Albert t'Serstevens's Un apostolat (1919; repr. with Afterword by Jean-Pierre Martinet (2018))

This fascinating little-known novel by the little-known Albert t'Serstevens has a sixty-six page Afterword by the also little-known (but more than a little fascinating) writer Jean-Pierre Martinet, whose 1980 masterpiece Jérôme is still (criminally) largely unknown even by French readers.

Here, the converts to the vegetarian life free from social and political constraints at first meet in the Restaurant Cérès: there's Pascal Marin, the older Chapelle, Krabelinckx (modelled on t'Serstevens himself, and a partial renegade who sneaks home to eat fried sausages), Firmin Lhommel, the poet Verd, etc. Anarchists, they form a utopian cummune named Cité Kropotkine but it doesn't stay a utopia for long. Plagued by infighting and huge theft by con merchant Botrou, the ideal ends with Lhommel's suicide and the collapse of the dream.

The second part of the book sees Pascal in London, which is to say the least a disappointment to him, and he spends his last weeks there living with the mysterious Déa, who may be a kind of prostitute but who knows? Returning alone to Paris, Pascal writes a pamphlet before becoming smitten by Lucienne, who lives in luxury and whose often absent but understanding husband Cunard is a financier. End of Pascal's egalitarian ideals.

Capharnaüm 2: Jean-Pierre Martinet sans illusions... (2011)

Published by the Bordeaux company Finitude, Capharnaüm has since it began in 2010 usually been a yearly journal. The 2011 issue is devoted entirely to Jean-Pierre Martinet, containing many of his frequently long letters to his friend the publisher Alfred Eibel, whom he refers to throughout as 'Fred'. The letters begin in April 1979, when Martinet had returned from Paris to his family home in Libourne and was looking for a place to establish a bookshop-cum-newsagent's; the letters end in September 1988, four and a half years before his death at the age of 49.

Eibel writes the Introduction to the series of letters, in which among other things he speaks of the strong criticism Martinet has both for himself and people he knows or has known, although at the same time he recognises the merits of the same people. This is particularly true, I noticed, of his attitude towards Gérard Guégan who relaunched the publishing house Le Sagittaire and published Jérôme, Martinet's second novel; and of Michel Marmin's the 'Nouvelle Droite' ('New Right') organisation GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne).

Not that this should suggest that Martinet was left-wing: although he shows throughout a great sympathy for the repressed, the dispossessed and the outsider in general, his letters clearly show a strong disdain for political parties:

'I didn't vote last time and I'm not going to vote this. I'm probably a very bad citizen but the future of this country full of bastards is a matter of complete indifference to me! In any case, universal suffrage is no more than an imposture serving to keep the upper middle class (right or left) in business: I think Marx wasn't mistaken there.' (My translation.)

Martinet is waiting for a moderate sum of money to come from the sale of inherited property on his mother's side, but this becomes a fiasco and in the end he moves house in March or April 1980 to Tours, to a tiny newsagent's with a tiny flat and high hopes of extending the business by selling books. Newspapers sell, although his main profits are made through magazines: book sales are very infrequent, and of the Barbara Cartland, San Antonio, and SAS (Gérard de Villiers) type. His only day off is Sunday, which he sometimes uses up by visiting Eibel in Paris, usually at the Coco de Mer restaurant on the boulevard Saint-Marcel near the Gare d'Austerlitz: the restaurant is noted for its seafood from the Seychelles, although all Martinet ever mentions in his letters is enjoying a good wine.

It's evident that Martinet is only just managing to keep his head above water financially, although when he left Tours is uncertain: there's a gap in the correspondence after September 1983 which an editorial paragraph suggests is partly due to Martinet meeting Eibel in Paris on a monthly basis, partly due to letters that have gone astray. But by October 1986 he's back with his mother in Libourne.

It's in Libourne that he starts writing again, and La Table Ronde – which also pays him a little money as a reader – publishes his third novel, L'Ombre des forêts, which attracts a few good reviews but doesn't exactly set the country alight with enthusiasm. There is no mention of sales figures so we don't know if it did any better than his first two novels: La Somnolence sold less than 500 and Jérôme a little more than 600. I didn't realise that he was working on a fourth novel, which was an extension of Ceux qui n'en mènent pas large*, although he was having problems with the length, and joked that it didn't need secateurs so much as a chain saw. He was particularly pleased with the fact that he was becoming more comfortable with writing dialogue.

