Linda Lê: Lame de fond (2012)

Linda Lê's Lame de fond (perhaps best translated as 'Tidal Wave', as the cover perhaps suggests) reached the final stage of the 2012 Prix Goncourt before being trumped by Jerome Ferrari's Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome.

The novel is in four major parts corresponding to different parts of the day, from the heart of the night to twilight, and within each of those parts are monologues by four different people, but not always in the same order of speech.

Van begins. He has very recently been buried in the Cimetière de Bobigny after accidentally (I think we are given to believe) being run over by his drunken wife  Lou.

Lou has been married to Van for about twenty years and they have a teenaged daughter called Laure.

Laure is a goth with a friend called Tommy.

And Ulma is Van's lover, whose flat Van had just left at 2 o'clock in the morning when Lou mowed her husband down.

That is the story, just as it is: the emphasis here, as we might expect from Lê, is not on what happens (or rather, doesn't happen), but on the psychological interplay between the characters: Lou is to be tried for her killing Van, although the interest lies not in if she is imprisoned or set free (which we never learn), but in the events which happened before Van's death.

Van was born in Vietnam to Vietnamese parents, although his father left the family to join Hô Chi Minh's forces and Van left for France when he was fifteen, where he was educated and permanently lived there as a proof reader.

Van was obviously more attached to his mother than his absentee father (who was later killed), and Lou was much more attached to her father than to her racist mother, who severed all connections with her daughter on her marriage to a Vietnamese.

Laure is not academically brilliant, and her father tries to 'correct' her grammar and her slang, although it is a fruitless. Nevertheless, Laure looks back on her childhood with nostalgia, and misses her father's pedantic ways.

It is Ulma who in a number of ways brings on the fateful event, although she, like the other characters, does not come across unsympathetically. The product of a hippie, globe-trotting and free-loving French mother Justine and a week-long relationship with a Vietnamese man in Paris, Ulma is largely brought up by her grandmother.

As a mark of how little importance suspense has in the book, the back cover informs us that Ulma is Van's half-sister. It is Ulma's eventual decision to send Van a letter informing him that he has a sister which brings on the lame de fond. Ulma's four monologues are written as if she were talking to her long-term psychiatrist, although her final monologue reveals that she no longer has any need of him.

Van meeting Ulma is a coup de foudre, an experience in which both see themselves in the other, and begin the incestuous relationship that will not only lead to Van's death, but occasion all the monologues in the book.

I'm not certain that Laure comes across as a fully developed entity rather than a somewhat stereotypical youth figure, but it was fun reading her (and Tommy's) expressions. The main potential problem, I think, is in how to persuade the reader to continue reading when virtually all suspense has been stripped away. It definitely worked for me, and I loved the book, although I suspect that not all people would read it in this way.

My other posts on Linda Lê:

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Linda Lê: Les Évangiles du crime
Linda Lê: Lettre morte
Linda Lê: A l'enfant que je n'aurai pas
Linda Lê: Voix: une crise
Linda Lê: Personne

Linda Lê: Personne (2003)

In some ways, Linda Lê's Personne reminds me of Gilbert Sorrentino's postmodern Mulligan Stew, but then in other ways not, as Sorrentino's book is far more playful, for instance.

The usual Lê themes are here – such as death, doubles, and madness – although there's far more ambiguity. Personne, whose name means 'No one', is the main character and is a night watchman at a hotel until it burns down and he gets a job in a mail redirection business. Personne finds a computer on a tip with notes written by a woman he calls Tima, who describes her work at a museum (where she has been moved to the 'salle des gisants', containing recumbent statues), and a journey to Prague. Personne decides to retranscribe the notes, but in his own way, so it's unclear if Tima or Personne has written them.

But then, Personne is a kind of runaway train, escaping from the narrator. Other characters appear, such as Katimini the detective, Falmer (who is Personne's friend – perhaps), Ebua (whose name in reverse is 'Aube', which means 'Dawn' in French), and Abracadabra the psychiatrist is briefly mentioned. And aren't they all characters in the same book, facets of the same Personne?

My other posts on Linda Lê:

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Linda Lê: Les Évangiles du crime
Linda Lê: A l'enfant que je n'aurai pas
Linda Lê: Voix: une crise
Linda Lê: Lame de fond
Linda Lê: Lettre morte

Linda Lê: Lettre morte (1999)

Lettre morte, which translates as 'Dead Letter', is a powerful book written in a single paragraph by a narrator whose Vietnamese father has just died. There are a number of parallels with Linda Lê herself, such as her mother leaving Vietnam for France with her daughters while her husband remained in Vietnam, the death of her father, the importance of the letters he wrote to her, etc.

