Life is a movie (or not): a reflection on 'Bristol' by Jean Echenoz
When I was little, an adult tried to snap me out of some fanciful thoughts I was absorbed in and shouted at me, "Life isn't a movie!" The phrase upset me so much that I still think about it several times a week, even though I'm 31. I don't know if life is a movie or not. The older I get, the less certain I am. In any case, it happens very often that daily life strives to resemble a film production, one that I find rather cheap and excessively dramatic. I suppose that's why I enjoyed reading Bristol boardFrom the French author Jean Echenoz (Orange, 1947), published by Rayo Verde. Not only because the main character is a mediocre filmmaker and much of the plot revolves around his work, but also because of the parallel between the ordinary human gaze and the cinematic gaze.
There are people who live as if their surroundings didn't exist, with a kind of chilling contextual unawareness that I sometimes envy. On the other hand, there are people for whom even the flight of a fly passing by represents a change in the course of their day. And then there are still other kinds of people, those who not only notice the flight of a fly, but also feel the need to transmit it, to transform it into words or images (if they aren't one and the same). This is what Jean Echenoz does: he turns the discordant anecdote into literature and, on top of that, makes us enjoy it immensely. The writer has published nearly twenty books, characterized by a writing style that is neither drawn out nor tedious, but rather moves the plots forward—often involving adventures and police cases—with agility, humor, and a very direct style.
Most of his works translated into Catalan can be found at Raig Verd. Bristol board This is the latest, published in 2026 and translated by Anna Casassas. It all begins when the protagonist, Robert Bristol, leaves his house just as a naked man falls from a window of his blog. The protagonist ignores the scene, and this already begins to indicate the particular way in which he relates to his surroundings. Bristol embodies the absurdity of a good, mediocre character (characters who usually provide readers with a great deal of entertainment), theatrical, whether intentionally or not, whose attitudes create vaudevillian situations or absurd games that are always funny.
Echenoz's way of explaining the plot is anti-romantic. He doesn't dwell on any inspiring moments. Quick, easy, out. Echenoz knows that modern life, so closely tied to the city, is contradictory and offers little opportunity for poetry. For example, this is how he explains a train journey where the most relevant thing is neither the beauty of the place you leave from nor the beauty of the place you arrive at, but the stark reality of the places in between: "On trains, when he takes one, Robert Bristol always gets on with the intention of looking at the landscape to observe how the transition from city to countryside occurs. Leaving one without, however, having entered the other. And the periphery complicates the project; it is never a clean leap. There are housing developments that contradict the silos, company parking lots that contradict the crops, a supermarket." discount disavowed a fertilizer plant […] Among the scattered buildings, one occasionally sees farmhouses, some still in use –clothes hanging on a line–, others abandoned due to suicides –plants growing out of holes in the roof–, ready to be reincarnated as weekend homes.” locus amoenusWhy?!
The plot of Bristol board It's fun, but the best thing about the book is the way it's written. The author translates the language of cinema into descriptive language: shots and reverse shots, voiceovers that summarize what's happening so we can move forward, lines of text that speak directly to us. If you're looking for a book to have a good time, this new release from Raig Verd is for you. Oh, by the way, Echenoz is this year's international guest at the MOT Festival in Girona. So fans of his writing can take note: they can hear him live on Saturday, March 28th, in conversation with Anna Casassas. Perhaps the translator will ask him if he thinks life is a movie… or not.
