French publishers and critics are often accused of being in thrall to the
culture of the prize; there are too many awards and the same authors’ names
turn up again and again, despite the hundreds of new books that appear each
year. You can even buy a book about book prizes, the Guide des prix et
concours littéraires, 2008, by Bertrand Labes. This year, however, the
rentrée littéraire was energized by the award of the biggest prize of all,
the Nobel Prize for Literature to a French novelist, J. M. G. Le Clézio, a
generally popular choice. The Villa Gillet in Lyon, which promotes writing
of all sorts throughout the year and especially in the spring (“Assises
Internationales du Roman”) and at the rentrée, is not interested in
agonizing over shortlists. The director, Guy Walter, prefers to consider a
handful of new books he and his team find interesting, and their success in
finding distinguished writers is remarkable.
This autumn they chose four novels from the 676 books published in 2008 to be
discussed at an evening under the title “Vu d'ailleurs”, at which foreign
critics are invited to give their slant on the rentrée. (I attended with
Eric Banks, the former editor of Bookforum.) The four books chosen are very
different – one would not even be called a novel in English – but the
evening revealed some similarities in subject matter, form and attitude.
Memory, the need to bear witness, romantic and family love are vital to
these books, as is a curiosity about the world beyond the confines of
literary Paris.
L’Excuse by Julie Wolkenstein is the most self-consciously literary of the
four; it opens with a series of reminiscences recounted by Lise, a
Frenchwoman who has returned after a long absence to a beautiful house in
Martha’s Vineyard, a place full of memories. Lise has inherited the house
from her “aunt” (actually her father’s first wife); she first came there as
a young woman soon after her father’s death and quickly became involved with
this new family. Her “cousin”, Nick, who died romantically young of an
inherited disease, has left boxes of “affaires personnelles” for her; one
containing photographs, another full of different objects – a telegram,
audio cassettes, playing cards – and a third which has a manuscript with the
title “Déjà-vu”. “Déjà-vu” is Nick’s version of Lise’s life, as dictated by
Henry James; Nick is possessed by the idea that Lise is a reincarnation of
Isabel Archer, and that the plot of The Portrait of a Lady eerily shadows
her existence. The narrative jumps backwards and forwards between the
adventures of the young Lise with Nick, and their friends and lovers and
Lise’s adjustment to her new life as a retired, single, childless woman
living in Martha’s Vineyard.
For the “Vu d’ailleurs” evening, each author wrote a short text and provided a
keyword essential to the book in question; Wolkenstein, who is a professor
of comparative literature at the University of Caen, chose “le jeu” as her
mot clef, and she explored it fully with relation to L’Excuse. It is, indeed
a very playful work, though not jocular; games are played on many levels.
Nick is playing a posthumous game with Lise as he recounts her life back to
her, leaving clues in the boxes for her to hunt down and put together.
Wolkenstein plays with the reader by leaving her own clues, sometimes
sending us racing ahead of Lise, sometimes withholding information. The
literary game is to spot where Lise’s story combines and collides with
Isabel Archer’s, and to see how cleverly Wolkenstein has created Jamesian
echoes, parallels and mirror images. The title comes from a game, often
played by Nick and Lise; the (fiendishly complicated) French card game
“tarot” has a card called “l’excuse”, which can either be played high or
low. The outcome of the game can hinge on this card. L’Excuse is an elegant,
cerebral book, but it does have a heart. As Lise tells her story, she takes
on a life of her own and there are hinterlands, such as the death of her
baby, that she will not and cannot explore; Wolkenstein handles these
episodes delicately and they provide a strong counterpoint to Lise’s
intellectual detours.
In contrast to the organized formalism of L’Excuse, Pôle Sud by Nicolas Texier
is a wandering, looping tale, which makes long narrative leaps across time
and space, tucks stories within stories and leaves the reader guessing until
the very last. At the centre of the novel is Fouad Jallâladîn Moumsen, an
Iraqi who specializes in the biology of seals, specifically the Weddell
Seal. This odd juxtaposition is a deliberate device to make the character
something more than just a representative Iraqi, a victim of history and
circumstances; Fouad is well-respected and successful in his (admittedly
narrow) field. When the narrator, a biologist who has his own adventures in
the course of the book but who remains unnamed, first meets Fouad, the Iraqi
is in an emotional state. He has come from London, where he has just split
from his long-term girlfriend, Liz; to add to his misery, while he was
waiting outside Liz’s flat for signs of her betrayal, he saw an apparition,
a spectre, of his uncle Abbas, long missing in the Iran–Iraq war. He meets
our narrator just after these events and they spend two months together on a
boat in the Antarctic, collecting material for a new seal study. Fouad has
plenty of time to tell his story, and the two become close. When they return
from their expedition Fouad keeps his friend up to date with his attempts to
discover whether uncle Abbas really is alive; eventually, he goes back to
Iraq to try and find out the truth. His experiences there come in the form
of a long letter, in which Fouad recounts the twists and turns of his
all-consuming quest. The strangeness and everyday brutality of the occupied
country are vividly conveyed; there is also room for humour, as when Fouad
describes one of the freedom fighters he is visiting as having “l’air
perpétuel d’ennui qu’ont presque toutes les espèces d’otaries à fourrure”
(the constant look of boredom that almost all types of sea lions have).