The narrative is written to her friend Sirius, about whom we learn almost nothing: the important characters are the narrator's father and her lover Morgue (a word which also signifies pride), and the unnamed narrator herself.

The writing on the back cover, taken from the beginning of the book, is worth quoting:

'Les morts ne nous lâchent pas, dis-je à mon ami Sirius en rangeant les lettres de mon père dans un tiroir. C'est le supplice de Mézence que j'endure, attachée à un mort, main contre main, bouche contre bouche, dans un triste embrassement. Les lettres ont cessé d'arriver du pays de mon enfance. Celui qui les écrivait est mort d'une mort solitaire et enterré au bord d'un cours d'eau. Mais il est là, sa peau touche ma peau, mon haleine donne vie à ses lèvres. Il est là, dis-je à Sirius, quand je te parle, quand je mange, quand je dors, quand je me promène. Il me semble que je suis morte, tandis que mon père, ce mort qui ne me laisse pas en paix, déborde de vie. Il me possède, me suce le sang, me ronge les os, se nourrit de mes pensées.'

My translation:

'"The dead don't let us go", I told my friend Sirius while putting my father's letters into a drawer. "I'm going through the torment of Mezentius, tied to a dead man, hand to hand, mouth to mouth, in a painful embrace.^* The letters stopped coming from my childhood home. The man who wrote them died a lonely death and is buried by a river. But he's here, his skin touching my skin, his breath giving life to my lips." I told Sirius: "He is there when I speak to you, when I eat, when I sleep, when I go for a walk. I feel dead, whereas my father, this dead man who will not leave me in peace, is brimming with life. He owns me, sucks my blood, eats into my bones, feeds on my thoughts."'

The narrator has intense feelings of guilt for not replying to her father's letters, for not going to see her father before he died. She describes her life with him, how her mother came to hate him, how he turned to drink, and how she used to fetch him alcohol as a child. Madness was around her, particularly from her uncle (her mother's brother) who frequently used to stay with the family before being sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he has periods of sanity and looks after the hospital library and goes around town on a moped. With the family, he used to sit on a car outside and bless people, and used to piss in bottles that he kept in the fridge and called it holy water.

In France the narrator has been in a destructive relationship (which she very recently terminated) with the married Morgue, who treated her very badly, but to whom she has been tied by an odd bond: he is abusive, a complete Philistine, and yet she has been unable to sever her relationship with him, which can perhaps only be understood in terms of her urge towards self-destruction.

Finally, after unremitting psychological pain and self-torture, the narrator decides to leave her flat and its terrible memories of Morgue, and tells Sirius to open the window and let the coolness of dawn enter.

^*Mezentius is a king in Roman mythology who is particularly noted for his cruelty. Virgil's Aeneid mentions his method of torture: permanently tying a dead body to a person, which was, as Virgil called it: 'a slow death in a horrifying embrace'. The expression 'le supplice de Mézence' is evidently much more common than the English 'torment of Mezentius', and that appears to be the only English translation for it.

Below are links to other books of Lê's that I've reviewed:

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Linda Lê: Les Évangiles du crime (1992)
Linda Lê: Voix: une crise (1998)

Linda Lê: A l'enfant que je n'aurai pas (2011)

Linda Lê: Lame de fond
Linda Lê: Lettre morte

Linda Lê: Les Évangiles du crime (1992)

Linda Lê has disowned her first three publications – Un si tendre vampire (1986), Fuir (1987), and Solo (1988) – although she recognizes Les Évangiles du crime (1992) as her first serious work. It's probably best to see this book as a collection of four short stories rather than a novel, although all sections are thematically related.

And although not all of the stories have the same themes, almost all of them involve alienation, madness, doubles, mirrors, suicide, (sado-)masochism, parents as monsters, violence, victimhood, reading and writing as therapy, etc. Lê's is also an essentially anonymous world, and forenames plus surnames don't exist: in this book at least, it's just forename and initial of surname, or an eccentric nickname.

The first story is 'Reeves C.', which revolves around events indirectly linked to Southern writer Carson McCullers's relationship with Reeves, the man she married twice, and who killed himself in the Hôtel de Château-Frontenac, 54 rue Pierre-Charron, Paris, in November 1953.

