Jean-Philippe Toussaint: La Clé USB (2019)

The Belgian Jean-Philippe Toussaint writes for Minuit so automatically, without even knowing anything about the book or even the author, the reader knows that this won't be a 'normal' read, not of course that that has any meaning. Let meaning take a back seat and enjoy the ride.

The narrator works for the Commission européenne with an interest in futures and blockchain technology, particularly bitcoins. So when he's approached by an unknown person with a view to meeting a guy in China with a view to learning more about bitcoins he's interested, but very suspicious because he doesn't in any way want to compromise his job in Brussels.

It's uncertain why he agrees to go to China to talk to a manufacturer of bitcoins, even uncertain about why he's been chosen to go there, but he makes sure everything he does won't come back in his face, that he won't in the future be accused of any corruption, so he won't accept any expenses paid to him.

But on discovering a USB key that his contact had inadvertently dropped (or on purpose?), and on finding out from the key's contents (which suggest embezzlement) he just has to go to China to find out what he can, but without telling his bosses anything about it.

Why he doesn't say anything is a mystery, as is his meeting with the Chinese contact, as is his trying to discover anything about the technological 'backdoor', or indeed why he receives an award in China, or even why his computer is stolen from him in a toilet in China by a mysterious hand groping under his cubicle door.

But that means the talk in Japan he's going to give will be aborted, in spite of his desperate efforts to re-write it without his computer notes, and anyhow he has to return home where his father is in his final hours. So? So what does the future mean when his father doesn't have one, what does the narrator's future matter?

I felt a sniff of Kafka in this novel (possibly inverted, circumvented, oblique, subverted or whatever way), a dreamlike universe where things take on amnesiac forms, where nightmares become the norm but are soon dissipated, but then maybe this is just Toussaint throwing uncertainties not to the wind but in our face. As ever, he's nothing short of interesting, intriguing, fascinating, infuriating. And the USB key? Maybe a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin, just designed to carry the plot through without a great deal of (if any) meaning in itself.

Boîte à lire, Saint-Servan, Saint-Malo, Ille-et-Vilaine (35)

This is rather different Boîte à lire, and I was delighted to find a copy of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's La Clé USB in it: it's part of this year's rentrée, and was only published this month (September 2019). The previous owner has pencilled 'idiot' on one of the title pages, although I don't know if the reader intends this as an adjective of noun, but I don't think they can be at all familiar with the writing of Toussaint!

Boîtes à lire:
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Boîte à Lire, Dicy, Nièvre
Boîte à lire, Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines
Boîte à lire, Sorigny, Indre-et-Loire
Boîte à Lire, Jonzac, Charente-Maritime
Boîte à lire, La Roque-d'Anthéron, Bouches-du-Rhône
Boîte à Lire, Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, Cher
Boîte à lire, Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône
Boîte à lire, East Markham, UK
Boîte à lire, La Folie Couvrechef, Caen, Calvados
Boîte à lire, Bergues, Nord
Boîte à lire, Le Havre, Seine-Maritime
Boîte à lire, Villerville, Calvados
Boîte à lire, Saint-Servan, Saint-Malo, Ille-et-Vilaine
Boîte à lire in Caen, Calvados
Boîte à Lire, Noyant d'Allier, Allier
Boîte à lire, Dampierre-en-Burly, Loiret
Boîte à lire, Illiers-Combray, Eure-et-Loir
Boîte à lire, Chartres, Eure-et-Loir
Boîte à lire, Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, Rhône

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

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:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
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