Adeline Dieudonné: La Vraie Vie | Real Life (2018)

What to do on a wet day in France? Read a book found in a boîte à lire is one possibility, and I've been meaning to read Adeline Dieudonné's first novel La Vraie Vie since it came out three years ago. A popular novel translated into numerous languages isn't normally my idea of fun, but this appeared to be somewhat stranger than the normal popular fare: and it is!

Holding a suspension of disbelief as to how an amusement park employee (the unnamed (at first ten-year-old) narrator's equally unnamed father) could find the money to go around the world and hunt game, or that the same (slightly older) girl can afford to pay an emeritus professor to give her advanced physics lessons out of what she earns through babysitting, this is still some story.

And the fact that it pays off, that the reader continues to read with great relish, is testimony to Dieudonné's writing skills. So what is this about? Well, anyone who glances at the blurb can see it's about a family who live in a house with four bedrooms: the narrator's, her younger brother Gille's, her parents', and that of 'the bodies'. We later learn that the bodies are of wild animals as the father – whose is interested mainly in hunting wild animals, watching television, drinking Glenfiddich, but above all controlling his family: he's a self-obsessed tyrant. And he's very violent towards his wife, whom the narrator calls an amoeba.

The book, however, isn't just about a dysfunctional family, but also about a highly gifted young girl growing up, how she copes with her many problems, even how she attempts to solve them by wishing to turn back history to before a specific traumatic moment in childhood. I'm not too sure what you're left with after the end, but the journey through the novel is rivetting enough.

André Baillon: Histoire d'une Marie (1921); repr. with Afterword by Pierre Schoentjes 2013

André Baillon's Histoire d'une Marie is a largely autobiographical novel in that the main character is Marie Guillot (changing the name from Baillon's wife Marie Vandenberghe), André Baillon is here represented as Henry Brulot and Baillon's second woman (Germaine Lievens) as Germaine Lévine.

The first part of the book sees Marie with her brutish father and good mother who is nevtheless too busy to care for her daughter's education. When Marie gets pregnant by her boyfriend Victor she leaves for Brussels, but unfortunately her child dies and Hector marries someone else. Marie goes to live London with the pimp Vladimir, who hands her over to d'Artagnan, although Marie escapes to Belgium.

In Brussels Marie joins a brothel until François rescues her to live with him, although he dies and Marie is left with little money. She becomes a laundress and puts a small ad in a paper with a view to meeting a man for Sunday walks. As soon as Henry replies she discounts other applicants and soon goes to live with him in Forest near Brussels, where (like Baillon) he lives near a cemetery.

Henry, though, lives very frugally, with pretensions of becoming an author, but can't put words together in the right way. They move to a rural setting in Campine, where Henry also fails at being a farmer.  And Marie is later arrested for once more prostituting herself. It's only when he leaves Marie for the pianist Germaine that he writes a book, which is a success.

To his muse Germaine Lievens, André Baillon dedicates Histoire d'une Marie.

Pie Tshibanda: André Baillon : Le Belge de Marly (2009)

The life of André Baillon (1875-1932) was cut short by his fifth (and obviously successful) suicide attempt. An orphan at the age of six (his father having died when he was only four months old), his life was fraught by his own frustrations, his guilt, and his inability to resolve his love life: at one time he was living with two of his women (Marie and Germaine) on different floors.

Psychologist Pie Tshibanda's critical biography was a rare find: this book is completely unavailable via the internet, there's not even a copy held at BNF, and his own publisher's site doesn't recognise it! Oddly though, I've found a link to Tshibanda advertising the book (in 2009) here. This is its tenth anniversary.

As Tshibanda says, as a 'man of colour' (he comes from the Congo), he wanted to write a book about another 'man of colour' (Baillon was red-haired as well as full of complexes), and wanted to show that he wasn't mad as is normally perceived by critics. This is a very well researched book which details Baillon's books in the light of the people and the events in his life, his living with a prostitute, his stays in psychiatric hospitals, etc. Baillon comes through all this as not exactly normal (there is of course no normal, and we are all neurotic in some way) but as someone who is writing about the problems of his life out of therapy, necessity, or mere (partly changed) autobiography. Fascinating stuff.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: L'Appareil Photo | Camera (1988)

In Pierre Lepape's review of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel L'Appareil Photo (translated into English as Camera) on 9 January 1989, he describes the anonymous narrator/protagonist as a hypersensitive person 'trying to live less in order to live less badly', which makes a lot of sense.

Deciding to take driving lessons, the 'hero' is bogged down by bureaucracy, and can't cope with everything he's asked for at once, particularly four photos of himself. He brings out an envelope of photos of him as a child with his father, of his sister in his mother's arms, his parents with his sister at the swimming pool, etc, but knows that they're inappropriate. He'll have to work on it.

One thing he says, and in fact repeats and seems to echo Lepape's words, is that his 'jeu d'approche' (the way he goes about things) is to try to 'fatiguer la réalité' (exhaust the reality) of difficulties he stumbles up against, much as he works on an olive on his plate, leaving marks of it with his fork, trying to crush it to make it suitable for him to stab and put into his mouth. Er, yes, that's quite an analogy.

So this is the story of a man who starts taking driving lessons, becomes at first vaguely involved with one of the women (Pascale!) who work there, goes with her in one of the dual controlled cars when she needs a primagaz refill, although the car breaks down and has to be left at the nearest garage. Then for some reason they end up in London for the night and become lovers, the 'hero' appears to have gone to the wedding mentioned in the second sentence of the book, misses the last train home and walks towards Orléans, resting in a telephone booth and concentrating on the fugitive moment, on immobility.

There are obviously a number of similarities between the protagonist in La Salle de bain and the one in L'Appareil Photo, although this one seems (relatively) far saner and has far less malice towards others: he even worries deeply over stealing (meaning not handing in) a presumably very cheap instamatic camera he finds wedged between two cushions in the self-service café on the boat going back home.

