Various: Une nuit à l'hôtel (2019)

This is a collection of eleven short stories, all written by prominent authors, and all having a night in a hotel as the theme. We need books like this, which give us not only an idea of what authorial talent is around, but also perhaps a hint of who we'd like to read more of, or not at all. I particularly appreciated the stories by Cécile Coulon, Nina Bouraoui, Adeline Dieudonné, Franck Bouysse and Négar Djavani.

The stories:

Cécile Coulon, 'Madame Andrée' –  A woman goes to a hotel to have a lesson on playing the flute from her former teacher, although everything is in her mind.

Serge Joncour, 'Une nuit, presque à l'hôtel'  – A man sleeps in a deckchair by the hotel swimming pool because, well, he can't stand duvets: he's an eiderdown salesman.

Nina Bouraoui, 'Une nuit à Timinoun' – A woman with homosexual sympathies admires a young female guest in a hotel after fleeing from her husband, children, and the asphyxiating normality.

Silvain Prudhomme, 'La Femme au couteau' – A guy remembers his university back-backing days, particularly staying in a bug-ridden hotel and being greeted by a woman with a knife.

Adeline Dieudonné, 'Alika' – The hell of a child minder from the Philippines come to France to what amounts to slavery.

Franck Bouysse, 'Ma Lumière' – A clever young boy lives in hotels with his mother who perhaps works as a cleaner, but also as a prostitute.

Négar Djavani, 'Le Dernier' – After twenty-two years a cop tracks down a serial killer who has set up a new life in Buenos Aires.

Caryl Férey, 'Juste pour un jour' – The punk era by the Berlin wall, the title of course being a translation from David Bowie's 'Heroes'.

Ingrid Astier, 'Fil de soie' – A man, dumped by his girlfriend, arrives at a hotel where there's a 'telepathic' barman.

Régis Jauffret, '¡Alzheimer! ¡Que buéno! Y Macrón! ¡También!'  – An insane rant from a hotel (or psychiatric hospital?) in which virtually every sentence ends in an exclamation mark!

Valérie Zénatti, 'Le Miroir de Cirta' – A young French woman traces her mother's and her grandmother's Algeria, before they were forced to emigrate to France.

Régis Jauffret: Sévère (2010)

Regis Jauffret's Sévère clearly states that it is a novel, and it even has a Prologue (or Préambule) which is a disclaimer: Jauffret is a novelist, therefore a liar, no one in a novel has ever existed, its characters are puppets full of words, spaces, commas, with syntax for skin, they are imaginary, the author has invented them, people who recognise anyone should run the bath, stick their head in the water and hear their hearts beat. The book mentions no names, apart from the insignificant obese plane flight companion of the female narrator's, who in return gives him the false name of Betty.

And yet the Stern family attacked the book: the story of the sado-masochist in it, murdered by his friend while he was in a latex suit, was too close for comfort to the real-life Édouard Stern (1954–2005), who was murdered by his friend Cécile Brossard. Many noted French authors signed a petition against the family's actions, and these are just a sample: Virginie Despentes, Christine Angot, Pierre Guyotat, Philippe Djian, Jonathan Littell, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Philippe Sollers, Michel Houellebecq, Sophie Calle, Eric Reinhardt, Marie Darrieussecq, Emmanuel Carrère, Atiq Rahimi, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Catherine Millet, Matthias Enard, Annette Messager, Claude Lévêque, Nicolas Fargues, Yannick Haenel, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Frédéric Beigbeder.

The novel weaves in and out of past and present time, near beginning with the female murderer briefly going to her place and leaving her nonplussed 'husband' – they had a 'wedding' in LA which wasn't a real one – as she gets in a taxi to leave for Milan, and then catches flights to Sidney, from where she quickly flies back, taking champagne and pills throughout the journeys to steady herself before she sort of gives herself up, is found guilty and imprisoned for murder.

In between the bare bones of this plot we learn small and large snippets about the man she's murdered, of his love of women and men, his great wealth, his love of killing animals, his various fetichisms (such as gaining sexual satisfaction from making people suffer), and his conviction that he will be killed shortly, so hiding weapons everywhere. It might not – in fact it certainly isn't – be Jauffret's best book, but it's a relatively short and powerful read.

My other posts on Régis Jauffret:

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Régis Jauffret: Claustria
Régis Jauffret: Lacrimosa

Régis Jauffret: Claustria (2012)

There's a sort of legal disclaimer at the front of this book, stating that it's a work of fiction, as of course you'd expect from a work that describes itself as a novel on the title-page. Jauffret's Sévère (2010) also described itself as a novel on the title-page and was also based on a fait divers or story in the news, but it had nothing like the legal disclaimer here, and it ran into legal complications. But Claustria clearly states that any characters in it have no relationship to living people. Well...

Well, Jauffret did a great deal of research on the Josef Fritzl case before writing the book, to the point of going to Austria, interesting himself in the Fritzl trial, visiting the dungeon in Amstetten where Fritzl imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth for twenty-four years and raped her perhaps 3000 times, and where she had seven children by him. He even calls the protagonist by his real name, but as Josef Fritzl was the only guilty party here he changes the names of all the other characters. The world knows the essentials of this story, but not much about how Fritzl's 'second family' survived, how it spent its time.

This really is where Régis Jauffret's novel comes in, because he imagines what it must have been like to undergo such an ordeal, although as he says, it's easy to imagine being tortured or being shot dead, but how can anyone conceive of twenty-four years of this kind of torture, of not being free to belong to the outside world, of not knowing when your torturer is going to come and rape you, of not knowing what kind of mood he's going to be in, of what he's going to do next?

