Jocelyne François: Joue-nous « España » (1980)

Another vintage gem from Jocelyne François, found in one of my favourite Paris bookshops for all of one euro. The back cover says Joue-nous « España » (lit. 'Play Us 'Spain'') is an autobiographical account of a woman from Lorraine, concerning her childhood and adolescence. Yes, this has some very vivid descriptions of the area of Nancy where François was born, including her visits to both of her grandparents in nearby Rosière-aux-Salines and Combasle-sur-Meurthe. The reader is treated to a lyrical description of the flowers*, orchards, and vines of the region, including some expressions of the area, such as mettre à parer, meaning to spread grapes on a rack until they ripen. And then World War II spreads its poison over France.

The real interest is when after the war the narrator is sent to a religious school in Mattaincourt, where she physically and mentally develops for seven years. The narrator expresses her love for Marie-Claire, or Sarah as she also calls her, a love which is extremely strong and physically expressed; when she tells a religious man she believes is sympathetic, he tells her to forget such matters: for him, there is no such thing as homosexual love, which is against nature.

The narrator's mother is of a similar opinion as the religious man, only she believes that the narrator would have been better as a sexually promiscuous woman, even as a prostitute. The title takes on a symbolic significance, and in the final paragraph the narrator rejects both her father and her mother: they used to enjoy her playing 'España' on the piano, although she didn't, but when she says 'Non, mon père, non, ma mère, je ne jouerai jamais España' on the piano they gave her, she means that she will never play the game, never play the heterosexual farce (again). She did play the game initially by marrying and had three children, and her lover 'Sarah' (in reality Marie-Claire Pichaud) had an affair with a married man. But truth (as opposed to pretense, or hypocrisy) won in the end, and the couple lived together in Provence (Saumane-de-Vaucluse) for twenty-five years before moving to Paris due to poor health.

*One flower mentioned several times is the nielle, or corn cockle, which is virtually extinct in England.

My other Jocelyne François post:
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Jocelyne François: Les Bonheurs

Virginie Despentes: Apocalypse bébé (2010)

Virginie Despentes describes herself as an 'anarcho-feminist'. When she directed a film of her first novel Baise-moi (1994) in 2000 it caused quite a stir and was subjected to accusations of 'pornography'. I could describe the film Baise-moi as Tarantino meets Thelma and Louise with lashings of unsimulated sex. But there is nothing titillating about it, and there would be something very unusual with anyone getting off on this stuff: Despentes is very angry. Coyly, the film version for distribution with English sub-titles didn't translate the title: a film called 'Fuck Me' would obviously have encountered censorship problems.

In 2010 it was a surprise when Despentes won the prix Renaudot – the second most important French literary prize. But to capture the atmosphere of the novel the making of a film version is highly unlikely because of the cost involved – this is a devastating read in more than one respect.

The back cover of this novel calls it a mixture of social satire, contemporary detective story and road novel, which seems a reasonably accurate shorthand description. Valentine Galton is the key character – a wayward fifteen-year-old who frequently plays truant and has sex with as many men as possible because she imagines that the more she has of it the better she'll get. Earlier on she mixes with the band PDTC (Panique Dans Ton Cul), which can be translated as 'Panic In Your Ass': it could almost be a prediction of the novel's climax, but more of that later.

There was a sub-genre of the fin-de-siècle New Woman novel in English literature which involved women detectives, and although I never managed to track one down to read I imagine that Apocalypse bébé must be a kind of update. The narrative switches between first and third person, with the first being related by the private detective Lucie Toledo, and the third revealing key characters in Valentine's life, ending with Lucie herself.

Valentine has gone missing, and Lucie's job is to find her. To help her in this she co-opts La Hyène ('The Hyena'), a much more experienced private detective and a larger-than-life, very openly lesbian character who doesn't flinch about using violent tactics to reach her goal. The novel involves various detective activities in Paris, and then a journey by car to Barcelona, where Valentine is eventually found and is ostensibly a docile captive.

Valentine comes from a broken family with an extremely self-centred mother and novelist father François whose books have gone out of fashion: the internet plays a very important role in detection in the story, although François uses it to write his Wikipédia entry and check his tiny sales positions on the Amazon charts.

But François's position in those sales charts will rocket, albeit posthumously. Finally his contribution to literature has been noticed, and this is to be recognised in a ceremony at the Palais-Royal. Valentine accompanies him, although what follows is catastrophe of such proportions that it will be compared, among other things, to the Twin Towers and the earthquake in Haiti.

