Philippe Delerm: Quelque chose en lui de Bartleby (2009)

There's a French expression 'marcher à  côté de ses pompes' that could be translated as 'being in another world', or 'being completely out of it', etc, which would be an adequate description, but by no means entirely accurate: literally, it means 'walking at the side of your shoes', which puts a whole new glow on it. There is quite simply no way that I can think of in English to convey this mind/body, internal/external split in a short expression. To a certain extent, this is what Philippe Delerm's Quelque chose en lui de Bartleby is about.

Arnold Spitzweg is a very likeable character, a kind of everyman, but a loser who is not only happy to be a loser but relishes it: he's not interested in the finer things in life, he's interested in the little things that most people don't even think of, he can spend hours looking at wallpaper hanging loose from a wall, watch a crack in a wall, get his kicks out of not getting kicks. He refuses not exactly in the way that Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener refuses to accept, but just refuses to be normal, to accept conventions. His 'I'd prefer not to' is quiet, as he knows he'd get the sack from his mediocre job if he actually voiced it. Instead, he simply refuses to play the usual social games, the bits of nonsense that make up other people's existences.

If we take those shoes as life itself, he walks at the side of life without completely engaging in it. He moved from Kintzheim, Bas-Rhin, on the death of his parents: he was known by people in the small town, although he trades this recognition for the anonymity of Paris. Arnold might appear to have something of the autistic in him, maybe Asperger's syndrome, a real communication problem, but he recognises that he can't really communicate with most people, that he mainly communicates with himself, but don't we all? Isn't his way of being unconventional merely the way he copes with modern life?

Certainly his communication is virtual, but again, isn't that a manifestation of modern life today? When he lived with a woman, he disliked the way she came home and automatically switched on music, the way she'd spend hours texting her cousins in the suburbs, people she'd never actually visit, never know.

And then the anti-modern Arnold discovers blogging, a way he can say what he wants, create www.antiaction.com, which unfortunately takes off too well, people start making comments to him, many of them women, but he doesn't reply, just pretends he's talking to himself. But he's asked on a radio show, even though his face is unknown he's recognised by some, so he has to self-censor in order to conceal the identities of people he writes about: in a word he's no longer himself, society is taking over. He refuses a book contract: he isn't made to live outside himself.

My other posts on Philippe Delerm:

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Philippe Delerm: Quiproquo
Philippe Delerm: Les Amoureux de l'Hôtel de Ville
Philippe Delerm: La Première Gorgée de bière

Philippe Delerm: Quiproquo (1999; repr. by Motifs 2005)

Philippe Delerm's Quiproquo is either a short novel or a longish short story, I'm not too sure which, but needless to say it highlights the author's pointillist style, emphasising the tiny aspects of life, often enriching them with a magical (or occasionally negative) power.

Here we have the narrator – from Normandy – moving to Picardy to work as a journalist on Le Réveil Picard. He takes the opportunity to go for the weekend in the south, in Agen, to cover the budding local young tennis player Valérie Pascal's performance. As his old Renault has finally given up on him he has to go with the insufferable Pascal family, and on arriving there the father seems to have arranged what everyone should do and more or less orders that following a shower the journalist shall join him in the bar. The narrator – bored rigid by the Pascals and no doubt sick of writing about tea parties and the like – just takes a shower, changes his shirt, picks up his sac à dos and makes journalism part of his past.

He hitches to the bus station in Agen, decides that Beaumont-de-Lomagne is probably too big, but Camparoles (with an esse, as opposed to with the real Camparole) sounds small enough. And in fact it is: it may not be the prettiest of places, but it's the south, with its heat and light and hospitality, its leisured way of looking at life. This'll do for him, so he throws his phone in the Gironde and carves out a new existence.

His first problem is finding somewhere to stay, but his luck's in when he meets the Tarentini family: Albert and Maria – originally from Italy – bought a farm and started raising a family in France; on Albert's death Maria sold up and opened an auberge in Camparoles and developed it into a café-theatre (the Quiproquo Théâtre) where the (now adult) children Stéphane and Alicia can exercise the acting gene that is within them. Maria has built the business into a successful one, with tourists and even people from Agen coming to visit.

The narrator falls in love with the place so much that the family allows him to stay at the auberge for a small sum in return for a few odd jobs – sort of quid pro quo. Initially he also works in an orchard and sells the produce with some of the seasonal workers on Barsac market. Shortly afterwards he drops the fruit job and joins the acting troupe on a permanent basis and things really are idyllic. He even begins a relationship with Alicia but of course it can't last.