Jauffret refused to see Fritzl when he went to Austria because he's a man completely without ideas, a blank. Certainly we're talking about a cunning person who premeditated the rape home several years before the abduction of the girl Jauffret calls Angelika because he built it as a nuclear shelter. The food supplies were well thought out as Fritzl shopped in another town to evade suspicion, and he only delivers them at night. But Fritzl has no inner life, is incapable of thinking anything through if it isn't practical. He is Nazi-like in that his power is absolute and he will listen to no one but himself, but he has no ideology: Jauffret shows him an a complete egotist, which must be the truth otherwise Fritzl would have gone mad. And another terrifying thing is that as far as I know no psychiatrist declared him insane. This too is difficult to imagine: how can a person responsible for so much insanity be sane?

So Jauffret (who put off writing the book for several years) imagines the unimaginable. He had an idea of the smells from his visit to the hell-hole, but imagines Angelika trying to escape by using her father's mobile phone, trying to keep sane by watching TV, by resisting the torture in other ways, but by also accepting the inevitable. The book was difficult to write, and in places it's difficult to read but not because there are any graphically described scenes of torture: we're spared, for instance, details of Fritzl pulling his daughters teeth out, and the rapes are not dwelt on in any detail.

But this is a also a story of love, of moments of joy, of Angelika educating her children, of trying to bring them up as best she can in the circumstances. This is 544 pages of skilfully crafted fiction, and Jauffret has made a powerful achievement. The title of the novel, by the way, comes from a fusion of the French word 'claustration' meaning being shut up or confined, and the word 'Austria'.

My other posts on Régis Jauffret:

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Régis Jauffret: Lacrimosa
Régis Jauffret: Sévère

Régis Jauffret: Lacrimosa (2008)

A woman friend of Régis Jauffret's strangled herself on 21 March 2007, coincidentally exactly two years after he had met her at the Salon du livre in Paris on 21 March 2005. Lacrimosa is a novel based around those bare facts, although I'm unaware of the truth of any others in this work.

The book has a kind of epistolary form with letters from the unnamed male narrator beginning 'Chère Charlotte' interspersed with imagined letters from his rather younger dead lover from the grave – but which of course are also written by the narrator, and all of which begin 'Mon pauvre amour'.

As its title suggests, this is indeed a requiem, although the male narrator frequently indulges in flights of fancy, causing Charlotte to insult him, say he's wasting his time, accuse him of re-inventing her at the expense of truth, and certainly more than once the male narrator admits he's invented something, such as the pair of them being threatened with deportation by the Tunisian police if they again swam naked at Djerba during their Club Med holiday.

This in fact is a far less bizarre invention than, for example, Dr Hippocampus Dupré living (and sleeping) with a panda. I'm not too sure why this section was included, but then there are a few other puzzling things, such as the male narrator addressing Charlotte by the formal 'vous' throughout, whereas Charlotte uses the expected 'tu' to her (former) lover. Is the 'vous' form intended to indicate the distance (living versus dead) he now sees between them, but if so surely that negates the need to write letters to the dead person in the first place: the death has already been accepted.

Finally, we can perhaps view the whole exercise as a kind of therapy, although the resolution in the last sentence (written by 'Charlotte') – 'Je suis fiére de toi' ('I'm proud of you') – sounds far too much like self-praise: but is this the narrator praising the narrator, or the author praising himself? Although I've only read this novel by Jauffret, I don't think it's one of his best, and other people – who have read others – seem to agree.

My other posts on Régis Jauffret:

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Régis Jauffret: Claustria
Régis Jauffret: Sévère

Régis Jauffret's Sévère: The Fight for Free Expression

I've not yet read any of Régis Jauffret's books, although from what reviews and extracts I've so far read they are both very powerful and very disturbing, although they are far from being the purely sensational read that their subjects might suggest: for one thing, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust are among Jauffret's biggest inspirations. This post is prompted by a wish to support a wildly inappropriate reaction.

Regis's novel Sévère is inspired by the murder of the very wealthy banker Édouard Stern by his lover Cécile Brossard. The trial uncovered Stern's world of ruthless business dealings and his voracious appetite for sex with both men and women. It is of course very common for writers of fiction to be inspired by real-life events, and Jauffret clearly states at the beginning of Sévère that this is a work of fiction: the characters have no more reality than the paper they're written on: close the covers and they cease to exist. Seven months after publication in March 2010, Stern's relatives demanded that the book be banned, which of course strikes at the root of any of the freedoms that authors hold dear. By extension, surely any freedoms any of us hold dear?

Many noted French authors have signed a petition against the family's actions, and these are just a sample: Virginie Despentes, Christine Angot, Pierre Guyotat, Philippe Djian, Jonathan Littell, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Philippe Sollers, Michel Houellebecq, Sophie Calle, Eric Reinhardt, Marie Darrieussecq, Emmanuel Carrère, Atiq Rahimi, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Catherine Millet, Matthias Enard, Annette Messager, Claude Lévêque, Nicolas Fargues, Yannick Haenel, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Frédéric Beigbeder.

The full list is here, and can now be signed by any member of the public: 'Pour signer la pétition, envoyez vos prénom, nom et ville de résidence par email à l'adresse courrier[at]inrocks.com avec "Jauffret" en objet du mail': To sign the petition, send your first name, surname and town of residence by email to courrier[at]inrocks.com with 'Jauffret' as the subject of the email.

Unfortunately, it appears that none of Jauffret's many books has been translated into English, although there may well be some translations in other languages.