Muriel Barbery's One Hour of Fervor

Reviewed by Kevin Canfield

(Europa Editions, 2024)

​Everyone should read great literature. It’s an idea on which universities are founded and careers built. But pretentious, poorly conceived novels can also be instructive; they teach us how to spot pandering, opportunism and fake profundity. Muriel Barbery’s new book offers many such lessons.  
 
One Hour of Fervor is about a Japanese man named Haru Ueno, who, like a character out of Faulkner, “lay dying” on the book’s first page. Barbery—the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, an international bestseller about unlikely friends—describes Haru as a consummate “seeker of form,” a worldview that has made him a “very rich” Kyoto art dealer. This suggests that his professional success is an essential component of the story. It is not. This is a novel that does lots of telling but very little showing when it comes to its protagonist’s working life.
 
What, then, distinguishes Haru, born in 1949, from other Japanese Boomers? The answer has to do with the quality and duration of his sorrow, which begins when he has a portentous encounter with a Frenchwoman visiting his country.
 
Haru meets Maud Arden, a sophisticate who works for a cultural organization, at a party in the late ‘70s. Trying to impress her, “he ventures a lesson in Japanese art,” none of which, alas, appears in the book. “She listens, impassive, and at one point, she murmurs, I agree, the way you might say, I am dying. Haru is lost in this woman. She seems infinite to him, and at the same time, she isn’t there.”
 
Haru has been hurled into a metaphorical “void inhabited by dead stars.” Like so much in this novel, which favors abstraction over detail, it’s tough to know what this means. But one thing is clear: It’s a void where everybody is extremely horny.
 
Haru and Maud find a bed, where, according to Barbery’s cringey account, Haru “penetrates her, and her silent passivity leads him into moments of unprecedented ecstasy. Probably, if she came to life, the spell would be broken, but she does not come to life, and he loses himself in his own delight.”
 
Their affair lasts for a few days, and after Maud returns to France, Haru learns from a mutual acquaintance that she’s pregnant. Haru sends her a letter, pledging emotional and financial support if the baby is his. Her reply, which confirms that he’s the father, concludes with a stark warning: If Haru tries to have a relationship with their child, Maud will kill herself. Why would having this apparently gentle man in her life would make her end her own? Maud doesn’t explain.
 
Haru promises to honor Maud’s wishes but secretly rejects the idea that he’ll know nothing of his child’s youth. He hires a private detective to dig up info on Maud and, when their daughter Rose is born, a sneaky photographer willing to document Rose’s life without Maud finding out. It’s a disturbing endeavor that raises lots of ethical and moral questions; Barbery dispenses with these in half a paragraph, absolving Haru of “guilt” because he treats the photos with “respect” and “gratitude.” This goes on for decades (it’s good to be a wealthy art dealer), during which Haru sees images that suggest Rose, once a bubbly child, has become a morose adult without friends or romantic relationships. Though he tells no one that he has a daughter, Haru never gives up the hope that someday they’ll meet.
 
The storyline might remind readers of one of Paul Auster’s novels about obsessed loners. The difference is that there’s no intrigue in Barbery’s book. We learn virtually nothing about how the surveillance takes place; the people conducting it; or if, as seems likely, Maud or Rose suspect they’re being watched. When he’s alone, Barbery writes, Haru speaks to Rose as if she were in the room, but the details of these monologues are vague and cliché-ridden: “He explained his work to her and shared his likes and dislikes, unveiled the workings—and tricks—of his trade.” Readers curious about those dislikes and tricks will be left wanting, as will those who believe each sentence of a novel should serve a purpose (Alison Anderson, who translated the book from the French, does a capable job considering the text she was handed).
 
Instead of exploring Haru’s idiosyncrasies, Barbery resorts to the kind of cultural stereotypes and gauzy prose that would get a richly deserved pummeling in any self-respecting writers’ workshop. Over sake, Haru and his friends exchange folk tales that originated in the Heian period (794-1185), reminisce about Noh plays they saw long ago, perform drunken kabuki parodies and think big, vague, “thoughts about the impossible depth of Japanese feelings” and “the Japanese soul.” The latter, Haru decides after a deadly earthquake, can be summed up thusly: “Through our land and our destiny, we’re condemned to stay close to the surface, and, cut off from our inner depths, we’re struck full on by disasters and cataclysms.” If, as it seems, Haru is saying that Japanese are relatively unemotional, this is awfully close to some pernicious stereotypes.  
 
Likewise, Barbery’s characters deal in banalities that render them one-dimensional exotics. “Life,” Haru thinks, “must be a path washed by gentle rain, under a sky of ever-changing transparency.” Later, after witnessing heretofore hidden aspects of a friend’s personality, he decides that “everything is invisible, and everything is there in front of us.” Some readers are quick to shout “cultural appropriation” when an author writes fiction about a person from another culture, but this is a critical cul-de-sac, where artistic freedom goes to die. It's fair to say, though, that Barbery has written a deeply superficial book.
 
Barbery lived for a time in Kyoto, and from the attention she pays to the city’s natural beauty and elegant Shinto shrines, it’s clear that she adores Japan. But her depiction of Haru is flat, clumsy and condescending—not because she doesn’t have the right to tell his story, but because she doesn’t take the time to equip him distinctive traits, explore the complexities of his work or enable him to say interesting things in original ways. After Haru visits a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, he’s “profoundly happy,” because the site “assuaged grief, purified love, dusted the web of life with a sparkling powder.” This is empty, unspecific, mystical nonsense, like something from a story about a cartoon princess.
 
More than once, Haru tells a Heian-era fable about a woman and a fox who, having learned to speak to one another, say “only the names of their dead.” It’s a nice enough metaphor for Haru’s plight—he mourns the absence of a person he’s never met, and though he’s multilingual, he’s yet to find the words that describe his feelings. In this, he’s not alone. “Stories speak to us,” a friend reminds him, though “we don’t know how they do it.” Fair enough. But as this book demonstrates, some stories have nothing to say. 

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​Kevin Canfield's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cineaste, Film Comment and other publications. He lives in New York City.