Into great silence: Pierre Peju's La Petite Chartreuse, a contemporary tale of secular pilgrimage

La Petite Chartreuse (2002), penned by the prolific yet understudied novelist and essayist Pierre Peju, charts an unlikely relationship in the wake of a devastating accident. As he walks the Massif de la Chartreuse in the shadow of the Carthusian Grande Chartreuse, a solitary bookseller searches inner depths and mountainous heights before confronting his eponymous young victim's death-and his own. Informed by the hermeneutical relationship between tale and travel, this chapter reads the novel as a contemporary conte (as theorized by Peju himself), as well as a secular pilgrimage (informed, notably, by Thomas Merton). I contend that Peju's secular antihero, within (rather than in spite of) physically circumscribed conditions, paradoxically scales spiritual heights epitomized by these two wayfaring narrative traditions. His tale offers a defense and illustration of reading in the face of modernity's acceleration and dematerialization, challenges contemporary unease before suffering, and belies personal and narrative expectations like progress and harmonious closure. Ultimately, I suggest that Peju plots a profoundly humanistic voyage unto death, as he defamiliarizes the very terrain of these travel genres.