The first blow is the death of Maria, which devastates the group but life must carry on – it's what she'd have wanted. But on the same night that Maria died a Parisian theatre director saw Alicia's acting and was very interested: she has to follow her dream. It's not Stéphane's dream, and the narrator's principal dream is of course already in Camparoles, so he stays with Stéphane and the café-théâtre continues regardless.

My other posts Philippe Delerm:
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Philippe Delerm: La Première Gorgée de bière
Philippe Delerm: Les Amoureux de l'Hôtel de Ville
Philippe Delerm: Quelque chose en lui de Bartleby

Philippe Delerm: Les Amoureux de l'Hôtel de Ville (2001)

François has become unemployed at the age of forty, and now has time to reflect, to bring back memories of his childhood and of his youth, and among other things he revisits his ageing father and his old university friends and reflects some more.

It's his childhood memories which are the most vivid – the Dinky toys, the Solex, Tintin, or the sounds, such as the quiz show Quitte ou Double with Zappy Max on Radio Luxembourg or later on Radio Monte Carlo.

Some objects of his youth have an iconic importance, such as Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (Le Messager in French) and the young boy of the title with whom he identifies – a film he says he's seen a hundred times.

Most of all, though, it's Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville ('The Kiss'), Robert Doisneau's world famous 1950 photo of a young couple kissing in a crowded street with the Hôtel de Ville in the background, that transfixes the narrator. It's of particular importance as a kind of 'family photo' because his parents used to (apocryphally) claim that they were the lovers in the foreground, and he minutely dissects the photo.

This is not so much a trip down a middleaged person's Memory Lane as a meditation on the nature of memory and its deceptions, its constructions, and also on the vividness of the past compared to that of the present.

My other posts on Philippe Delerm:

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Philippe Delerm: Quiproquo
Philippe Delerm: La Première Gorgée de bière et autres plaisirs minuscules
Philippe Delerm: Quelque chose en lui de Bartleby

Philippe Delerm: La Première Gorgée de bière et autres plaisirs minuscules

Philippe Delerm's La Première Gorgée de bière et autres plaisirs minuscules (1997), translated as The Small Pleasures of Life (1998), is a fascinating collection of 34 generally unrelated two- or three-page observations on such subjects as: the first mouthful of beer; Sunday evenings; motorway driving at night; the moving walkway at Montparnasse station; kaleidoscopes; learning how to play boules; a new pullover for the cooler months; reading on the beach; or the architecture of a banana-split.

One special event is mentioned, and is held in the narrator's memory - as we all freeze such memories - at the very time that he or she is performing a particular action. Here, what is recalled is not the assassination of Kennedy or Lennon, or the 9/11 massacre, but the death of Jacques Brel, heard on France Inter on the car radio. For the narrator, Brel will always be associated with where he or she was at the time: on a motorway, speeding down a charmless valley somewhere between Evreux and Mantes-la-Jolie.

Delerm's gift for writing often transforms the experience of the commonplace into something striking - even haunting - by his use of metaphor, such as in his description of the 'alligator jaws' of an escalator, or wet espadrilles represented as 'a complete shipwreck'.

Sometimes, these brief pieces remind me of other writers, as in this description: 'Shelling peas is easy. Thumb pressed on the slit along the pod and, obediently, it opens its offerings. Some, not as ripe, are more shy - an incision with the index fingernail allows the green to be torn and we can then breathe in the moistness and the thick flesh'. It's not the sensuality of the language that I find particularly interesting here, but the detail of it, and I'm reminded of Nicholson Baker's paper clips and shoelaces in Mezzanine. Unlike Baker, though, Delerm doesn't deliberately labour the detail: shelling peas is just briefly mentioned as a simple pleasure, and no more.

'The Motorway at Night' reminds me of Craig Raine's A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), especially the poem of the title. In Raine's poem, we see everyday objects with fresh eyes, such as the car, of which he says 'a key is turned to free the world / for movement, so quick there is a film / to watch for anything missed.' In this piece, Delerm compares the car to a spaceship, and then says 'In solitude's padded silence, it's rather as though we're in a cinema seat: the film passes before our eyes'.

This is my first taste of Delerm, and I look forward to his latest novel, Quelque chose en lui de Bartleby.

My other posts on Philippe Delerm:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Philippe Delerm: Quiproquo
Philippe Delerm: Les Amoureux de l'Hôtel de Ville
Philippe Delerm: Quelque chose en lui de Bartleby