My other posts on Jean-Philippe Toussaint:
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Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Faire l'amour | Making Love
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Fuir | Running Away
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Nue
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Salle de bain | The Bathroom
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Vérité sur Marie | The Truth about Marie

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Salle de bain | The Bathroom (1985)

That is, not 'bathroom' in the American sense. La Salle de bain was Jean-Philippe's first novel, which seems to be about a madman, although – with the exception of one particular instance – it is really funny for much of the time, if funny in both senses of the word. Post-modern this certainly is, and Oulipian too in that the constraint is a huge lack of information about the psychology of the first person narrator, a historical researcher who does no professional research here.

In fact he is obviously undergoing some kind of crisis, and the Pythagorian theorem about the square of the hypotenuse is a kind of illustration of the form of the book: the first and last sections are called 'Paris', the middle one 'L'Hypoténuse'. 'L'Hypoténuse' mainly takes place not in Austria where the narrator has been asked to go to, but Venice (water, bathroom, of course) where he flees to under some kind of psychologically-driven panic.

Not that he does anything much there, apart from watch football on television, or 'talk' in one of the only ways possible that he can to someone (the hotel barman) whose language he doesn't share: by exchanging names of esteemed footballers and racing drivers. He also shows interest in tennis, although it's far easier to throw darts at a circle chalked on a wardrobe panel.

Until, that is, he entices his girlfriend Edmondsson (who works in an art gallery) over to join him, and with great force he (for no reason that we're aware of) hurls a dart into her forehead and (after a short time in a Venetian hospital) she returns to Paris. His reaction to his behaviour perhaps brings on another crisis: a doctor in Venice tells him he has to be treated for sinusitis, which causes him to stay for a few nights at the hospital in preparation for the treatment he never has: he simply takes the plane back to Paris.

At the beginning of the novel he has spent a great deal of time in his bathroom, and it appears that he may do the same again on his return. He also spends long moments in bed, in non-activity. Contrary to Edmondsson, he loves Mondrian, whom he sees as a painter of immobility, contrary to most paintings, which he sees as highly mobile. Staring at a crack in his bathroom wall in Paris he sees no movement. Similarly, (although it's sinking at the rate of thirty centimeters per century) Venice, even if the narrator and Edmundsson tread heavily on the streets, their effect on the sinking of the place will be like water off a duck's back, as it is only sinking at the rate of 0.0000001 of a millimetre per second.

Before the narrator's violent attack on his girlfriend, he (and occasionally his girlfriend too) used to enjoy doing a few slightly malicious things, such as having really long (especially long-distance) conversations on the phone while Edmondsson's employer wasn't there; the narrator also enjoys holding people up by asking them complicated directions, and goes out of his way to find anyone in a hurry; he visits the hotel kitchen with a view to stealing a chicken leg; having enjoyed an evening meal and afternoon drink with his hospitable doctor and his wife, the narrator walks right out of their lives saying he has to return to his hotel and his wife. Come again? No, no.

A very weird book that only the French (OK, I mean the French-speaking: Toussaint is Belgian) do really well.

My other posts on Jean-Philippe Toussaint:
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Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Faire l'amour | Making Love
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Fuir | Running Away
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Nue
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: L'Appareil Photo | Camera
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Vérité sur Marie | The Truth about Marie

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Vérité sur Marie | The Truth about Marie (2009)

I haven't of course read this series in order, which doesn't really matter as the books can be read in any sequence: they are self-contained and were written over a number of years, and each adds different aspects to the actions of Marie and the unnamed narrator, although certainly things don't tie up neatly, and they're not intended to. This then is the third volume of the tetralogy, and it's in three parts.

In the first part the narrator is sleeping with his girlfriend, who happens to be called Marie, when he receives a phone call from the Marie of the title, the same Marie (er, yes, but...) as we have met in the other books. She has been with the man the narrator has called Jean-Christophe de G. in Nue, whom he's been secretly watching at Contemporary Art Space in Tokyo, only that doesn't seem to be his real name but it who's splitting hairs: he's died of a heart attack in Marie's room anyway.

The second part goes back in time to when Marie is leaving Tokyo with Jean-Christophe de G., who has asked her to go with him when he returns his horse Zahir. Here we learn a great deal – probably far too much – about taking horses onto planes. Zahir escapes near the plane and has to be coaxed into returning and still causes a fuss on the plane anyway. He also vomits, which of course horses don't do, but that's not the point. And interestingly enough, the narrator later sees Marie with Jean-Christophe de G. and tells us that he doesn't know him: well, different book.

In the final section, Marie, has been staying on Elba in her father's house following his death a year before – which would be baffling if the reader thought about it too much, but that of course is not the thing to do. And we hardly learn anything of Maurizio, who is supposed to be guarding the house, but anyway didn't he die? Oh, wrong book, different story. I really must read this series again some time, as Jean-Philippe seems to be one of the most fascinating writers in the French language. But then, have I ever come across a writer in the Minuit stable whom I've not liked? Rhetorical question.

My other posts on Jean-Philippe Toussaint:

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Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Fuir | Running Away
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Faire l'amour | Making Love
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Nue
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Salle de bain | The Bathroom
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: L'Appareil Photo | Camera

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Nue (2013)

This novel is the final part of what critics have called 'Le Cycle de Marie', or what the publisher Minuit seems to prefer to call 'Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte' after the protagonist of the tetralogy. As I remarked in the post immediately below this one, Laurent Demoulin notes in the Aferword in Faire l'amour (the first volume) that the plot of Fuir comes before that of Faire l'amour – but Demoulin wrote this before the publication of Nue, which, confusingly, makes it clear that the opposite is the case.

