Taking Stock: On Ferdinando Camon — Patrick Autréaux
up now @ World Literature Today
“Camon’s words bear witness to the tendency for the intransigent to exceed the garments in which they have been decked, whether that be a suit or a cassock. They come from someone who, despite gaining recognition, seems to have resisted institutionalisation. An unyielding writer. Because of that, I have felt him at work within me. Sharply, sorrowfully. Neither as a pose nor a failure, but actually as a kind of immiscibility. Everywhere I have been, I was, or was put, to one side: medicine, psychoanalysis, university, letters. I have partaken in this fatality myself, without wanting to, and sometimes wanting the opposite, seeking out community. I don’t want to say, like him, that I have actively been suppressed. Of course it was more subtle. It is a process of eviction which pushes one into isolation despite oneself. And if the dominant caste have established a respectable category for its class exiles, rare are those that have chosen it—in order to serve, whomever it is they defend, more so than to change their own lives …”
My translation of Patrick Autréaux’s essay ‘Taking Stock: On Ferdinando Camon’ is now up at World Literature Today. It first appeared in Europe in 2023.
Read the full essay here.
Patrick Autréaux is a French writer, living between Paris and Cambridge (USA). The view of illness as an inner experience informs his first cycle of writing, ending with Se survivre (Verdier). He is the author of dozens of books and articles in French. His new novel, L’Epoux has just been published by Gallimard.