Félicien Marceau: Creezy (1969)

Creezy – obviously a distortion of the English word 'crazy', and the same title of which was used in the English translation – is a story of not-so-everyday madness, but certainly of the madness of consumerism and the inability of the market to supply certain demands, such as love or happiness.

Creezy begins and ends in the same place, with député Jacques waiting a half-hour for the engine noise in his car to be fixed in the garage. While he's waiting, though, the reader learns why his life is such a mess, why he no longer has a wife and of the events leading up to the death of his beloved Creezy.

Jacques first caught a glimpse of Creezy – a beautiful and famous fashion model – at the front of the audience at a show. After that he meets her at an airport, the pair hit it off very well in sitting next to each other during the flight, and Creezy seems to be another of the conquests of the député (married with two children).

A fling becomes an obsession, lust turns to love and therefore psychological dependence, and all the hell that that brings. No, Jacques can't keep two lives together and things start to fall apart quickly. There's no indication of this in the form of the book, though, which consists of eighteen sections in a single paragraph, apart from when occasionally being split to incorporate quotations.

Creezy marks my thirtieth Goncourt winner reading, although this relatively short (197-page) novel feels  – at the moment at least, although I'll definitely reread it one day for confirmation or otherwise – like one of the best of them.

The grave of Félicien Marceau (1913–2012) in Le cimetière ancien de Neuilly:

My Félicien Marceau posts:

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Félicien Marceau: La Terrasse de Lucrezia

Félicien Marceau: Creezy