Jean Echenoz, Courir
Our Reading Journey
In our discussion of this 2008 novel, we followed the fictionalized life of Emil Zátopek, the Czech long-distance runner whom Echenoz calls simply Émile, a shoe-factory apprentice from Moravia who discovers, almost by accident, that he can run faster and longer than anyone else. We traced how the story unfolds against the two invasions that bookend it: German troops entering Moravia in 1939 and Soviet tanks arriving in Prague in 1968, with Émile's Olympic training and record-breaking career unfolding in between, on cinder tracks and in a borrowed tracksuit, under a state eager to claim his victories as its own.
Our conversation centered on what Echenoz withholds rather than what he includes. We noted how the novel refuses Émile any confession or interior monologue, giving us only gestures, training routines, and races, and we discussed this approach as an inheritance of the Nouveau Roman's distrust of psychology, filtered through Echenoz's own ironic, tender distance from his subject. We compared this method to Ravel, the biofiction Echenoz published two years earlier, and asked what it means to build a portrait entirely from the outside.
We were especially drawn to the mechanics of Echenoz's prose: sentences that lengthen into inventories and then cut, almost cinematically, from a training track to a barracks to a factory floor. Our session left us with a lingering question: what does it mean to write a hero defined only by what his legs do, who never once explains himself to us?
About the Author
Jean Echenoz was born in 1947 in Orange, in the south of France, and has published without interruption at Les Éditions de Minuit since his 1979 debut, Le Méridien de Greenwich, which won the Prix Fénéon the following year. The Prix Médicis followed in 1983 for Cherokee, and the Prix Goncourt in 1999 for Je m'en vais; in 2016, the Bibliothèque nationale de France honored the whole of his work with its prize. Belonging to what critics call the second school of Minuit, Echenoz inherited the formal rigor of the Nouveau Roman while restoring the pleasures it had set aside: plot, humor, and a sustained attention to the object.