Nue begins with a section concerning a model who is naked apart from a 'dress' of honey, and is pursued by a swarm of bees, although I won't go into this dramatic moment. Memory is important here, and even if by no means all of the pieces of a narrative can be filled by it, it can still add to things, even fill in cracks in our knowledge that we didn't even know we didn't know.

The honey 'dress' episode is really a short introduction of sorts, with the book then divided into two large sections. The narrator (always unnamed) returns to Paris with Marie from the Isle of Elba and they go to their separate homes, although the narrator waits for Marie to contact him, spending some time looking out the window.

A long piece in the first section concerns the narrator's memory of the events following the end of Faire l'amour, after he's poured the hydrochloric acid on the pansy (or violet). His mind returns to when he returned to Contemporary Art Space in Tokyo, but, knowing he won't be allowed in, he climbs up to the roof to look into this window, trying to spot Marie. We follow the concupiscent Jean-Chrisophe de G. who spends some time with a Marie he thinks is Marie the fashion designer, and then he sees her, as does the narrator. And this has an oddly soothing effect on him, as for instance when he held the small hydrochloric acid bottle. As for Marie, we learn on the final line of the first section what soothes her: 'When I'm depressed I boil an egg.' An egg?

As it is, there's almost no news from Marie until two months later, when she telephones (ah, all those Alan J. Pakula moments!) to meet him in a café at Saint-Sulpice. Here the narrator learns of the death of Maurizio, the man who's well known to Marie and has been looking after her dead father's home on Elba: so it's another journey, vaguely recalling the restlessness of Jean Echenoz's narratives. But was that all Marie wanted to tell him?

It's not a pleasant trip to Elba at first, where due to the behaviour of Maurizio's son Guiseppe (who may be an arsonist, maybe not) they miss the funeral, leave Marie's father's old house in disgust because someone's been sleeping there, and have problems with the heating at a hotel in Portoferraio. On the positive side, Marie tells the narrator she's pregnant and it must be by him as she's slept with no one else since. So after all this, after all their problems, we have a happy ending? As this is the final volume it's for the reader to reach his or her conclusions.

My other posts on Jean-Philippe Toussaint:

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Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Fuir | Running Away
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Faire l'amour | Making Love
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Vérité sur Marie | The Truth about Marie
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Salle de bain | The Bathroom
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: L'Appareil Photo | Camera

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Faire l'amour | Making Love (2002)

Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Faire l'amour | Making Love (2002) is the first of a tetralogy known as Le Cycle de Marie (or the full name 'Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte'), the other books being Fuir | Running Away (2005), La Vérité sur Marie | The Truth about Marie and Nue (2013), the last title as yet not translated into English and meaning 'Naked' (referring to a woman). This Minuit edition has an eleven-page Afterword by Laurent Demoulin titled 'Faire l'amour à la croisée des chemins', which I read before the novel itself: the positive point here is that such a strategy allows for better comprehension, although at a more superficial level some suspense is inevitably lost. The article informed me that one thing I'd missed about three years ago when I read Fuir (incidentally when this cycle was only a trilogy – before the publication of Nue) was the season 'Été' printed at the top left corner of an otherwise blank page following the title-page: this means that Faire l'amour ('Hiver') is actually chronologically set after Fuir. (La Vérité sur Marie is set in two seasons – 'Printemps–été, as is Nue – 'automne-hiver').

I translate the first sentence of Faire l'amour: 'I had had someone fill a small bottle of hydrochloric acid, and I kept it with me permanently, with the idea of one day throwing it in someone's face.' Strangely, possessing this bottle has a tranquillising effect on the narrator, who – this was of course written before 9/11 and all subsequent security measures were put in place – even carries it in a suitcase stashed in the hold on a flight to Tokyo with Marie, and escapes with impunity. The narrator is obviously disturbed, the bottle is the source of much of the suspense, and Marie even wonders if the acid will end up being thrown in her face.

Marie is a fashion designer carrying several suitcases of her creations, and she has been enjoying an on-off relationship with the narrator, having wonderful sex and not ceasing to be in love with him, but there's a major problem, and one which Demoulin perceptively pinpoints in one sentence on which the relationship hinges, a sentence which fully explains why this is the last trip the couple will share, why they must part*: 'We loved each other, but we could no longer bear each other. Now, in our love, even if on the whole we were doing ourselves more good than harm, what little harm that we were doing to each other had become unbearable.'

And in the end, the hydrochloric acid doesn't go in Marie's face, in the narrator's own face, or even as a crazy final gesture in the face of the guardian of Contemporary Art Space, but it's poured onto a flower, which may be a violet or a pansy (French pensée means 'thought' or 'pansy'): a final futile, desperate, anguished gesture, or as the narrator puts it, 'an infinitesimal disaster'.

ADDENDUM: Well, in theory at least, but this is of course a post-nouveau roman, so who knows anything?

My other posts on Jean-Philippe Toussaint:

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Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Fuir | Running Away
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Nue
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Vérité sur Marie | The Truth about Marie
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Salle de bain | The Bathroom
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: L'Appareil Photo | Camera

Caroline Lamarche: Le Jour du chien (1996); repr. Espace Nord 2012

This edition of Caroline Lamarche's second book, Le Jour du chien, is published by the Belgian company Espace Nord, and comes with twenty very useful pages at the end by Daniel Arnaut. Some of the useful things we learn from Arnaut concern the hors texte. We already know that the book is dedicated to a dog seen on the E411 motorway on the 20 March 1995, but not everyone will know that the epigraph about a lost dog that paradoxically possibly never existed, and is written by Vladimir Nabokov, is from his autobiographical Mademoiselle O. Arnaut also, oddly, mentions the back cover summing up the book as 'Six characters in search of a dog', after Pirandello's play 'Six Characters in Search of an Author'. I say 'oddly' because there is no such sentence on the back cover: a reference to the original Minuit edition, or an editorial decision not to include the sentence after all?

