Philippe Rahmy

Béton armé

«Shanghai is not a city. This is not the word that comes to mind. Nothing comes. Then astonishment at the noise. Noise like the ocean or an engine of war. A tumult, an infinity of perspectives, angles and surfaces amplifying the racket.»

«Shanghai is not a city. This is not the word that comes to mind. Nothing comes. Then astonishment at the noise. Noise like the ocean or an engine of war. A tumult, an infinity of perspectives, angles and surfaces amplifying the racket.» The man who dedicates himself to that megalomaniac colossus Shanghai in «Reinforced Concrete» – and does so with all his senses, especially his sense of rhythm and the sound of words – is forty years old and severely disabled since birth.
He is the author Philippe Rahmy, who was invited there by the Chinese Writers Association. This residency in Shanghai is, for Rahmy – who suffers from brittle-bone disease – the first time he has gone on a journey. «He has never learned to travel.» The city reveals itself to him in all its simplicity: «at the pavement edge…is all the banality that flowers on a piece of asphalt.» So, observations on everyday scenes, smells, light conditions, alternate with political and philosophical reflections on present-day China. The physically and mentally overwhelming brutality of Chinese daily life forces to the surface similarly powerful scenes and memories from his childhood. Shanghai becomes a picture-puzzle in which the pain of the places he visits brutally comes up against the pain of his disabled childhood. A childhood, in which a traumatic event, the author’s birth, is foreshadowed: «That moment is the moment of my death. It is the moment of my birth as a writer. We write in order to silence the beast in ourselves.»

(Sabine Graf)

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia: www.12swissbooks.ch

Translation of title: Reinforced Concrete

Éditions de La Table Ronde, Paris 2013

ISBN: 978-2-7103-7073-4