This is a gem of a read, providing great insights into the mind of Jean-Pierre Martinet. He writes with a great deal of enthusiam about films (usually old ones) that he watches on television, and I thought it significant that he calls the sparseness of his dialogue in L'Ombre des forêts 'too Bressonian' in places.

*And Maman – see the appropriate post below – doesn't manage to pull the trigger.

My other Jean-Pierre Martinet posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Jérôme (L'Enfance de Jérôme Bauche)
Jean-Pierre Martinet: L'Ombre des forêts
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Nuits bleues, calmes bières
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La Somnolence
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La grande vie | The High Life
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Ceux qui n'en mènent pas large

Jean-Pierre Martinet: Ceux qui n'en mènent pas large (1986; repr. 2008)

Jean-Pierre Martinet can be a very disconcerting writer, and Ceux qui n'en mènent pas large (I suggest 'Those Who Live on the Edge') begins very disconcertingly. This is my translation of its apparently gender-confused first sentence: 'Mum looked at the sky but, from up there, no one was looking at him, Mum, he knew only too well.' OK, I should have read the front flap first: Maman (meaning 'Mum' in French) is the surname of the main character, Georges Maman.

Originally I'd been thinking that in several ways Martinet reminds me of the New Zealand writer Ronald Hugh Morrieson, and certainly some aspects of their lives are similar: the huge amount of drinking, the obscurity of their work (especially when they were living), living with their mother, their early deaths, etc. The works of both of these writers are a weird mixture of the dark and the humorous, although Martinet lays on the dark with a far thicker brush. But it is particularly Ceux qui n'en mènent pas large which reminds me of another writer: Amélie Nothomb for the dialogue and the situation, the two characters caught in a hellish kind of huis clos, hating each other yet at the same time bound in a trap from which there seems to be no escape.

Maman is of course a loser: a once promising actor, he's now on his uppers, and he's only had a few walk-on parts the whole year. He's been reduced to doing porn, although he even failed at that because he was incapable of getting an erection. With his last fifty franc note, he shambles into the nearest bar and cracks five hard-boiled eggs while impatiently waiting to get served. But he doesn't eat them as he can't stand eggs – they remind him too much of the catastrophe of birth, perhaps? – and gets rebuked by an old guy at the counter for wasting food and mentions the starving in Ethiopia. Mamam, theatrically, says he doesn't give a shit about Ethiopia, and looks round for positive responses to his performance: no one has noticed anything.

The waiter of course doesn't even notice the great Georges Mamam – if he'd been Depardieu or Belmondo, all right, but Maman? Who he? It's as if he never existed, apart from the fact that the waiter's annoyed about all the egg shells on the counter. Maman orders a beer and requests the waiter to go easy on the froth. He swiftly drinks three more and naturally wants to go to the café toilet, but all four cubicles seem to be permanently engaged. So he pisses in the phone box, and while he's at it tries to phone Marie Beretta, the woman he used to live with some years ago, and is still obsessed with.

It's then that he runs into Dagonard the assistant film director, who's also a loser but with more money, and has been working on a Jim Thompson adaptation for ten years but hasn't been successful because of Yasujiro, a cancer he's named after the Japanese film director Ozu: Dagonard's cancer is imaginary, but that's the kind of man he is. And he's an insufferable bore, forever banging on for hours about film plots, and Maman particularly dislikes him because he insists on punning on his name and addressing him as a woman. Maman thinks the only reason people tolerate Dagonard is because he's always got money on him and in fact seems to buy conversation with it. Consequently, Maman decides to tolerate Dagonard's tedious non-stop talking as he's looking for a meal ticket and maybe the permanent loan of several hundred francs if he's lucky.

He gets the meal, but Dagonard lies and says he's a little short of money so they eat at a place where the food is pretty crappy, although to compensate this is washed down by copious supplies of beaujolais, the effects of which partly numb Dagonard's prattle. But Dagonard is self-aware and knows that Maman is only with him to try and wheedle money out of him. He also knows that he still loves Marie Beretta and can use this knowledge as a psychological weapon, speaking of how famous she now is, and of the magazines he has with photos of her husband and child. He gives Maman a 500 franc note, whereupon Maman leaves and takes a taxi home.

In the middle of the night, and still under the effects of the three Rohypnol tablets he's taken, Maman awakes to find Dagonard shaking him: Maman, in his drunkenness, left the key in the lock. Dagonard says he saw Maman going into the chemist's before taking a taxi home, and feared that he was going to kill himself. And so the mental torture continues, with Dagonard getter drunker and drunker on Maman's dirt cheap 1.5 litre Margnat wine in plastic bottles, and even eating his Canigou dog food in the fridge: Maman has no dog.

