Certain advertising slogans are well known. Such as: “Seventy meters he fell deep/ His heart stood still/ But his Pontiac ran.” During the Tour de France of 1951, cyclist Wim van Est fell while descending the Aubisque. He was pulled from the ravine with bicycle tires tied together. A black-and-white photo has survived in which we see him sitting on the roadside, crying, with the yellow sweater still around his shoulders. The fall itself has not been photographed, but it must have looked like artist Sempé immortalized a similar moment in Raoul Taburin’s Secret from 1995. An Icarus-esque figure, painted with gray watercolor, flies over a chasm with bicycle and all, under the headline: ‘Insane stunt by foolish cyclist’.
Jean-Jacques Sempé, who turns 90 in August, is one of France’s greatest illustrators. His story series Le petit Nicolas and Un peu de Paris, you can safely call his poetic tribute to the French capital a classic. It is actually strange that a translation of Raoul Taburin, of which a successful film adaptation was made in 2018. The book and film are all about Raoul Taburin’s curious secret: he can’t ride a bike! Everyone knows the qualities of this mechanic from the village of Saint-Céron, not least the rider Sauveur Bilongue, who thanks to him won a stage in the Tour de France. But the bicycle builder cannot cycle himself. “No matter how much he practiced on asphalt or dirt roads, he couldn’t keep himself upright on two wheels.” Fortunately, his experience with rollovers, skids and shock absorption had made him “a master of the art of falling.”
And then Hervé Figougne appears in his life, a gifted photographer eager to capture Raoul as he rides his bicycle down a hill. Raoul has no choice but to face his fears and defy gravity. Small spoiler: that doesn’t end well.
In short, a funny story with beautiful drawings, but what makes the book priceless is Sempé’s play with proper names that become brand names. Raoul Taburin’s bicycles are so good that they are given an honorary title: the bicycle you buy from him is not just any bicycle, it is a ‘taburin’. One of his fellow villagers is the butcher Auguste Frognard, whose hams are so good that a ‘frognard’ indicates a very nice piece of meat. And then there is optician Frédéric Bifaille, who sells special glasses. The lenses and frames that you purchase from him are more than just utensils: they are real ‘bifailles’. With this, Sempé parodies the French obsession with terroir and the tendency on any quality product in the vicinity to have a appellation of origin want to paste. You should The secret of Raboul Taburin So don’t just call it a book. It’s a ‘sempe’.
Jean-Jacques Sempé: The Secret of Raoul Taburin. Translated from the French by Kris Lauwerys and Isabelle Schoepen. banks; 96 pages; €22.50.
