When asked about the novel, David Foenkinos summed it up in three words: “rupture, destruction, revenge”. Looking up the meaning of the word “pause” in the dictionary, it means “what you cut from something”. Perhaps Foinkins’ opinion is completely wrong about his novel, or, more precisely, the novel cannot be reduced to three words.
And if you reduce it to three words, it is certain that the break will be within it, but in the sense that you take a moment to understand and understand the beauty. A moment to walk towards the camel, driven by the desire to assimilate it, not to run on it. There is a kind of beauty that can only be understood through the pain of what happens to its owner, and there is a beauty that hides and is not seen, although one surrounds oneself in all its aspects except through pain. Perhaps this is the story of Antoine Doris, the hero of Foinkinus’ novel, who sought beauty and didn’t understand it until he went through some kind of pain. David Foenkinos (1974) paints a world of great complexity through the search for beauty, with two main characters, Antoine Doris and Camille. He plots a long way to the hidden beauty that we only glimpse by walking down a path full of pain. Antoine Doris is a professor of fine arts at a university in Lyon. At some point he decides to leave everything he has made of his life to work as a caretaker at the Musée d’Orsay. Nobody understood why he worked, but basically he was looking for beauty. He seeks beauty within himself as a comfort and consolation for the estrangement with his wife. A break with the world of him that he left, and saw that the best thing he could do for himself was work as a guard in the museum and talk to the painting hanging in front of him. “Everyone seeks their own way to console themselves,” said Doris, “can one heal oneself by revealing to a painting?” There is a lot of talk about the art of therapy and creativity to express the perversion of mood and to make oneself understood through inspiration. However, this was different. Contemplation of beauty, according to Antoine, is a cover-up for ugliness (and it always has been). So when he got sick, he went for a walk in a museum. Magnificence remains the best weapon against fragility “.
Doris somehow covered up the ugliness of her life, talking to a hanging painting, telling her about her secrets, her feelings, her pain. He went from his pain to beauty in search of comfort. Throughout four chapters, Foinkins ties Doris ‘search for beauty to her attempt to console herself by his wife’s estrangement, but during the chapters it becomes clear that Doris’ search for beauty was consolation for the suicide of her student Camille, who finds also in beauty the consolation of what has happened to her. Camille was raped by her high school painting teacher, suffering from a severe depression that only saved her from a long trip with her mother and father to the “Musée d’Orsay”. Standing in front of the painting, she says, “I understood the power of beauty to heal wounds. In front of a painting we are not judged, because the exchange is pure, where the work seems to understand our pain and free us in silence, and it remains forever and reassuring, and its only purpose is to shower you with waves of beauty. The pains are forgotten with Botticelli (1445-1510), fears are lessened with Rembrandt (1606-1669) and worries diminish with Chagall (11887-1985).
The author summed up his novel in three words: alienation, destruction and revenge
Foinkins binds together the fates of Doris and Camille, both amazed by their beauty and ability to heal wounds. But the most interesting thing about the work is that they both migrate from their original place to another place, and the word walk is mentioned a lot in both languages, and beauty is not reduced to an idea. He added to the idea of looking for beauty a lot, and he didn’t reduce it to a painting or talk to it, Camille says: “Sometimes you can heal with a simple geographical shift.” Perhaps this is another meaning that confirms the idea of work, which is an attempt to walk towards beauty and seek it. Both were moved by a kind of mourning. Camille was moved by the mourning of her rape of her and Doris was moved by what she thought was the reason for her suicide because she wrote her a regular review of one of her paintings of her. Many phrases are repeated, such as “Beauty makes a person stronger”, “Beauty relaxes”. Perhaps what the reader sees after completing the work is that beauty saves his personal world, filling the void that surrounds him, and this beauty can be in a painting, in a poem or in a novel. Life is full of beauty, but to understand it perhaps you have to go through the pain of something that changes your idea of beauty and its effect. The distancing can – despite its multiple meanings – become the road that removes dust from anyone who blinds him from seeing the beauty that surrounds him.
