Jean-Yves Jouannais is not read, he is visited. You have to know how to find it and then enjoy it, because it is not evident, like many of the most beautiful coves of our coast. Now, in Sand barriers. Treaty of Coastal Castillology (Cliff, 2025), Jouannais takes up his most lucid obsession: to think about the world through what, apparently, does not count, building a cartography with the wisdom of children who, without knowing it, philosophize at the foot of the beach.
Because yes, the object of study is the sand castle here. But not as an easy metaphor (or the ephemeral, nor of vanity, nor of lost childhood), but as an epistemological artifact, as a conceptual construction that the author himself frames within his Coastal Castillology invented but methodologically rigorous discipline. Thus, a Jouannais faithful to himself proposes a treaty as deliciously useless as deeply revealing. And in that paradoxical balance lies its charm (and its challenge).
⁄ The book is a treaty as deliciously useless as revealing, and in that paradoxical balance lies its charm
It is not an easy book, nor wants to be. But neither is it unintelligible. The reader accustomed to Jouannais, the one who enjoyed his Artists without work (Cliff, 2014) or The use of ruins (Cliff, 2017), will recognize the style here: a dense but sparkling prose, which mixes erudition with dry humor, and an apparent digression with a precise background architecture like a fort. And, in this book, the phrases are chained as dunes pushed by a wind that, far from being arbitrary, seems to follow a wind rose known only by the author.
The work is presented as a kind of fragmentary treaty, as Jouannais, organized in short chapters ranging from philosophical meditation, historical digression and the deliciously apocryphal anecdote. It is difficult to know where the documentation ends and where the fabulation begins. But that is precisely the grace: the space between data and delirium.
And best of all, Jouannais seems to claim the right to waste time, but to lose it well, with an almost monastic discipline. And that is where his style becomes a way of thought. The choice of a minor object (a summer children’s game) is no coincidence, but a challenge: to demonstrate that everything can be worthy of analysis, if the eye is sharp enough and the heart ironic enough.
The book also drinks from the tradition of the pataphysics that fictitious science of absurd and exceptions, invented by the eccentric genius Alfred Jarry, creator of the work Ubu roi . But what might seem like a French intellectual boutade wanting to show off (and perhaps it is a bit) becomes, by Jouannais, an invitation to look again what we thought we had seen a thousand times.
Sand castles, here, are also military forts, emotional architecture models, ephemeral symbols of power or care. But above all they are a pretext for a writing that resembles the object that describes: fragile, thorough, beautiful, and condemned to be erased by the next wave of reading.
There is, of course, the risk of a certain excessive self -referentiality, which can make the less seasoned reader lose. But for those who accept the game and understand that the true subject of Jouannais is not the sand, but the gesture of building in it, Sand barriers It is a banquet of ideas wrapped in beautiful words like shells.
More than a book, it is a secret cove: not everyone will reach it, but whoever will go out with the swimsuit full of treasures.
Jean-Yves Jouannais Sand barriers Translation by JR Monreal Cliff 176 pages 16 euros
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