The Palais-Royal metal detector registers when Valentine passes through it, but when she explains that this is clitoral ornamentation the staff don't probe any further. Ten minutes before the ceremony Valentine borrows her father's iPhone to post the ready-recorded video clip 'Little Girl' – showing her inserting a highly explosive device into her vagina: the result will change more than the nature of French security for ever.

Overnight Lucie becomes a wanted person, but her boss provides her with a fake driver's licence, she escapes to Spain to join her lesbian Polish lover Zoska, and ends up near Seville hoping for a fake passport to take them to South America.

A review of this book in the Independent suggests that the end of Apocalypse Baby is tacked on: oh no, it was intended. Like Baise-moi, this is an angry book, and a very powerful one.

My other Virginie Despentes post:
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Virginie Despentes: Vernon Subutex I (2015)

Nina Bouraoui: Garçon manqué |Tomboy (2000)

Garçon manqué. Tomboy in the English translation. Autofiction. About a girl called Yasmina. Born in Rennes in Brittany. Moved to Algiers, Algeria as a child. In 1967. French mother. Maryvonne. Algerian father. Rachid. He's a senior civil servant. She goes to a French school. She speaks fluent French. She doesn't speak Arabic. Her father calls her Brio.

In France they call her Nina. It sounds less Arab. Maryvonne's parents didn't want her to marry Rachid. Her parents met while the war was on. Nina is French. Nina is Algerian. Nina is both. She's neither. She has no country. She looks at a photo of Rachid's brother, who died in the Algerian war. He's pointing a rifle. At her. She's the enemy.

Nina wants to be like a boy. She cuts her hair. She tries on the gendered mannerisms. 'Je ne me sais pas.' 'I don't know myself.' A prisoner of her body as well as a prisoner in both countries.

The telephone sounds at night. Their car tyres are removed. From a balcony they throw dirty water at her. Things could end in a blood bath. Kids throw pebbles at the car while her mother's driving.

Nina and her sister stay with their grandparents for the summer. They don't ask about Algeria. So much is spoken by never being said. But.

There's a devastating violence in the word, casual or intended. The effects on a highly intelligent, hypersensitive child. Their effects on anyone. Yes, the power of the word. This book conveys it. Sometimes brilliantly.

My other posts on Nina Bouraoui:

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Nina Bouraoui: Avant les hommes
Nina Bouraoui: Mes mauvaises pensées

Jocelyne François: Les Bonheurs (1970; repr. 1982)

I use labels so that I can easily consult my posts, although it seems like ghettoising to use the term 'lesbian literature' for this book, which wears no badges and is not even about homosexual identity: it's just about two women who happen to be very deeply, passionately in love.

It's also strongly autobiographical: as I understand it, the character Anne is based on the author Jocelyne François (born 1933), and the character Sarah on her lover Marie-Claire Pichaud, who was for a short time a singer and later – as Claire Pichaud – an artist.

Jocelyne and Marie-Claire met and fell in love in Catholic school, and although they became lovers they separated, Anne marrying and having children and Claire having a heterosexual relationship. But several years later they re-united permanently and lived in Saumane-de-Vaucluse for twenty-five years – François meeting and becoming friends with the poet René Char from nearby L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue – before they removed to Paris for health reasons.

Les Bonheurs is narrated by both Sarah and Anne (usually as if in epistolary form), although it is not always immediately clear who is speaking at a particular time: the second person singular 'tu' is used almost all of the time, and the reader's knowledge of the narrator is often only ascertained from the a direct address to the addressee: yes, this is a kind of experimental novel.

The questioning, reminiscing narrative prevails, only occasionally interrupted by snippets of conversation, and the novel begins with Sarah remembering her relationship with Anne – who's now married to Michel – with great pain and longing. Although Sarah is now in a relationship with Jean, a married man, she can't forget Anne, and a letter asking her to come and see her for a few days when her husband's away soon finds the lovers in each other's arms, making passionate love, making up for lost time.

Sarah returns with a copy of Anne's diary smuggled out in the bottom of her bag, and for about fifty pages we read of Anne's feelings about her marriage and childbirth, but more importantly of her undying love for Sarah. On the second page of the novel we have learned that a certain Ulrich originally separated them, but it is only in the diary that we find out that he was a priest who fed Anne with religious poison and told her that the young girls' relationship was unnatural. Anne's marriage, long mulled over by Sarah, was only a desperate measure: although no dates are mentioned, the book is set, after all, in the Catholic France of the 1950s.

