Christiane Rochefort: Les Petits Enfants du siècle | Children of heaven | Josyane and the Welfare (1961)

Christiane Rochefort's Les Petits Enfants du siècle is a play on Alfred de Musset's La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836), well known as an example to the 'Mal du siècle' (or 'sickness of the century'), only Rochefort's novel is not about the nineteenth century.

Here, we're in the middle of a world in 'Les Trente Glorieuses' (1945-1975) beginning with the end of World War II, supposedly confident years in which France was rebuilding itself, putting up HLMs (social housing), new fake towns (as opposed to those which grew up over many centuries), where the government encourages families to have increasing numbers of children to become willing workers and consumers, and when capitalist enterprises supply increasing numbers of new household goods to meet demands, only too happy to do so to make interest under hire purchase.

Josyane is one of the children caught up in this working-class consumer whirlwind, coming from an ever-increasing family. Her father works in a mustard factory and they have moved from dirty lodgings in the 13 arrondissement, where the water came from a tap on the landing, to a new cité in Bagnolet, which is grim in a different way but an improvement in amenities. Josyane, as the eldest child of the brood, plays second mother to the younger children, leaves school early, and has sex (cunnilingus) very early with Guido, a thirty-year-old build.ing worker: she adores the experience, which transports her to another world.

Josyane can be said to have the second half of the twentieth-century 'mal du siècle', and she's alienated by her environment, her family, the architecture and life in a cité in general. When Guido leaves she tries to find him in Sarcelles where he's supposed to have moved now the housing project has finished in Bagnolet. She loves the Sarcelles, alough she doesn't find Guido in the maze of streets named after poets. On the title page is a quotation from Rimbaud: 'La Vraie vie est absurde' ('Real life is absurd.').

The final chapter is a rather soppy story of Josyane falling in love with Philippe, getting pregnant, marrying him, and probably going to live in Sarcelles, where of course they'll live on credit, and maybe Josyane will have a fling with one of the builders when she husband's out at work, as the houewives are reputed to do in the cités. Come to think of it, this came across as a naturalistic, modern update of Zola. Pessimistic? Yes, that's what I thought. Very readable and very well expressed though.