“De quoi est faite l’ardeur de voyager ? sa brûlure ? de tous les moments sans hiérarchie, de toutes les rencontres.” Chantal Thomas

[What is the yearning for travel made of? its burning? Of all the moments without hierarchy, of all the encounters.]

In the early ’80s, after a string of mostly happy coincidences, Chantal Thomas is invited to teach for a semester at the University of Tucson. With only a cabin bag, she leaves New York for Arizona and keeps a journal over the course of her stay,where she writes about the beauty of spring in the desert, the cacti in bloom, the smells and colors that make her uprooting enchanting, and the people she meets.

Since Souvenirs de la marée basse, Chantal Thomas’s books read like intimate conversations with the world around her, and with her readings. This diary, written in the present and always on the move, is shaped like an exploration. Journal d’Arizona states Thomas’s presence in the world with a clarity and a precision that allows us to experience both the materiality and immateriality of her surroundings with uncommon intensity and force.

The author discovers Arizona like a lover, and the exploration of the places becomes a sensual adventure that summons all her senses. She abandons herself to the places she visits, just as one gives oneself to another, to their caress. What Thomas describes with particular accuracy is the intoxication of novelty, and its ability to free us from our past, and to make us feel as light and new as the environment around us.

Thomas wants to see everything about Tucson and its culture, from evenings out with colleagues, where she starts out bored stiff and ends up dancing like a devil, to strip clubs, which she compares to the morning ritual of the king getting up at Versailles. Her (expatriate) gaze is lively and funny, as she follows the poet’s injunction and dives into the heart of the unknown to find something new.
Thomas’s attention is focused on details, and a touch of Modianesque melancholy can sometimes be heard in a paragraph: “There’s always a woman in a West Coast airport who’d like to look like Liz Taylor.”

At times, her exploration sounds like an escape, in between lines, she confides that she has left New York in the middle of a painful breakup: “Life in the desert, a way of sweeping away the past.” She describes her stay in Tucson as one of perpetual motion, just like the book that haunts her, J. Kerouac’s On the Road. And then, with the same freedom, she leaves for Mexico, and falls under its spell; she basks in the bright colors, the effervescence, the music and laughters.

These Arizona diaries are an invitation to live life as an adventure, to open up to the world and embrace its beauty. Like an epicurean promise, renewed on every page.

Journal d’Arizona by Chantal Thomas, Seuil
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Miriam Bridenne

After almost two decades of working in publishing, and a few round trips between Paris and New York, Miriam has decided to settle down at Albertine to do what she enjoys most: recommending books she loves. Somehow this also includes taking bizarre pictures for Albertine's social media outlets.

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