Eventually the dead drunk Dagonard is bundled into a cab, but not before he's told Maman that he's left a present in the fridge. Maman steels himself to open it, and finds a pistol with 'M BERETTA' in a circle on the handle. He puts it to his temple. But we don't know if he pulls the trigger.

My other Jean-Pierre Martinet posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Jérôme (L'Enfance de Jérôme Bauche)
Jean-Pierre Martinet: L'Ombre des forêts
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Nuits bleues, calmes bières
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La Somnolence
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La grande vie | The High Life
Capharnaüm 2: Jean-Pierre Martinet sans illusions...

Jean-Pierre Martinet: La grande vie | The High Life (1979; repr. by l'Arbre vengeur 2012)

L'Arbre vengeur appears to specialise in publishing out-of-the-ordinary works, and as this one is by Jean-Pierre Martinet it is of course very much out of the ordinary. La grande vie has the distinction of being the only book by Martinet that has been translated into English (as The High Life), thus giving a wider readership at least some idea of what Jean-Pierre Martinet – an unfortunately very neglected author – is playing at.

La grande vie is a novella first published in Gérard Guégan and Raphaël Sorin's journal Subjectif in 1979, the year after the publication of Martinet's huge novel Jérôme, which is considered as his masterpiece by most of the relatively small number of people who have read it.

Most of Martinet's main characters – similar to Martinet himself – drink a great deal. However, the narrator of La grande vie is the central character Adolphe Marlaud, who doesn't drink. He is a very small, shy and weedy character who only weighs 38 kilos. He feels that life is a prison and – much like the main character in 'Nuits bleues, calmes bières' who 'trie[s] to pass unnoticed like a stowaway on a ghost ship', Adolphe says 'My rule of conduct was simple: to live as little as possible in order to suffer as little as possible [...] I'd willingly have given everything I owned to be invisible, or a ghost'.

The novella is entirely set in a very small area. Adolphe lives at 47 rue Froidevaux – incidentally the same address where Martinet used to live – overlooking Montparnasse cemetery, and from his fifth floor accommodation he can see his father's grave in allée Raffet. He has a part-time job a short distance away at a shop selling funeral goods on the corner of rue Froidevaux and rue Boulard. Monsieur Rameau runs the shop and is a rather unsympathetic character with a bad temper, although his behaviour tends to be greeted by a mental shrug of the shoulder on Adolphe's part. Adolphe has some rather unsavoury thoughts about his customers, particularly the young widows – who sometimes give him an erection – and he'd love to know if they wear black underwear too.

There are some surreal moments in La grande vie, but none more so than in his relationship with Madame C. the elephantine concierge, who is two metres tall and weighs almost 100 kilos. She is a 48-year-old widow with the hots for the unfortunate Adolphe, and uses him as a sex object, her voracious vagina swallowing him whole – apart from his feet, which she holds to stop him wriggling, until her orgasm shakes the walls and she spits him out, 'leaving me alone like a dispossessed king, soaked from head to foot, incapable of uttering a single word'. But he, er, comes to like the attention.

Until, that is, Madame C. drags him to the cinema with her to see a porn film: Adolphe doesn't like the idea of them being seen together in public, although he really likes porn films and the theatre is empty so Madame C. doesn't make a nuisance of herself by spoiling the view for other people by her enormous height and girth. It's when they get back to rue Froidevaux that the trouble starts. She's been turned on by the baroness in the film being buggered by the cook, so she rips Adolphe's clothes off and is on the point of stuffing him between her gigantic buttocks when he takes an enormous saucepan, stuns her with it and escapes naked to his room, where he stays for a few weeks with the door bolted.

When Adolphe emerges he discovers that the concierge has been replaced: Madame C. tried to kill herself on the métro but only succeeded in derailing the train, and is now in a psychiatric hospital. Adolphe can at last concentrate on his main interest: keeping cats and dogs away from his father's tomb: he's given up his job and now keeps his rifle ready to kill any animals that stray near the grave. He's even entertained the thought of taking a pot shot at pedestrians but spared them so far, although if that young girl who came to the shop and called him a slug comes this way again...

Adolphe gets a thoughtful letter from Madame C. in hospital, who asks him to do a few things for her, but he screws the letter into a ball and bins it: he's read somewhere that madness can be contagious.