These former soldiers, whose aim is to attack the occupying forces, are
deftly drawn by Texier; they have their own war stories to tell and are in
many ways sympathetic characters. Nor are the occupying forces vilified;
Fouad describes a group of American soldiers as just as fearful and as much
under siege as the civilians.
In the end, after his wanderings, Fouad returns Ulysses-like to London, and
finds out what happened to his uncle. He also learns, slowly and painfully,
further lessons about love and forgiveness. Pôle Sud is full of surprises
and incongruities, changes of tempo and narrator, longueurs and passages of
tense excitement, meditations on trust and love. It is one of the most
unusual books of the rentrée, but it is also a thoughtful, thought-provoking
work.
Barlen Pyamootoo’s novel, Salogi’s, also deals with death and the family, but
from a very different angle. It is essentially a paean to Pyamootoo’s
mother, Salogi. He opens the book with details of her death in a traffic
accident in her native Mauritius, and describes the grief and shock felt by
her extended family. Pyamootoo himself cannot bear to hear the family talk
about her, he dreams of her constantly – it takes a year and a half for his
dreams to register her as no longer alive – and he begins writing this book
as a way of bearing witness to his mother’s life. He reproduces her early
diaries – she did not learn to read until she was thirty-four – and then
retraces her childhood and eventually the family life that included him.
The family moves between Mauritius, England and France, often in search of
work, but the most vivid scenes are those in Mauritius, with its dirt roads,
cane fields and families grouped around one radio, where Pyamootoo has since
returned to live. The island is now marketed as a holiday paradise, but
Salogi and her family lived in poverty and worked long and hard from a young
age. Despite these difficult circumstances, Salogi’s sweetness and strength
illuminate this book; clearly the heart of her family, she looked after
everybody within the family circle, yet was not afraid to go abroad alone in
search of work. Pyamootoo recalls the neighbour’s children, whose mother, a
distant relative, had died and whose father could barely look after them;
they sometimes mixed dirt into their food to make it go further. They were
welcomed by Salogi who fed them even when food was scarce for her own
family. There are no tricks, no games, few literary devices in Salogi’s. All
is recounted in short episodes in deliberately plain language, which gives
such vignettes a forceful impact: “personne dans [ma] famille ne se
nourrissait de terre, faute de riz, comme Mimine, le fils de Danon, que j’ai
surpris un jour en train d’en mélanger une poignée avec un légume, du
chouchou je crois”.
Pour Vous, by Dominique Mainard, is the most straightforwardly novelistic of
the four; it is driven by character and plot, narrated by one person, and
comes to a satisfying conclusion following dramatic events and upheavals.
The narrator here is Delphine, a thirty-five-year-old woman who runs an
agency, Pour Vous, which caters for every desire. Surprisingly, the majority
of these desires are not sexual; Pour Vous specializes in wish-fulfilment.
For example, Delphine will pose as an ex-wife for a devastated husband, a
beloved granddaughter for an old man with dementia, a go-between for a pair
of adulterers; she will consider any proposition, for the right price. She
justifies this to a client who accuses her of being “une sorte de gigolo” by
saying to herself: “J’étais tout à fait autre chose, pas une voleuse ni
quelqu’un se vend au plus offrant, j’avais des principes, j’avais une
morale, Pour Vous etait une sorte d’oeuvre de charité” (I was something
completely different, neither a thief nor someone who sells herself to the
highest bidder, I had principles, I had morals, Pour Vous was charity work,
in a way).
Delphine swings between self-justification and a hard-headed, businesslike
approach; she does not mind acting out the desires of her clients because
she has no desires or attachments of her own. She finds it difficult to
understand why Marja, her employee, is loath to lend her son for an
afternoon a week to a couple desperate to have children. We learn that
Delphine was abandoned by her mother as a child and brought up in care
homes; this point is lightly made, however, and no morals are drawn. Mainard
lets Delphine speak for herself and as she tells her story – of pregnancy,
too intimate a relationship with an autistic teenager, a sudden realization
that she is capable of feeling after all – she describes a slow breaking
down of barriers. Pour Vous poses serious questions about artifice and
reality, money and relationships and how to engage meaningfully with your
own life, but they are not allowed to get in the way of the story, which
remains compelling until the end.
Pour Vous is the only novel of those under review that uses Paris as its
backdrop, but the city does not play an important role; the story could take
place anywhere. For the other books, France is a point of departure or of
passing through, and there is a sense that the wider world must at least be
taken into account, if not directly engaged with; this is welcome in French
fiction, which can sometimes seem like a closed shop. But this year both the
Goncourt and the Renaudot Prizes were awarded to “outsiders”, one a refugee
from Afghanistan, the other a native of Guinea, a former French colony; an
indication, perhaps, of l'exception française looking outside itself.
Julie Wolkenstein
L’EXCUSE
345pp. P. O. L. ¤20.
978 2 84682 271 8
Nicolas Texier
PÔLE SUD
217pp. Gallimard. ¤16.50.
978 2 07 012221 9
Barlen Pyamootoo
SALOGI’S
138pp. Éditions de l’Olivier. ¤16.
978 2 87929 585 5
Dominique Mainard
POUR VOUS
251pp. Joëlle Losfeld. ¤16.90.
978 2 07078 766 1
Lucy Dallas co-chaired the evening “Vu d’ailleurs” this autumn at the
Villa Gillet, Lyon. She is the editor of the In Brief pages and of the TLS
website.
