The Rest of Us

Hey there. Troubled times, so I'm really just reading around trying to make sense of what I can. Just finished another novel. It's just come out in French. It's by Stéphane Audeguy, and I'm liking it much much more than his first one which I read when it came out. It's called Nous Autres in French, and I think it should be titled The Rest of Us in English. A "we" narrates the novel, and we readers are given to understand that the narrator is basically all of the attentive dead of Africa. Here's a translation of its last paragraph, which has me on the verge of tears.

"One morning, Pierre discovers an extremely bizarre trace of something all the way at the end of the beach. It’s a kind of ribbon made up of little twists. It’s impossible for him to imagine what had left such a wake in the sand. He slowly follows it, trying to understand, trembling at the idea that this mysterious mark might just stop somewhere, thereby forever keeping its secret. At the moment the hesitant writing of this unknown life seems to him to be the most moving sign of the world’s grace. It goes on for another twenty yards. Finally, he sees a little shellfish quietly making its way with uncertain steps. Pierre calculates the fact that, in proportion to its size, this hermit-crab has just covered the equivalent of two thousand kilometers in this sandy desert. But he’s done so walking parallel to the ocean: the animal is moving surely towards a hideous and slow death. Pierre watches it for a long time. And then he can’t take it anymore, he picks up the animal, it quickly folds itself up into the bottom of its shell, he goes down to the sea and places it carefully into shallow water. He waits. Soon it goes about its business, incomprehensible, indifferent to the miraculous rescue of which it has just been the object. Pierre goes back towards the bungalows. His joy is as pure as the ungrateful crustacean’s joy, now entirely absorbed by the delicate pleasures of life in a lagoon, and the craziest wind won’t be able to shut us up, and our words on the earth one vast tomb."