I’m Gone, a novel by Jean Echenoz, winner of the Goncourt Prize and first published in 1999 (Je m’en vais, Les Éditions de Minuit), is a farewell to the 20th century. Félix Ferrer, an art dealer and gallerist, overcomes various challenges, sometimes against his will and other times through sheer luck. His trials range from a journey to the Arctic to retrieve indigenous artworks from the Nechilik, a ship stranded among glaciers, to the subsequent theft and recovery of this treasure, a serious heart condition, relocations from one Parisian arrondissement to another, and constant changes in romantic partners.
He manages to surmount everything, except being himself in a century that has brought more misfortunes than fortunes to humanity, where art is valued in monetary terms even before its creation, and love grows increasingly intolerant and colder. When it seems that Ferrer has finally met in Hélène the person life had denied him for years, their moments together are marked by a strange silence:
“Accompanied by an appropriate glance and smile, silence can yield excellent results, unusual intensities, subtle perspectives, exquisite aftertastes, definitive decisions. But that was not the case. It all boiled down to thick, heavy, cumbersome silences, like clay sticking to the soles of shoes.”
Echenoz maintains a steady narrative pace in I’m Gone. Though written in the third person, he positions himself so close to the characters that it feels almost as if the reader is inside their minds, as if reading descriptive monologues.