My other Jean-Pierre Martinet posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Jérôme (L'Enfance de Jérôme Bauche)
Jean-Pierre Martinet: L'Ombre des forêts
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Nuits bleues, calmes bières
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La Somnolence
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Ceux qui n'en mènent pas large
Capharnaüm 2: Jean-Pierre Martinet sans illusions...

Jean-Pierre Martinet: Nuits bleues, calmes bières (1972 (title story); repr. by Finitude 2009)

Nuits bleues, calmes bières (lit. 'Blue Nights, Calm Beers') is a short book containing two short stories: that of the title, and a shorter one called 'L'Orage'. 'Nuits bleues, calmes bières' was originally published in the magazine Subjectif in 1978, and 'L'Orage' in Matulu in 1972. In both of these stories, the obsessions and the very dark style of Martinet's novels La Somnolence, Jérôme and L'Ombre des forêts can clearly be seen.

'Nuits bleues, calmes bières' is about the life of a man who's dead, but dead in the sense that he sees Melville's Bartleby or some Henry James heroes as dead. Yes, this is a literary name-dropping book that, for instance, several times mentions a sentence by Henri Calet in which the character Odilia, mentioned by the unnamed protagonist as seen – rather similar to the way Monsieur first sees Rose Poussière in L'Ombre des forêts – from a window. And the story ends by mentioning Rimbaud, although the cinema is also important, and the narrator imagines Murnau filming Louise Brooks: a quotation from Brooks appears at the head of the initial page of this story.

Louise Brooks states that, at the age of seventy, she has given up trying to find herself, adding that her life was nothing. How does this relate to the narrator? Well, not only can't he find himself either but he's utterly lost. Deeply, existentially. The last time anyone knocked at his door was to deliver a telegram informing him of his own death, whereupon he celebrated by drinking several 'red beers', by which I imagine he means George Killian's, several crates of which he took to his own grave, drank, and escaped back into life.

This isn't exactly a wonderful advert for that particular beer, as the narrator now experiences a living death in which he 'tried to pass unnoticed like a stowaway on a ghost ship'. In a sentence that may well – in a much, much lighter context – have been written by the singer Renaud, he says: 'Le zinc était mon pays' ('The bar counter was my country'). It's only after many demis (always drunk alone) that he can, after checking out that no one has moved into his accommodation now that he's dead – leave whatever crappy bar he's in and go home to perhaps drink more beers before dropping into bed, maybe wrapping the sheet around himself like a mummy, a shroud.

As just an indication of the style and content, this is my translation of the first sentence, and I make no typo here as the second sentence closes the bracket opened in the first sentence:

'That evening, on going home, after knocking over at least a dozen dustbins, slitting the throats of three dogs and slapping a drunken blind man who had mistaken him for Marilyn Monroe (he had tried to embrace him in the middle of the street, in the rain, but he had succeeded in escaping.'

'L'Orage', quite simply, is a brief early sketch of the novel La Somnolence: the protagonist is also called Martha, who is seventy-six and suffering from hallucinations of persecution: she fears the swifts menacingly flying by her window and the little girls come out of the gooseberry bushes to hide and whisper in the base of her bed. She has a home help who brings her the newspaper, and drinks whisky from the bottle. But much of the action in La Somnolence begins when she sets fire to her home, whereas this is where the sketch ends.

Alfred Eibel, publisher and friend of Martinet, writes a brief Afterword entitled 'Jean-Pierre Martinet ou l'éternel purgatoire', and 'everlasting purgatory' does seem to be an apt description for the man who wanted to be recognised as a writer but died unknown, who had a fruitless relationship with a woman who couldn't stop drinking, and who himself drowned in alcohol before he reached fifty: a kind of living death not very dissimilar to that of the anonymous character in 'Nuits bleues, calmes bières'.

My other Jean-Pierre Martinet posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Jérôme (L'Enfance de Jérôme Bauche)
Jean-Pierre Martinet: L'Ombre des forêts
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La Somnolence
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La grande vie | The High Life
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Ceux qui n'en mènent pas large
Capharnaüm 2: Jean-Pierre Martinet sans illusions...

Jean-Pierre Martinet: La Somnolence (1975; repr. by Finitude 2010)

Criminally, Jean-Pierre Martinet is very little known even in France – the country of his birth and where he spent the brief forty-nine years of his life – but outside Francophone countries he's almost entirely unheard of.