'Reeves C.' is told entirely in the first person, although (a little confusingly) the first person in the introductory section is a woman later called – by the, er, second and subsequent narrator – 'Douleur Muette' (or 'Mute Pain' if I really must translate it literally). Douleur Muette first briefly encounters the second narrator as he forges a path past her down the street urgently informing her that he has to reclaim his taste for living, and disappearing across the road with little regard for his own safety.

Douleur Muette dreams that night that she asks a cab driver to take her to rue Pierre-Charron, although the driver refuses. She makes her own way there next morning and finds the man who has to refind his taste for living, who tells her that a friend of his killed himself in the Hôtel de Château-Frontenac.

There follows a strange sado-masochistic relationship by means of a series of telephone calls that the man makes to Douleur Muette, in which only the man speaks, and the woman makes notes. An analogy is established between the writers Carson McCullers and the woman, and Reeves and the man, who both in the end kill themselves.

In the second story, 'Professor T.', there are three narratives: the words from the notebook of Professor T., who has killed himself in his cellar after his son has killed himself and his wife has gone mad; the words from papers in between the notebook written by 'Plus-dure-sera-la-chute' ('The Harder They Fall'), who is Professor T's alter ego; and the notes from the investigator.

The professor is an austere bully obsessed with morality, whereas Plus-dure-sera-la-chute is concerned more with sex, hates the professor, and has existed since the professor was twelve: he makes his appearances at times of crisis. Plus-dure-sera-la-chute sees an analogy with the Kurosawa film Rashômon (1950) – a son who kills himself and a wife who goes mad – but he also brings in Moritz Schreber (1808–61). Schreber was a physician who invented contraptions for city children to release excess energy, and devices to prevent masturbation: child psychologist Alice Miller (1923–2004) called him a proponent of 'poisonous pedagogy'. Schreber's son, Daniel Paul Schreber, wrote a rather different book: Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness) (1903) – negative inheritance is important in Lê's vision.

This is another story of mutual destruction. In the end, the fascinated investigator doesn't know if the professor has killed himself, killed the other man in him, or allowed the other man to kill him. Maddened in a similar fashion, the investigator looks for his alter ego and wants a cellar.

'Klara V.' begins the story at the end, where a young woman has killed herself by jumping from La Defense. Again, there is a reference to the cinema: Billy Wilder's Fedora (1978), in which Fedora throws herself from a train at the beginning, and – yet another double – Marthe Keller plays Fedora as well as Fedora's daughter Antonia.

Klara's mother is clearly mad, abuses her daughter as a young child, pretends to be sick and has her daughter wait on her. At 17 Klara uglifies herself by wearing thick glasses and drab-coloured, shapeless clothes: a kind of identification with the aggressor this may in a sense be, but it's also a defence, as (interestingly) is the shoring up of books as a bulwark against the madness.

When Klara is 19 the mother ruins her relationships by writing letters to her daughter's lovers, slandering her. Even when she's 23, her mother visits her and searches her drawers to she can discover the details of her latest lover in order to write poison about her. Her mother dead, Klara continues to write similar letters to her lovers: sadism is followed by masochism. In 'A Vietnamese Voice in the Dark', (Francophone Post-Colonial Cultures: Critical Studies (Lexington Books: Lanham, MD, 2003)), ed. by Kamal Salhi, Emily Vaughan Roberts says: 'Klara denies herself a sense of belonging or stability through her continuing compusive dialogue with the past – a predicament that often affects an exile.' Alienation is self-perpetuating.

The final story is 'Vinh L.', which begins with a narrator who is in a sense the double of the main narrator Vinh L., as he's a writer who plagiarizes, which is perceived as a form of cannibalism. And cannibalism is the main subject, as Vinh L. has been one of the boat people escaping from Vietnam, and is torn apart by guilt because he was forced to kill in order to eat human flesh (one body being transformed into another) to survive the journey.

Vinh's narrative is in ten letters, and in the fifth there's another kind of double, as he mentions reading an article about a murdered Italian author in which the epigraph reads 'I have killed my father. I have eaten human flesh and I am trembling with joy', and I'm aware of these as sentences in the film Porcile (Pigsty) by the (murdered) director Pasolini. The cinema seems to play a big part in Linda Lê's life: I've mentioned earlier that when she dies she wants to be watching Fritz Lang's Moonfleet. But Vinh L. doesn't die: he returns to Vietnam for a kind of redemption.

Linda Lê's work makes for an enthralling, if exhausting, read.

There are links to my other Linda Lê book posts below.