In spite of that, though, 'Six characters in search of a dog' is a very apt description because the book is about just that. The text is divided into six sections, each narrated by a person on the motorway who has stopped because the stray dog is a potential accident hazard. But there's more to it than that because each person is at some kind of crisis point in their lives, and identifies with the dog because they too feel abandoned.

The text opens with 'Histoire d'un camionneur', in which a lorry driver has been abandoned by his parents, then his wife, has no children, leads a solitary existence so creates (a favourite word of his) a new life by writing to various magazines, and has even been interviewed by a journalist working for (the imaginary?) Tendresse.

A sixty-year-old priest is the subject of 'Le Combat avec l'ange', and when he speaks of caressing and licking the interior of a pebble, an object he compares to a woman's sexual organ, we get a vivid (and weird) idea of this fight of his with the angel. The thirty-year-old woman in the story is Sophie, who doesn't go to Mass but he sees her regularly in the library, until she disappears and he feels abandoned, even looks in other libraries for her but she has gone.

'Un petit parasol piqué dans la crème fraîche' is a phrase that appears right at the end of the eponymous story, expressing a wish. She is unnamed and was on the point of going to her lover to break with him but the dog causes her to abandon the act and merely go to see a film at the cinema, the actions of which she scarcely follows. She has identified her lover with the abandoned dog, although she herself is the abandoned one.

There is a gay young man in 'À Vélo', a person to some extent – like others in this multi-layered novel – also responsible for his own abandonment. His father has disowned him in part, he says and probably believes, due to his homosexuality, but he brings about his own dismissal from his dead-end job at 'Hello-Fruits', where his boss has made comments about his obvious gayness, so he insults her. Abandoned from home, abandoned from his job, he abandons his friends and risks arrest, which may come as some relief to his abandoning himself to cycling on the hard shoulder of the motorway.

In one of the cars that stop for the abandoned dog there is a mother and a daughter. The mother is the narrator of the fifth story, 'Rien à faire'. Her husband Nico has 'abandoned' her through death due to cancer. She compares the dog which she refuses to have anything to do with to a baby goat whose life she 'saved' from being shot by the hunting enthusiast Nico before they were married.

Unlike her unnamed mother, the daughter Anne in 'Le Repos éternel' goes to seek out the dog. Anne has abandoned herself to overeating since the death of her father, and her mother in a sense abandons her daughter by avoiding this person many take to be a male. Desperate for attention like for instance the gay young man, she wishes that her mother would beat her and abandon her on the motorway – like, of course, the dog.

There are a some other themes in the book, such as the religious one suggested in the title of Anne's section above, but I've tended to concentrate on abandonment: Caroline Lamarche is incidentally one of Marie NDiaye's favourite Francophone writers, and that clearly makes sense here. What more can I say: Lamarche is clearly a writer to look out for.

Henry Bauchau: L'Infant bleu (2004)

From 1947 to 1951 Henry Bauchau (1913–2012) underwent psychoanalysis with Blanche Reverchon, the wife of the poet Pierre Jean Jouve, and was profoundly affected by the experience. Bauchau himself became a psychoanalyst and worked from 1975 in a day hospital in Paris, which inspired him to write the novel L'Enfant bleu.

The central characters in L'Enfant bleu are the psychoanalyst Véronique and her patient, the thirteen-year-old Orion. Véronique is married to Vasco, formerly a racing car driver but now striving to become a musician, and she takes on the irksome task of understanding the mentally disturbed Orion, who calls her a 'psycho-prof-un-peu-docteur'.

Orion suffers from what appears to be a form of autism: he has severe difficulties communicating on some of the most basic issues, to the point of being incapable of entering a shop on his own. He needs someone he can trust to aid him, and Véronique fulfils this role admirably, helped a great deal by her husband. She sees the important thing as developing Orion's obvious artistic skills by encouraging him to paint (and later to sculpt), as his art is his way of expressing his demons, of revealing his subconscious thoughts. His dictations to Véronique also fulfil this need.

Language is very important to Orion, although the way he uses it is counter-productive to his ability to communicate: he is incapable of saying 'je', or 'I', and instead says 'on', more specifically in the much-repeated example 'On ne sait pas', which is difficult to translate into English here: it can mean 'We don't know', but not here as that would be too explicit; or it can mean 'No one knows', or 'It isn't known', which I think is more to the point. Orion dodges the first person, the 'I', by retreating into the indirect, the passive, as if 'On ne sais pas' were an existential get-out clause.

Gradually, painfully, Véronique endeavours to understand Orion's problems, which her sessions with him bring out, particularly when Orion lapses into his violent nature, breaking windows in the hospital, biting people (including Véronique), kicking and breaking plates and doors in her own home when she lets him 'come in' more, express himself and his frustrations as she becomes closer to him.

And closer to her husband: both psychoanalyst and her husband become close to Orion, become concerned with his progress and his regressions. The central problem is that Orion distances himself from himself and from others by refusing to accept responsibility for his actions: a monster in Paris (although entirely in himself) haunts him, and he externalizes the monster (much as he externalises himself by calling himself 'on') when that monster bites people or damages property.

Things come to a head when Orion is forced due to his age to go to another center and only see Véronique occasionally. Now, after several years of therapy, he forms a relationship with the anorexic Brazilian girl Myla, whose father is seen as a shark, a businessman only interested in money, and any possible money Orion may earn from his art is peanuts to him, so he must sever the relationship between his daughter and her friend. Were they in love? As Véronique says, 'Amour est un mot, c'est un monde pour les normaux, dont Myla et lui sont exclus' ('Love is a word, it's a world for normal people, from which Myla and he are excluded.)'

