Patrick Besson: Assessible à certaine melancolie (2000)

I needed something lighter after reading Ascendant Sagittaire, and Accessible à certaine melancolie certainly met that description. What can I say? It's very readable, you can get through it in a few hours, but you don't really feel satisfied after you've finished it. At under sixty, Besson has published well over seventy books, sometimes several in one year. That's an awful lot of writing.

 

The truth is, this book doesn't say much. At all. It's about egotistical war correspondent Milan who's forty-five, getting tired of his second wife and having many affairs. The trouble is that he can't find the right woman to save him: he needs a very rare and divine creature.

 

Towards the end of the book Milan goes to Vorchelia – a pseudonym for Serbia – and he gets together with Anna, one of his Vorchelian lovers, when Anna 2 (a surgeon he's having an affair with and whom he met through his eighteen-year-old lover Rose having a nose job) bangs on  his hotel door: she's left her handicapped husband for him. Exit Anna 1, although she later shoots him in the chest but Anna 2's surgery saves him: she decides to stay on and help in the war while the love-war-wounded Milan goes back to France.

 

So, will he go back to his cancer-stricken wife Brigitte, go back to Rose or find someone else? Does any reader care? Well, he discovers that Anna 2 is returning to France minus a hand, but on knocking at her door finds her aggressive wheelchair-bound husband there and they fight. Milan pushes the man down the stairs, kills him, and has time to kiss Anna 2's stump and make love to her before the police come.

 

Nine years later when Milan leaves prison Anna 2 is waiting for him to come and live with him. A fitting end to the story: maybe he's found his goddess. La Belle-Soeur was better than this, but I probably won't be reading any more of Patrick Besson's novels in the near future: I wondered what the point of this one was, but I don't think there is a point.

My other Patrick Besson post:

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Patrick Besson: Belle-soeur

André Fraigneau: Père Lachaise Columbarium #22

The Hussards was a literary movement the 'members' of which never recognised the term itself, and not did they see themselves as part of a movement. The expression was originally used in 1952 by the writer and journalist Bernard Frank in Les Temps Modernes to describe a group of strongly right-wing writers who were anti-Sartrean and anti-Gaullist. Under this umbrella come Roger Nimier (who published Le Hussard bleu in 1950 and of course inadvertently gave the name to the group of writers), Jacques Laurent, Antoine Blondin, Michel Déon, Jacques Chardonne, Paul Morand, and so on.

But Déon said that neither he nor Blondin would have been writers without the existence of André Fraigneau (1905–91), whose L’Amour vagabond (1949) is seen as something of a sacred text for the Hussards – Blondin, for instance, wrote L’humeur vagabonde in homage to it.

Some people (readers and writers) are attracted to the Hussard style (short, incisive, poetic phrasing) in spite of their politics, and Jérôme Garcin even coined the term 'néo-Hussards' to describe more recent writers such as Patrick Besson, a person who is wholly without the political affiliations of the original Hussards because he still considers himself a kind of communist. (Besson also published the novel Le Hussard rouge in 2011.)

My first post on Père Lachaise is linked below:

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Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise / Père Lachaise Cemetery

Patrick Besson: Belle-soeur (2004)

Not everything is as might be expected in Belle-soeur ('Sister-in-Law'), including the title. The narrator is Gilles, a journalist in Paris and therefore, as his mother says, a fouteur de merde, or shit stirrer. It's the family that's of central importance in this novel, as the title indicates. Gilles is the elder brother of Fabien, a famous (but alcoholic and coked-up) film star who is (off and on) engaged to Annabel, with whom Gilles falls in love and over whom he obsesses. But Gilles's relationship with Annabel is slow to start and it seems she's playing with him at first.

And then Gilles takes Sophie (a girl he doesn't, indeed can't, love) to Hungary, where Fabien is on location for a new movie and staying with Annabel until she falls out with him again and Gilles takes Annabel back to Paris, leaving Sophie to spend the rest of the holiday in Hungary.

And for three weeks Gilles's dreams come true and Annabel welcomes him into her bed and he lives with her in her flat. But Fabien returns, Gilles thinks Annabel will go back to him, gathers his belongings and leaves the key in the letter box. To Annabel's anger.

When Fabien buys a place in Neuilly and Annabel moves in with him she finds she's pregnant. She's told Fabien that she had a relationship with a man far older than Gilles (just to put her fiancé off the scent) while they split up, and when the child is born Gilles advises his brother to have a DNA test: it proves negative, and Fabien throws Annabel out.

Meanwhile Gilles has gone back to Sophie (although of course he's never stopped loving Annabel), who gives birth at the same time as Annabel, and Gilles knows, but doesn't care, that the baby is really Fabien's, and he's still marrying Sophie.

And then there's a potential atom bomb when Gilles tells Fabien that Annabel's baby is really his, although he knows that she'll deny it. Gilles's mother Catherine disowns him, but then her affections are for Fabien anyway, and shortly after Catherine tells her younger son that his father is in fact not the man who brought him up, he dies in a motorcycle accident.

So Fabien is only Gilles's half-brother, his wife's baby is not his but his half-brother's, he's the father of Annabel's child, and as Annabel and Fabien never marry, the 'Sister-in-Law' of the title must refer to Fabien's posthumous relation to Sophie!

Gilles says that Sophie and Catherine know that Annabel's lied about the true father, but they just continue to make believe that he's the liar. Well, has the reader ever suspected Gilles as an unreliable narrator? What does Gilles care: he only loves Annabel, who's bringing up their son, and every day he gets to take care of his reborn (half-)brother.

(In an article published in the magazine Le Point on 1 December 2011 and entitled 'Eva Joly, présidente de la République', Patrick Besson mocked the French-Norwegian green presidential candidate's accent by writing the whole piece in a kind of mock-Germanic style which began: 'Zalut la Vranze ! Auchourt'hui est un krand chour : fous m'afez élue brézidente te la République vranzaise'. It was the subject of some debate, and Joly called the article a 'racist attack', whereas Le Point didn't see what the fuss was about, and spoke of 'the dictatorship of the politically correct'. Some internautes tried to defend Besson by turning to the world of fiction and pointing out that Balzac too made fun of accents, as in the Alsatian Schmucke in Le Cousin Pons. Besson's article (with comments)).

My other Patrick Besson post:

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Patrick Besson: Assessible à certaine melancolie