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Linda Lê: Voix: une crise (1998)
Linda Lê: A l'enfant que je n'aurai pas (2011)
Linda Lê: Lame de fond
Linda Lê: Lettre morte
Linda Lê: Personne

Linda Lê: A l'enfant que je n'aurai pas (2011)

The 'Les Affranchis' series was thought up by Claire Debru, with the simple instruction: 'Write the letter you have never written', and Linda Lê's A l'enfant que je n'aurai pas ('To the Child I Shall Not Have') is one of the series. It contains sixty-five pages, is short on paragraphs and often has very long sentences, often with lists of things that the narrator would or wouldn't have done if she's had the child that she has resolutely determined not to have.

The letter is also short on names, the narrator simply calling her boyfriend 'S', her mother the pointedly Orwellian 'Big Mother', and the only other name in the letter, apart from dead authors, is the stillborn Emmanuel, son of a psychiatric patient. And although there are several authors mentioned, the most obvious one – Simone de Beauvoir – is not.

But although the remarkable Le Deuxième Sexe is often understood as a reference point for Beauvoir's work, I'm thinking more of Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée and Beauvoir's insufferable mother, although Big Mother is far worse than her. The four daughters receive no parental warmth – the déclassé father merely shrinking into insignificance and alcoholism – and Big Mother lives by ferociously strict puritanical codes and uses corporal punishment to enforce them.

Essentially, A l'enfant que je n'aurai pas is – as readers of Linda Lê's earlier work might expect – an outsider scream, and of course the outsider's chief problem is conformity. The narrator is a woman, and society decrees that as such her principal function in life is to have children, but this letter lists many reasons why she has chosen not to have any. S. does everything in his power to convince her that she must have children because, well, a man isn't a man without proving himself in the procreation stakes, etc.

Towards the end of the letter the narrator speaks slightly comically in a sick, grim sort of way, of locking the hypothetical child up until he's learned by heart 'the most remarkable of Nietszche's pages' and 'assimilated at least one Socratic dialogue', but this comes shortly after the mention of her suicide attempt, and shortly before the paranoia increases, where she makes another suicide attempt, followed by incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.

This brief text is just an indication of why Linda Lê is a such a major French language writer.

Below are links to other posts I've made about Linda Lê's books. Prix Goncourt tomorrow for Lame de fond? Well, let's hope.

ADDENDUM: Oh, Jérôme Ferrari got it with Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome. Huh.

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Linda Lê: Voix: une crise (1998)
Linda Lê: Les Évangiles du crime (1992)
Linda Lê: Lame de fond
Linda Lê: Lettre morte
Linda Lê: Personne

Linda Lê: Voix: une crise (1998)

Linda Lê was born in Dalat, Saigon in 1963, and had a French mother and a Vietnamese father. In 1968 her family was forced to move house during the war, and on their horrific journey they saw many dead bodies, often with severed heads. The family – without the father – left for France when Linda was 14. She continued writing to her beloved father for many years, but he died in 1995 before she could see him again, and she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital shortly after.

Voix: une crise (literally 'Voices: A Crisis') is a short book with no apparently logical sequence of events, and begins in a psychiatric hospital. It depicts a world – in which Paris is frequently identifiable – run by an omnipresent 'Organization', which no doubt only exists in the imagination of the narrator: this is a surreal nightmare world of horror, madness, severed heads, blood, and constant paranoia.

This is one paragraph:

'I'm stretched out on my bed. The anguish has taken the shape of dogs with three heads, poking their snouts into my belly, tearing it up and devouring my guts. My father stands at the side of the bed. He plunges his hand into my open belly and brings out letters written in blue ink and soaked in blood. I yell, but my father isn't listening. He's reading the letters, his white hair shaking.'

There isn't a great deal of information about her online, but there is a beautiful interview from 1999 with Catherine Argand, in French, which largely concerns Lê's work in general. She speaks of her (then) latest book, Lettre Morte (1999), which she says was inspired by Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann, who haunts her. She calls her father her ideal reader, and she was devastated to learn of his death. Tramps and drunks were the only people she saw with an unsuspicious eye, everyone else seemed artificial. She went entire weeks without talking.

Finally, she says she'd like to die in a cinema, watching Fritz Lang's Moonfleet: the cinema is where she feels most strongly the magic of paradise lost. The interview is here.

My other posts on Linda Lê:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Linda Lê: Les Évangiles du crime
Linda Lê: A l'enfant que je n'aurai pas
Linda Lê: Lame de fond
Linda Lê: Lettre morte
Linda Lê: Personne