But this is not a depressing book, it is full of hope and joy, which to a certain extent seemed to me to suggest some of the things the anti-psychiatrists of the latter half of the twentieth century, such as R. D. Laing and David Cooper, were stating, that madness is largely a function of the society in which we live, the apparently sane are often the full-blown crazies and vice versa.

I thought about that last night as I finished the novel and learned of the decision of the British government to attack Syria, to reproduce the same mistakes as have been brought to Iraq by Tony Blair and George Bush rushing into situations of which they had no understanding, tiny minds that destabilized the world, tiny minds like Cameron and his ilk continuing to destabilize the world more by giving the go-ahead to kill innocent people, behaving exactly like their enemy IS. As the mindless Hilary Benn compared the (undoubted) fascists of IS to the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and then Hitler, I lost track of all reality as Benn was equally mindlessly praised on social networks for ranting total bullshit about attacking a country whose politics he cannot possibly comprehend. Violence is self-perpetuating, it can never be prevented by more violence.

At least L'Enfant bleu is written by an intelligent, human person.

Paris 2015: André Baillon, Cimetière de Marly-le-roi (78) #1

'1875 – 1932

 

AU ROMANCIER

ANDRÉ BAILLON

SES AMIS.'

 

 

An impressive tribute to the brilliant Belgian-born novelist André Baillon, who after a number of aborted attempts killed himself in 1932. Adolphe Wansart (1873–1954) also made a bust of Baillon.

My other post on André Baillon, which includes my impressions on his novel Le Perce-oreille du Luxembourg, gives much more information on the man:

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André Baillon: Le Perce-oreille du Luxembourg

Eugène Savitzkaya: Exquise Louise (2003)

Eugène Savitzkaya is a Belgian writer who has written many poetry books and novels. Exquise Louise is classed as one of Savitzkaya's novels, although it contains barely more than seventy pages, which are in quite big print with many white spaces: in the English-speaking world, this would be called a short story, although it is in fact more of a poem written in prose.

In 1992 Savitzskaya published the 90-page novel Marin mon cœur, which concerns his son. Exquise Louise is about his daughter. Or rather, he's describing an independent being with a power of her own to discover the life around her.

Louise is described teething, bathing in the River Ourthe, playing truant, with friends, playing in the garden, trying to capture a snail, and many other activities. Although not in anything like the prosaic language I use here, but a language imbued with wonder, the magic of the everyday discoveries of a child: Savitzkaya takes the ordinary and turns it into a thing of wonder.

This makes for an interesting read and I'm pleased that I came across this writer's work, although I didn't find it sufficiently enlightening to feel encouraged to actively seek out further books by him.

André Baillon: Le Perce-oreille du Luxembourg (1928; repr. 2012)

André Baillon's troubled life began in Belgium in 1875, his father dying exactly a year after his birth. His mother died when he was six, and he entered a religious school the following year. He was interned in the psychiatric hospital of Salpêtrière in Paris on a few occasions, and after several attempts succeeded in killing himself in 1932. He is buried in Marly-le-Roi (78), and has left a number of imaginative works, one of the most noted being Le Perce-oreille du Luxembourg (lit. 'The Luxembourg Earwig' (1928)). Baillon's poet lover Marie du Vivier wrote a biography about him (La Vie tragique d'André Baillon (1946)) and a critical work (Introduction à l'œuvre d'André Baillon (1950)), and although she describes Le Perce-oreille as 'uneven and badly constructed', several literary scholars would disagree with her.

Le Perce-oreille is in three parts and from the beginning we learn that the narrator Marcel is twenty-five ('or fifty') and writing about his life from a psychiatric hospital. Part I describes Marcel's childhood until he is fifteen: the slow dispossession of the family's property until they are living in a kind of boarding house on Île Saint-Louis in the 4th arrondissement; Marcel's religious education, but particularly the occasion when his tormentor Dupéché squashes an earwig in the jardins du Luxembourg; and the brief move to Provence with his 'uncle' and 'aunt' Varia, from whom he discovers the torments of unfulfilled sexual desire.

Part II is the shortest and concerns Marcel's relationship with his friend Charles, Charles's relationship (such as it is) with Jeanne, and Charles's death and funeral.

Part III is concerned with Marcel's relationship with Dupéché and Jeanne; with Dupéché and Louise's wedding ceremony and Marcel's weird behaviour there; and sandwiched between is Marcel's sexual initiation by the much older prostitute Nelly.

These are the mere bones of a story which is not so much a mad narrative as an obsession to write away madness, although the obsession usually takes over and becomes a succession of repetitive thoughts about how things appear to others, how others perceive, twisting ideas, twisting 'reality', whatever that means here. As Nelly tells him: 'Be careful, you live in your head too much'.

Dupéché perhaps has too obvious a surname, and one too easily identifiable with sin (péché), even the devil himself.  But his words Marcel often imagines, and it is simple (maybe too simple) to identify him as a personification of Marcel's self-hatred, self-torment, self-torture.

Things of little or no importance take on a big, even enormous, importance. The earwig perhaps represents a number of different things: self-harm (oeil percé), Marcel's madness, Marcel himself, Dupéché, things loved and hated, perhaps above all the aleatory, but not all of these at the same time: the earwig can change at anytime, transmogrify within the text.

I'm sure there's a great deal more to this book, which is frightening, exhilarating, most of all stimulating, although that would require a second reading: some books deserve a second reading, some don't but this most certainly does. This is clearly a forgotten classic, and I'm very pleased that the small Belgian publisher Espace Nord has re-issued it.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: Milarepa (1997)

Eric-Emmanuel wrote Milarepa for Bruno Abraham-Kremer, who later directed it as a play. Milarepa (1040–1123) was a Tibetan Buddhist, and a magician, yogi and poet who fascinates Schmitt, a non-Buddhist partly because he's too passionate, as he explains in the Afterword interview with Bruno Metzger in the above edition.

