I have been attracted today by a character created by Simon Van Booy in his The Illusion of Separateness.  We never learn the character’s name.  As a German soldier, then a former German soldier he is referred to as A.  When he is cared for after he is shot, they know nothing about him except that he has a book in his pocket by Victor Hugo so they call him Mr. Hugo.

Mr. Hugo as we come to know him is shaped by his long hospitalization, then years living on the street, and finally some years as a janitor.  His life has not led him to expect much and he takes in small pleasures that have intrigued me.  From the hospital, they sent him to Gare du Nord, a transit station in the north part of Paris.  At night he listens to the signboards change and he calls it “the applause of falling letters.” Just right.

He refers to the coming of the morning after a long cold night as “the armor of dawn” and says it brought relief.  He slept under the bridges in the summer.  He says, “It was cool in the summer with my back against the stone.  I didn’t mind being alone.  I watched all.  I listened.  Slept.  Felt okay if I never woke up.”

He is offered a chance to live in California by a man who is now a famous film director, but who was a broken 14 year old boy in London when he knew Mr. Hugo.  He likes the idea of living in a sunny climate, but he frets over what he will miss if he leaves London.  He would miss, for instance the names scratched into the glass of the back window of the bus he takes on Tuesdays.  Then, he says, he would not know that: Daz luvz Ram or that Gareth is a Twat or that Lizzie is a slag.  It is hard for him to leave, not really knowing.

A reviewer from the Wall Street Journal says that Simon van Booy “deftly portrays his characters’ raw emotions.”  His treatment of Mr. Hugo is very simple and it moved me.