L'Office des vivants is Claudie Gallay's first novel, and like the other two novels of hers I've read – Les Déferlantes and Les Années cerises – is set in a very isolated place with its main characters having communication problems. L'Office des vivants reads like an epic novel, although only has 235 pages of many very short sections: but a great deal happens in them. Also, partly perhaps because of those many sections, it has an episodic feel to it, almost as if many of those sections (although written in chronological order) are short stories about the same topic.
It is certainly an epic depiction of living in a rural slum, with all its workshyness, filth, poverty, vile smells, lack of modern gadgets*, theft, casual rape, violence in general, frequent lack of food, lack of communication, lack of articulacy, lack of interest, etc. This is a kind of social horror story which wouldn't appeal to anyone who prefers feelgood fare with happy endings.
In a town up a mountain there is a farm mis-run by the mother and father of young Marc and Simone, with the grandparents (grandfather and M'mé Coche (his second wife)) living nearby –in similar squalor. The father seems not to like work much, is tyrannical and violent, and has a voracious sexual appetite, which is apparent from his regularly raping the young milkmaid Mado while she's milking a cow. The reader can't fail to agree with her when she calls the family completely mad and announces that she's leaving. Only, when she leaves she also takes what little savings the family has, and nine months later leaves her and the father's baby (whom she's called Monue) at the entrance to the farm.
Monue becomes part of the family and proves to be a revelation to Marc – a great change from his smelly one-eyed sister Simone – who's nicknamed 'Pue-la-Pisse' at school. And the lovely Monue and dreamy Marc become great friends.
The family leave the heights for the lower village Le Bas, although for reasons of space they also have to leave Monue in the care of the grandparents. But things get worse: although the father has a (very low-paid) job, he can't do it without taking a bottle of wine with him, and his drink-fuelled violence at home not only leads to him hitting members of the family but to a savage attack on the cow. Then the grandfather dies and – much to Monue and Marc's delight – the half-siblings are reunited, with Marc sleeping in the van. Later, Monue joins him in the van and the two enjoy a chaste sleeping relationship until the break comes when the unthought-of happens and Monue starts menstruating. And Marc starts going mad because his great childhood friend is not longer a little girl. Then, the blood really hits the fan, but I'll leave this fascinating (and often disturbing) novel there.
*At first the novel seemed timeless, although the existence of the petrol-driven van and mention of washing-machines set it in a more modern context.
My Claudie Gallay posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Claudie Gallay: Les Déferlantes | Breakers
Claudie Gallay: Les Années cerises
Claudie Gallay: L'Office des vivants
Les Années cerises (lit. 'The Cherry Years') concerns an eleven-year-old boy and his desires, his hopes and his fears. Rather like the later Les Déferlantes, this is about a fragile individual for whom communication is really difficult. In Les Déferlantes, the unnamed protagonist is traumatised by a previous relationship and incapable of expressing her feelings; in Les Années cerises, the eleven-year-old first person narrator expresses himself very well in the book, but in his daily life can't express his feelings, his knowledge, or his desires. His parents beat him, his mother takes him to a useless psychologist, and he seems trapped. He's 'L'Anéanti', or the destroyed or the broken person, literally living on the edge of a cliff which will soon give way and threatens to send his whole family over the edge into oblivion.
Not that he doesn't have friends, such as Paulo, who comes from a richer family, but who mocks the narrator as do the other kids and his teachers, but Paulo's sister (unnamed) gets the narrator's young juices flowing, even though he knows that he's at least three years too young for her, and anyway she sees him as a bit autistic, and there's probably a fair amount of truth in that. The narrator's mother thinks that sending him to a private (Catholic) school will be better for him, and surprisingly instead of this idea alienating him, his existing schoolmates ironically see this as a major plus: he can spy on them for his former school, whose pupils are at war with the other school.
Events get in the way though, specifically the erosion of the cliff their rented house is on, to such an extent that the family will have to be rehoused. Cue for major developments. Judging by the two books I've read of Claudie Galley's, (lack of) communication appears to be a major theme with her, although I may be barking up the wrong cherry tree.
My Claudie Gallay posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Claudie Gallay: Les Déferlantes | Breakers
Claudie Gallay: Les Années cerises
Claudie Gallay: L'Office des vivants
Drip, drip, drip. That's the way the information in Claudie Gallay's Les Déferlantes (trans. as Breakers) comes through here: slowly revealing tiny points in an enticingly poetic fashion. Most characters here have secrets, and it is the unnamed female narrator, who frequently speaks silently to a past lover and has obviously been hurt in some way because of him, to whom the revelations come. She has been a teacher in Provence, but now makes ornithological reports at the Cap de la Hague, on the north-western tip of the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy. She has moved into a huis clos situation where most people seem to spend much time watching others.
The language itself is subtly devastating, and it would be easy to imagine the life and events here in a medieval context, although we know that the poet Jacques Prévert once lived here (so it's after 1977), audio-cassettes are mentioned, as is telephone sex, the mentally wounded narrator has ceased to use her mobile phone, and a bottle of 1997 wine is mentioned. But there's no internet or even computers mentioned.
The inspiration for the main theme of the story is Prévert's brief poem 'Le Gardien du phare aime trop les oiseaux' ('The Lighthouse Keeper Likes Birds Too Much'), although this poem isn't mentioned in the book: incidentally, many things aren't initially mentioned because silence and verbal constipation rule here, anything spoken seems too painful to be said.
The narrator plays detective here, achieving much more than the ex-cop Lambert can – he's come here partly to sell the family home, partly to investigate what happened all those years ago, when he was only fifteen, when his parents and his baby brother died on their return journey from Aurigny (the French for 'Alderney'), crashing into the rocks. Théo, now an old man, was the lighthouse keeper at the time, and there are suspicions that he inadvertently played God: this is where Prévert's poem comes in, as its about a lighthouse keeper who switches off the light to save birds from killing themselves as, attracted to the glow, they hit the glass.
And then there's the photo of Paul, Lambert's brother, which is stolen from his grave, and it is later discovered that Nan, who ran an orphanage and adopted a child she called Michel. And what about all these letters Théo receives?
There are other colourful characters here too, clustered around the local café run by Théo's daughter Lili: M. Anthelme and his obsession with Prévert, Max the boat-builder with his impossible dreams, La Mère who's not as stupid as she seems, Raphäel the artist, and his sex-crazy sister who thinks the narrator should have a good 'fuck' (she likes to talk rough and dirty) to shake her out of her emotional deadlock.
Certainly the sexual tension between the narrator and Lambert is painful both for them and the reader. But things will be resolved after Lambert's contact with his long lost brother, who's alive and well and living as a monk in the Jura. The narrator and Lambert – now in a deeply satisfying sexual relationship – drive out to see him. They've rejoined the world of people rather than ghosts.
Highly engaging. My only complaint: the language loses much of its poetic impact in exhange for emotional power some time after the halfway mark, so seems a little uneven. But then, it would be difficult to retain the same atmosphere in a 539-page book.
My Claudie Gallay posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Claudie Gallay: Les Déferlantes | Breakers
Claudie Gallay: Les Années cerises
Claudie Gallay: L'Office des vivants
Posts