Milarepa is a short narrative, much like a short story rather than a novel, and Schmitt won the Prix Goncourt for the short story in 2010 with Concerto à la mémoire d'un ange. It forms the first part of Schmitt's 'Cycle de l'invisible', which also includes Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran, Oscar et la dame rose, L'Enfant de Noé, Le Sumo qui ne pouvait pas grossir, and Les dix enfants que madame Ming n'a jamais eus.

The story begins with Simon, who is troubled by a recurring dream that he has to kill someone. A strange woman he initially believes is insane comes up to him in a café and informs him that he is a reincarnation of the hateful Svastika, the uncle of the sage Milarepa. But she is telling the truth and Simon has a long way to go before the cycle of rebirths can be broken.

As Schmitt says in the interview, Milarepa would have been a yawn if he'd started out as a goodie-goodie and became a sage, as opposed to the revengeful mass murderer he originally was, and who grew into a sage through years of duress: it takes no time to be a villain, but to become a genuine sage requires extremely hard work and a considerable gift for the task.

My Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt posts:
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Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Nuit de feu
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: Milarepa
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Tectonique des sentiments
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Femme au miroir

Georges Rodenbach: Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise #4

 

 

The tomb of the Belgian symbolist poet and novelist Georges Rodenbach (1855–98), one of the most striking in Père-Lachaise. He was from an aristocratic family of German origin, and a great-uncle established the Rodenbach brewery, which is still extant.

Rodenbach moved to Paris in 1888. He is perhaps most remembered for his novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892). 

Link to my earlier post on Père-Lachaise:

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Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise / Père Lachaise Cemetery

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Fuir | Running Away (2005)

I was reminded of movie director Alan J. Pakula's films when reading Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Fuir (2005), or Running Away, but only because of the importance of the telephone: far from Pakula's realism, this novel is obviously Nouveau Roman inspired, with an (unnamed) unreliable narrator.

Chronologically, Fuir occupies the mid-position in Toussaint's three 'Marie' cycle novels, between Faire l'amour (2002), or Making Love, and the as yet untranslated La Vérité sur Marie, (2009), which will presumably be titled The Truth about Marie.

The novel's first sentence, Serait-ce jamais fini avec Marie? (lit. 'Would it ever be finished with Marie?'), is spoken by the narrator, and immediately we know there's a relationship problem, but that comes in later. Marie has sent the narrator to Shanghai to hand a $25,000 money packet to Zhang Xiangzhi, his slightly reluctant host. At an exhibition he meets Li Qi, a woman who seems to promise sex, and she invites him to take the train to Beijing with her, so he readily agrees to meet her at the train station, but is surprised to discover that Zhang Xiangzhi is going with them too. On the train, while most people are sleeping, the narrator is on the point of having sex in the toilet with Li Qi when the Pakula moment comes: it's Marie on the phone to say that her father has died at his home in Elba. This changes everything, and the narrator's sexual enthusiasm for Li Qi moves into detumescent mode. End of the first of three parts.

Now they're in Beijing, it seems that Zhang Xiangzhi could be in a relationship with Li Qi, but the narrator is no longer concerned: Marie's phone call has had a big effect: there's a difference between the world that's under his nose and the way he perceives it; the real is distorted, there's a separation, a kind of fracture, in fact he's in a state of permanent jetlag.

Zhang Xiangzhi shows him a little of Beijing in a half-hearted way, then gets a motor bike and rides them both to a bowling alley, where Li Qi later turns up with a package that the narrator guesses contains drugs that Zhang Xiangzhi has spent the twenty-five grand on. Then there's another earth-shattering phone call (although we never really find out why), this time from an unknown person to Zhang Xiangzhi, and the trio all hop on the motor bike followed by the cops, and the novel briefly turns into a kind of silent movie comedy: there's virtually no dialogue in the whole book anyway. In this way, a phone call again leads to the end of the section.

So will the common grief of Marie's father's death bring the couple together again? Well, it's not as simple as that. The narrator flies back to Paris and on to Elba to attend the funeral, but instead he just phones Marie and decides to play hide and seek for several hours. Marie finds him and they try a little sex but it doesn't work so they decide to go for a swim but he stays on the shore while Marie takes to the water.

Her father had a heart attack swimming here, but surely Marie hasn't? Has she? It seems not, so we'll rely on the narrator at the end...won't we? Nathalie Sarraute spoke of l’ère du soupçon, or 'the era of suspicion' which the Nouveau Roman heralded, and with the, er, Nouveau Nouveau Roman, it's still wise to be suspicious of the truth of what the narrator tells us.

(There's a link to a very interesting article on Jean-Philippe Toussaint in the London Review of Books by Tom McCarthy, which at the same time also tells us something about McCarthy.)

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'Stabbing the Olive', by Tom McCarthy

My other posts on Jean-Philippe Toussaint:
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Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Faire l'amour | Making Love
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Nue
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Vérité sur Marie | The Truth about Marie
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Salle de bain | The Bathroom
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: L'Appareil Photo | Camera

Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père (2011)

Tuer le père (literally 'Killing the Father') is Amélie Nothomb's latest work, although Barbe-Bleue ('Bluebeard' as in the Charles Perrault story) will appear on 22 August: she turns one out a year in time for the rentrée, and has been doing so for twenty years. I've read all her books so far, and have been impressed (to varying degrees of course) with each one.

This novella has a framing device: the first and last brief scene (both on the same occasion in 2010) take place at L'Illégal Magic Club at Le Shywawa in Paris, and these are related by an observer called Amélie Nothomb. She sees everyone enjoying themselves apart from a 30-year-old man winning at poker, and everyone watching him apart from a 50-year-old man whose intention seem to be to disturb the younger man. On enquiring, she learns that the younger man is Joe Whip, and the other Norman Terence. And then the flashback starts.