The book ends in Anne and Michel's divorce, but it is hard fought: fighting is the operative word here and men are seen as warriors, battling for territory overseas (the humiliating Algerian war being in the background) as well as battling for female territory. Michel only very slowly comes to realise that his wife has physically enjoyed Anne's body in the same way – only much more intensely –as his: the phallocratic fallacy.

Sex, according to Michel, is binary. He asks her:  'Eh bien, Anne, entre vous deux, comment se répartissent les rôles? Tu est l'homme ou tu est la femme?' – 'So, Anne, just between the two of us, how do you share the roles out? Are you the man or the woman?' Anne's reply is delightful: 'Pourquoi? Tu a eu l'impression d'être un pédéraste en vivant avec moi? 'Why? has living with me made you feel like a homosexual?' He of course objects to this, so she continues: 'Eh bien, Jean ne s'est pas senti péderaste avec Sarah. Tout le monde est homme et femme à la fois' – 'Well then, Jean didn't feel like a homosexual with Sarah either. We are all male and female at the same time.' Ah, if only we all understood that though!

It seems very fitting to add that one of Marie-Claire Pichaud's songs (of about 1962) was called 'Nous n'irons plus en guerre' – 'We're not Going to War Anymore'.

Jocelyne François went on to write four more autobiographical novels – Les Amantes (1978), Joue-nous 'España' (1980), Histoire de Volubilis (1986) and La femme sans tombe (1995) – and three diaries.

I'd not heard of Jocelyne François until a couple of weeks ago when I noticed this novel in the French section at Waterstones, Deansgate, Manchester: it was a 1990 reprint of the 1982 edition, still priced in French francs at that date, and I find it a little difficult to believe that the shop had had it on the shelves for so long as there is only a little sunning to the spine and slight soiling of the bottom edge. Anyway, I thought it something of a bargain at £9.50: it's been out of print for some years, and Bookfinder.com only shows a few copies available worldwide. And although the Library of Congress has both editions, the British Library doesn't have it at all, and it's never been translated into English.

This was quite a find – not just a rare book, but what I call a significant one too.

My other Jocelyne François post:
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Jocelyne François: Joue-nous « España »

Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)

This is a far from conventional spinster novel: it is deeply subversive, it screams anti-convention. Towards the end of the book the narrator suggests that protagonist Laura Willowes' nephew Titus is a 'proxy wooer', marrying Pandora when in fact the 'real match' is between Pandora and Lady Place, Titus's inherited home.

The word 'proxy' goes a long way towards an understanding of this work, because the unmarried Laura lives much of her life through others: after the death of her mother she's housekeeper to her father, and then after he dies it's taken for granted that she can probably have no life of her own (although she's still under thirty) and she goes to London to live with her brother Harry, his wife Caroline and her two nieces, one of whom accidentally causes the re-branding of Laura to 'Lolly'.

Early in her stay in London Harry and Caroline had nevertheless hoped to find a match for her among Harry's acquaintances in the legal profession, although Laura didn't tell them that she thinks '[t]heir jaws [are] like so many mouse-traps, baited with commonplaces'. However, they are surprised that she gets on well with Mr Arbuthnot, although marriage is far removed from Laura's ideas: she merely finds Mr Arbuthnot a little more human than the others because of his stammer. And then, after Mr Arbuthnot refers to February as a dangerous month Laura agrees, adding:

'If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.'

This is England in 1902 and we are in prim and proper upper-middle-class society, so the effect of such a frivolous – and slightly crazy – remark can be imagined. Some years later, in her late forties, Laura disturbs the family universe by deciding to leave her brother and family to live in the hamlet of Great Mop – a fictional creation, of course – in the Chilterns. There, in spite of the unwelcome and confused Titus briefly joining her, she finds a physical and a mental room of her own. A world of her own, in fact, because she makes a pact with the devil and becomes a witch:

'One doesn't become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It's to escape all that – to have a life of one's own, not to have an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day'.

This was Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel, and it clearly heralded a fresh new voice in interwar fiction. It's not difficult either to see the demonic symbolism, that essential coding of difference, as a prototype of the coding used by other homosexual writers such as Rhys Davies, John Hampson, or Frank Sargeson.