal hand-wringing. At the outset, as he describes a pre-trip dinner in Moscow hosted by a French émigré who had acquired and revived the Raketa watch factory, one gets a taste of Tesson’s tart attitude:
“Our host had moved to Moscow twenty years earlier, having gotten weary of France, of its regulations, its petit-bourgeois reactionaries, its bad-manned socialists, its potted geraniums, and its rural traffic circles. France, a little paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell, administered by do-gooders busy keeping in check the residents of the human park, no longer suited his need for freedom.”
Tesson’s declarative, precise and often droll prose (acutely rendered by Katherine Gregor) suggests a certain style of living, an encounter with and naming of what is actually happening. There’s an obvious performative and theatrical element to it all – but the harshness of the excursion mitigates the staginess. While most of us worry about capitalist surveillance tactics and the ruination of facts, Tesson detects the same tragedy in the crushed bones of Napoleon’s army beneath his wheels. He spells out his motivation: “The reason for this journey was precisely to make this nightmare sink deep into our heads in order to hush the inner laments and to wring the neck of his shrew, this repugnant tendency that is man’s true enemy: self-pity.” His pretension, I suppose, is that his exertions are rebellious, however symbolic, while the rest of us are merely whining. But his undeniable talent for creating an aura of self-legitimacy provides the enjoyment in reading this book.
City by city, the traveling quintet finds traces of Napoleon’s lingering presence. They chat about the books they’ve read, with a special interest in the memoirs of Napoleon’s staff. The trip becomes an Ecclesiastes-like descent into mortality – and escaping with one’s life. This is the significance of Berezina itself, the Belarussian river which the Grande Armée managed to cross, thus eluding a trap set by General Kutuzov’s Russian forces. Napoleon had left Paris with 450,000 men. At the Berezina, his army numbered 40,000 soldiers, including reinforcements that met him there. Tesson reflects:
“Napoleon had always felt the need to strive toward an idea. Did he not profess that the world was led by imagination? He would project on the screen of the future the images of his mental constructions. Nothing must hinder the mechanics, a defeat was not conceivable. This is why the Emperor gives the impression of brushing aside the Russian disaster, minimizing it, and casting it out of his mind. Sadly, the means at his disposal were never sufficient to bring his plans to a successful conclusion, and to consolidate the work he had begun in every direction and every country. He started everything and finished nothing. He wanted to redesign the world, but he didn’t achieve a single local reform. And so his reign was like a sleigh trip: a crazy pursuit. Napoleon’s life was the journey of a genius galloping after his visions …”
Berezina is itself – and tells about — a crazy pursuit. But of what? The man who started by intending “to make this nightmare sink deep into our heads” ends by “taking a shower, and washing off all those horrors.” Of course – who would want to live continually among those ghosts struggling through the snow, their famished horses dying in the drifts. The equivocal notions of heroic endeavor in Berezina refuse to resolve into visions of social justice and world peace. Tesson is interested only in core impulses and how they get us into trouble. I think of him crumpled in pain, then unconscious along the foundation of his friend’s house. But that occurred afterwards. He also told the reporter that he would like to go to the Turkish-Syrian border to pay homage to the courage of the Kurds. Tesson, who won the Prix Medici de l’Essai in 2011 for In The Forests of Siberia, may just have to produce another book.
[Published by Europa Editions on November 5, 2019, 192 pages, $15.00 paperback]