The action begins in 1994 in Reno, Nevada, where Joe's mother sells bicycles. Joe, who doesn't like his mother's new boyfriend, is thrown out because she doesn't want to lose her new man.

Joe is only 14 and must find his own way in life with the small amount of money his mother sends him every month. But Joe's gift is magic and he can do amazing card tricks, so has no difficulty making money. He learns the tricks through videos, but a stranger tells him he needs a teacher. So Joe gets to live with the professional magician Norman Terence and his girlfriend Christina, who is a fire dancer from hippie parents whose ways she has partly rejected.

When Joe becomes madly in love with Christina he hides it from the couple, but saves his virginity for when he is eighteen, when Norman and Christina will allow him to go to the Burning Man festival, Black Rock, Nevada. Once there, Norman and Christina take LSD but Joe secretly hides his blotting paper in his jeans, and by pretending to feel sick at a night club he manages to be alone with Christina and have sex with her. Norman believes that this is Joe's way of killing the father he believes he had been.

After Burning Man Joe chooses, amicably, to leave his substitute parents to be a croupier in Las Vegas, but much to their chagrin he completely severs ties with them. It's only the day after Joe's twentieth birthday in 2000 that Norman will hear any more of Joe, who is accused of a huge swindle at the casino. That there is not sufficient evidence to convict him is believable, as is his having to pay the money back to avoid death by concrete, but it's the conversation Joe has with Norman near the end of the book that is too much to believe.

What devastates Norman is that Joe refuses to see him as a father, because the man he looks upon as his father is the stranger (mentioned above) who devised the poker scam, which was arranged five years in advance, and Joe hasn't seen the man since, apart from across the card table when the swindle took place. And it is this 'father' who went flying back to Belgium with the fortune that Joe made for him, leaving Joe a relatively paltry $40,000 tip (and incidentally leaving him to refund the full $4,000,000 to his boss). What reason could Joe possibly have for keeping this agreement after five years, and how could he have seen, and indeed still see, this stanger as a father? Well, of course, he's insane. Sorry, but this is just too easy an escape.

Finally, the reader is back at L'Illégal Magic Club, now with the character Amélie Nothomb fully acquainted with the circumstances about Joe and Norman, who has been following his 'son' wherever he goes for eight years, and will continue to do so until he gets 'justice': recognition as a father. Yes, he's gone mad too.

This book has themes common to many other books by Nothomb: obsession, psychedelic drugs, madness, etc. It didn't feel the same though, and I was drawn back to a sentence a few pages near the end: Maintenant, je découvre à quel point tout ceci était dénué de signification: 'Now I understand to what extent all this was stripped of meaning'. Quite. Normally the reader expects a twist with Nothomb, but this just seems twisted: this reader feels short-changed, although I only borrowed the book from the library.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
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Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres (2002)

In English this is The Book of Proper Names, but much is missed in the translation of this title.

At the age of nineteen Lucette and Fabien marry, although they have no idea what they're going to do with their lives. When she's eight months pregnant, Lucette fires bullets into the sleeping Fabien's head because she wants to protect her child from a commonplace name – Tanguy or Joëlle – that Fabien has decided on. In prison, after ensuring her baby daughter is baptised Plectrude, she hangs herself with a rope of torn prison sheets.

Lucette's older sister Clémence and her husband Denis then adopt the baby. Plectrude is loved by the whole family, which includes the slightly older daughters Nicole and Béatrice, who devour food and grow, whereas Plectrude eats little, and only her eyes grow. And it is her eyes that cause her to be rejected from nursery school, because they frighten everyone, almost as if she were a witch. She has no problems when she takes ballet lessons, though, as she is brilliant and loved by all.

When Plectrude begins her compulsory schooling, she hates it, and is only saved by Roselyne, a friend from ballet lessons. Later, a boy called Mathieu Saladin joins the class, and although Mathieu and Plectrude are in love with each other, they never exactly have the occasion to express it.

Plectrude is determined to make a career as a dancer, so goes to the Opéra de Paris boarding school, where there are echoes of the concentration camp (cf. Les saboteurs amoureux and Acide sulfurique), where she becomes anorexic, stops taking calcium, and eventually puts an end to any possible career as a dancer by breaking a leg.

Plectrude joins a theater group, but when she starts only reading Ionesco things become really absurd: like her mother, she gets pregnant (but through a casual relationship) and decides to commit suicide (but by jumping from the Pont-Neuf), although she is saved by the magical appearance of Mattieu Saladin, who shows her that there is life after attempting to get your leg over the Pont-Neuf.

The reader is spared a description of the years of bliss that Plectrude (now known as the singer Robert (not RoBERT)) shares with the musician Mathieu, but a character called Amélie Nothomb becomes a kind of sister to her, although she talks too much and must be dealt with, so the problem Robert and Mathieu have is 'Amélie, or How to Get Rid of It', which of corpse (sorry – couldn't resist it) is the central problem that Amédée and Madeleine have in Ionesco's 1954 play Amédée ou comment s'en débarrasser (Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It), which, as the narrator points out, is just one syllable different.

The book may end there, but not the background to the novel, which adds a fascinating dimension to it: the Robert dictionary books are an obvious link to the title, but more importantly the novel is a fictionalized biography of Myriam Roulet, better known as the singer RoBERT, who was a very close friend (like a sister) of Amélie Nothomb's for a number of years. RoBERT is a singer of songs often concerned – like a number of Nothomb's novels – with childhood and death (the latter actual or symbolic), with a mixture of the magical and the tragic. RoBERT is married to the musician Mathieu Saladin, and she (or rather Roulet) too began a classical dancing career that ended with leg trouble, and... I don't know. Did RoBERT's mother kill her father when she was pregnant with her? As RoBERT says (these being her only words in English) in an eccentric (how could it not be?) interview: 'That is the question'. Nothomb told RoBERT that she was pregnant with her, which is less bizarre than it sounds as 'pregnancy' is far from an unusual sensation authors experience when writing books. RoBERT also says that Nothomb took truths and mixed them around in the novel, partly to protect RoBERT. The four-minute interview is here.

