A complicated childhood that the writer and designer portrayed by touches. Sumptuous graphic memories.
by Denis Cosnard
A few touches of white, a lot of black. From the first page of this strong and sumptuous book, the palette is fixed. Three -quarters of the space are taken by a drawing showing a dark barge moored on the Seine. Coal, no doubt. Below, a few lines. An “attractive smell”, that of a still warm Parisian wand, puts up a childhood memory: “On the way, I nibbled the tip before dropping it on the table.” But with white crumbs succeeds immediately A dampering funeral: “We lived (…) Avenue du Général-Michel-Bizot-This soldier was shot on April 15, 1855 in a poorly protected English trench.”
Everyone has their own madeleine. That of Frédéric Pajak, this lukewarm baguette, makes ghosts resurface. Those who had he had seen in an episode of Zorro, thugs paid with white sheets which terrorized him. Those, above all, strange and familiar, whom he keeps penny, book after book, with words and drawings that cohabit without marrying. Missing from history like General Bizot or, more often, from his own family. Yes, he notes, “I would live my whole life chased by ghosts”. Unless it is he who pursues them?
Three uncles
Three occupy the front of the stage in his new book, in the calm of the evening. Three uncles, all dead, and hardly shiny. Uncle Jean-Paul was a former Indochina, a survivor gnawed with remorse, passed to the far right. The uncle René, a brutal, angry man, recruited by force in the Wehrmacht before fleeing and participating in the liberation of Colmar, called his Algerian workers “rats”. The third, “Uncle N.”, a lively flay marked by the suicide of his mother, directed important European institutions in an approximate manner: “He knew how to take great liberties with the rigor required such administration.”
Behind these three ghosts slip others, more stealthy and more essential at the same time. Pajak devotes a few poignant pages to his mother, this woman whom he sometimes hated, but whose he claims to have forgiven the absence of love. As for his father, a painter of Polish origin killed at 35 in a car accident, he only talks about a line or two, but who are worth a thousand: “For me, Jacques Pajak is not Death. “For more than twenty years, all the books of the Son revrete around this elusive spectrum.
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