John Keene on Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men

John Keene (winner of a 2018 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) talks with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s 2021 Prix Goncourt-winning novel The Most Secret Memory of Men, the joys of a shaggy dog story, the power of the sublime, and the limits of knowledge.

For a full episode transcript, click here.

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Reading list: 

The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, tr. by Laura Vergnaud • Blackouts by Justin Torres • Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem • Roberto Bolaño • Clarice Lispector

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From the episode:

Michael Kelleher: I think this epigraph from Bolaño is one of like the great epigraphs you know, and it’s the novel like takes its title from, from maybe I’ll just read it really quick just because I feel like it, it covers so much about what’s going on in the book and what’s interesting about this book and what might be interesting about Elimane and what, what about Elimane anyone about whom you have passion might lead you on quest of this kind.

It says: “For some time, the critique accompanies the work. Then, the critique fades away, and it is the readers who accompany it. The journey can be long or short. Then, the readers die one by one, and the work continues alone. Although another critique and other readers gradually accompany it on its voyage. Then the critique dies again, and the readers die again, and on that trail of bones, the work continues its journey towards solitude. To approach it, to sail in its wake, is an unmistakable sign of certain death. But another critique, and other readers, approach it tirelessly and relentlessly, and time and speed devour them. Finally, the work travels unavoidably alone in the vastness. And one day The work dies, as all things die, as the sun and the earth, the solar system and the galaxy, and the most secret memory of men will be extinguished.”

John Keene: Yeah.

MK: I just love that he’s comparing the work of art to, like, the death of the sun. It gets at something that you’re talking about, right? It gets at that idea of the sublime. It’s so incomprehensible that when you try to think about it, your mind is completely overwhelmed, but in a kind of ecstatic way, in a way that, that becomes generative, in a way that makes you want to follow something, it makes you want to produce something, it makes you want to, to be an artist and make art, commune with others.

John Keene: And it’s sustaining. It’s sustaining, but it epitomizes that phrase, and he’s gotta, this is the other thing too. The, there’s a lot of, uh, riffing on titles and famous quotes and things, you know, going back to Hippocrates, right? Ars longa, vita brevis, you know, this idea that, that art…

Art has multiple lives, even if our lives are brief, right? But yes, it is almost like the solar system, right? It’s going to be around long after we die. And then it may, and things may vanish for a while, but then someone may come and resurrect them, right? A new critique, a new set of fans, a new set of readers, writers, enthusiasts, and then that dies down and the work itself and the writer who created it may disappear.

But then, of course, here comes another, you know, another wave of people. And I feel like Bolaño, in a sense, was, eulogized in advance his own passing, you know, what was going to happen to his work, right? We see it’s, it’s, you know, a source of endless fascination for readers and other writers.

But I, I feel like the work at the heart of this book, this work, which really, in a sense, did disappear, comes back and resonates even if it’s just through one person or a small cadre of people, the effects just keep rippling out, rippling out, rippling out.

And then they may die down, but it’s going to happen again and again until, of course, yes, there is no one left and it is just the most secret memory of men