RoBERT's album Celle qui tue (best translated as 'The Woman Who Kills') contains six tracks written by Nothomb, with the music by Mathieu Saladin: 'A la guerre comme à la guerre', 'Le Chant des sirènes', 'Nitroglycérine', 'Sorcière', 'Celle qui tue,' 'Requiem pour une soeur perdue'. It was released a few months after the novel, and it is rewarding to view both novel and album side by side: Nothomb (presumably only in certain respects) considers music to be a far more superior medium than literature, but is incapable of making music herself.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
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Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie (2010)

Perhaps only four or five of Amélie Nothomb's novels can be classed as what the French term 'autofiction', but all of them contain elements of her life - for instance, she really did, as mentioned in Une forme de vie (translated as Life Form), write this article in The New York Times 2 April 2009, in which she praises Barack Obama but criticizes Nicolas Sarkozy. It is also well known that she has no internet connection, not even a computer, and that she writes - in longhand - to many people who write to her.

Amélie Nothomb's Une forme de vie is partly epistolary, the narrator sharing her name with the author as well as one of the two letter writers, the other letter writer being Melvin Mapple, a soldier in Iraq.

The character Amélie Nothomb is a writer, and Melvin Mapple begins a correspondence with her after reading all her books. Melvin is 39 years old, and had spent some time as a tramp before joining the army, which he did solely because he was sick of being hungry, and in the army he can eat as much as he pleases. His surname reminds us of the sugary maple syrup that millions of Americans pour on their daily breakfast waffles.

It is a fact that the number of military personnel diagnosed as overweight or obese has doubled since 2003, and the fictional Melvin is an extreme representative of one of these people. He believes food is a stronger drug than opium was in Nam, and finds overeating is a form of relief from the hell of war.

But he is not without self-disgust, and as a coping mechanism calls his obesity Scheherazade, imagining the young woman of One Thousand and One Nights, after the horrors of the day, lying on his impotent body and telling him soothing stories at night. But ashamed as he is of his unspeakably ugly body, he can't stop eating: sometimes, he imagines Scheherazade is one of the civilians he has killed, and it would be killing her a second time if he lost weight.

Plus, he sees his and other soldiers' obesity as a kind of sabotage, causing the government to spend enormous amounts of money on food, special outsize clothing, medical expenses, etc: yes, this novel is of course (if only in part) a criticism of the war on Iraq.

Melvin begins to fascinate her. For some reason, the character Amélie initially thinks that Melvin comes from the Mid-West, although he comes from Baltimore, Maryland, which - the narrator reminds us - is where the 'pope of Bad Taste' John Waters comes from, and where he sets all his movies. The character Amélie has previously informed us that someone sent her a shit-covered copy of one of her novels in the mail, and she is without doubt thinking here of The Marbles sending Divine a box containing a birthday card and a turd in Water's Pink Flamingos (1972), even of Divine eating dog droppings on the sidewalk toward the end of the movie.

(One movie that the author (and/or narrator) chooses not to mention - perhaps because too obvious - is Marco Ferreri's La grande bouffe, in which four characters decide to commit suicide by overeating.)

On Amélie's's prompting, Marvin decides to turn his body into an art form and take regular photos of it. When she tells him that a gallery(-cum-café) wants a recent photo of him, he sends Amélie a grotesque naked shot, his genitals hidden by layers of fat. But when a photo of him in uniform is asked for, he runs for cover.

The reason is because, well, he's a liar and has never been a soldier: they rejected him because of his obesity.

But it's when the reader finishes the book and looks at the cover and the title that he or she starts to wonder who the really mad person is. And if the title relates to both of the characters.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
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Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique (2005)

Acide sulfurique is probably the strongest social criticism Amélie Nothomb has so far made, and it is significant - bearing in mind that she is so suspicious of the internet that she doesn't even have a connection - that this criticism should involve modern technology.

The date is uncertain, but definitely the future, and probably the near future, when reality TV has almost exhausted any new permutation to stimulate viewing figures. Until, that is, television executives, with the complicity of the government, invent Concentration, the program that will make viewing figures hit the ceiling: in this, they kidnap people off the street to play out the role of victims of Nazi-style concentration camps. But there's a vital extra factor involved: the television studios are real concentration camps, and the victims are starved and beaten by paid fascist guards, and sent to their death.

There are similar themes in this book to Nothomb's others: the juxtaposition of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, monsters and saints; the (mentioned or unmentioned) metafictional references - Sartre's Huis clos yet again, but also Maupassant's Boule de suif; and there are prolonged crucial dialogs between the two main characters.

We are also implicitly reminded - probably via Michel Foucault, or George Orwell's telescreen - of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, the ever-present eye in the totalitarian world.

In Acide sulfurique - for the viewer - Kapo Zdena is the most hated pyschopathic employee, and Pannonique (now known as 'CKZ 114') the most loved prisoner. We sense that Pannonique will soon meet her death, but it is made perfectly clear who the real murderers are: not the television executives, not the government, but the ordinary viewers, the ghouls who perpetuate this system by continuing to watch.

Slowly, Kapo Zdena - who doesn't even possess a TV - comes to share the audience's sympathies and loves the beautiful CKZ 114, slipping her chocolate, merely pretending to beat her, but it's not enough for Pannonique, as the same rules should be applied to all the prisoners, and she will not submit to the sexual blackmail of Kapo Zdena under any circumstances.

And eventually, Pannonique's intelligent but hair-raisingly risky tactics pay off and Kapo Zdena is in her magnetic power, which is strong enough to change the nature of reality. Or at least reality TV. By sheer bluff - forget the sulphuric acid.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires