Flash fiction, Ivan de Monbrison
Marseille, August 2nd 2025
So, I just…I just, uh, I just finished reading uh, the book A Portrait of Jennie.
I don’t know what to think of it, because you see I’m a painter myself and I did have some models sitting. I actually had a relationship with one of my models that lasted for six years. So, I know what it’s like. It’s a weird novel and. I’m not sure that the ending is correct; but it says something. I saw the movie too, but Joseph Cotten isn’t any credible in the movie as an artist. Actually he’s totally fucked up.
After closing the book, I thought for what purpose should I make up a story? What is it to write a story about love, love lost and found, etc…growing up with love, balding with love! hahaha…Well I don’t know. It’s funny. You read the book, you find it fine and you close it and it’s not so good anymore.
Right now, I’m in Marseille, in the south of France for a week.
And there’s a bright Summer Sun. And the sky is
crazy blue.
So, some swifts are still out there flying. And, you know, there are a bunch of trees too that I can see from my window, shivering under the summer wind.
Well, I’m French. I’m not American. So I’m not sure whether I know English very well. It is funny to write this.
I don’t know if it is still possible to write fiction anymore. What does it mean to write fiction? To invent characters or even your own self-fiction, you know, all this crap.
I know, I know I sound bitter and I just took one Prozac and one antipsychotic just in order to be able to drag myself out before night comes. I have my paintings hanging around me in the room…most of them abstract.
What is abstraction? I guess abstraction is the footprint of the mind left on canvas. I just saw a painting by André Masson recently at the Museum here. I felt that even if Andre Masson was not a very good painter he did really influence Pollock a great deal (Just as Robert Nathan was not a very good writer).
I still don’t know.
My mother has terminal cancer, she will be dead probably before winter . And for myself, I am not a young man anymore. So, after closing the book, I remembered and mused on who I was twenty years ago and it doesn’t make any sense to me anymore, this life.
Ivan de Monbrison is a person affected by strong psychiatric disorders that prevent him from having what others may call a “normal” life. He has found writing to be an exit to this prison. Or maybe it is a window from which – like an inmate – he can see a small square of blue sky above his head. His writing often reflects the never-ending chaos within him, but contrary to this mental chaos, the paper and the pen give him the opportunity to materialize this in a concrete and visible form. Writing can feel like a slow death, but it’s better than mere suicide in the end.