This is the third Martinet novel I've read, and as expected almost all – if not all – of the characters are in varying degrees of insanity, making it a little difficult (to make an understatement) to trust the reliability of the narrator. Of what then can we be sure? Er, this is all part of the fun, and black as Martinet's books may be, the readers are missing out on a great deal if they don't find his books funny.

I'm rambling slightly, but nowhere near as much as Martha Krühl, the narrator of La Somnolence, which is Martinet's first published novel. This Finitude edition has a five-page Introduction by Julia Curiel, in which she makes a case for the novel being a kind of foretaste of Jérôme (1978), which was published three years later and is considered by many critics as Martinet's masterpiece. Curiel, unlike the critic Pascal Pia before her, sees autobiographical content here, and now that more is known about Martinet's unfortunate life La Somnolence does indeed appear to have strong autobiographical elements. As Curiel points out, the name Martha does evoke the name Martinet, and Martinet's friend Alfred Eibel has spoken about Martinet's fear of the swift bird species ('martinet' is French for the bird) seen as having a metal beak: Martha speaks of her fear of their metal bills cutting her throat.

Martha is seventy-six and lives in an appartment with a photo of her father – a man of religion who hanged himself from a cedar tree when Martha was only sixteen – a crucifix, and a copy of the Bible. La Somnolence is a deranged monologue – often reporting conversations – addressed most of the time to a man (whom she may have once loved, may have met in a psychiatric hospital after her father's death, or who may be completely imaginary) who drinks a great deal of beer and whom she imagines (?) as spending much of his time silent and sleeping or sulking on a mattress in her corridor. Her father called him 'Ouine', which of course evokes Georges Bernanos's darkest novel: Monsieur Ouine.

Martha hasn't left her flat for weeks and her ramblings are full of paranoid delusions, thoughts that everyone is spying on her, out to get her, perhaps especially 'Ouine'. (Martha doesn't mention him as Ouine herself, but for the benefit of this post I find it easier to give her 'ami' a name.) She has a home help she pays a pittance to bring her cheap whisky (Martha's an alcoholic like Martinet), petits fours and do a little cleaning, although she suspects her of drinking some of the whisky and watering it down to top it up, possibly with urine.

Perhaps Martha sets fire to her flat and perhaps she kills 'Ouine' unintentionally in the process, but suddenly she's outside the claustrophobic environment and the narrative tilts way over into hallucination, suicide and murder. There's a dead man who's in a small space like a rabbit hutch and whose wife is constantly shaving him and cutting his nails but leaves Martha to look after him, and Martha thinks it best to shine his shoes as there's no point in cutting his incessantly growing toenails as they just destroy his socks and he has no more, but then she finds his young daughter's singing disrespectful and hits her with the pommel of her cane and may have killed her.

Then Martha goes to the cinema but thinks that the posters are telling her things about herself, and then she walks in on a film where two viewers are getting too sexually excited for her liking, and as they're getting down to it she pommels them, and may even have killed them. As she walks out she notices that the receptionist appears to have killed herself.

Still only in her dressing gown and slippers and stinking of sweat and vomit – or is that just part of her delusions? – Martha tries to kill herself by lying down in the road, but no traffic comes. She is desperate for whisky, and then she meets a young man she saw leaving the cinema and who invites her back to his place to open a special bottle of twenty-five-year-old scotch. But he falls unconscious in his car outside his house so Martha breaks in, can't find the drink and pisses (although she would insist on 'urinates') on the carpet just as the young man walks in.

But he doesn't appear to have noticed and is anyway too busy talking about his dead girlfriend – the one who bought the whisky – and still keeps promising to crack open that bottle, after a certain sexual act that is. So Martha goes down on him, feels disgusted, staves the young guy's head in, but he's still alive and praying to be finished off and...

Welcome to the very weird world of Jean-Pierre Martinet.

On the back flap is an uncredited sentence from the magazine Les Inrockuptibles which states that Martinet's only fault was that he wasn't American, because if he had been then Jérôme would have been an internationally acknowledged cult novel. I agree of course, although his cult status wouldn't only apply to the one novel, but to Jean-Pierre Martinet's whole work itself.

My other Jean-Pierre Martinet posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Jérôme (L'Enfance de Jérôme Bauche)
Jean-Pierre Martinet: L'Ombre des forêts
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Nuits bleues, calmes bières
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La grande vie | The High Life
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Ceux qui n'en mènent pas large
Capharnaüm 2: Jean-Pierre Martinet sans illusions...

Jean-Pierre Martinet: L'Ombre des forêts (1987)

In the Afterword to L'Ombre des forêts (lit. 'The Shadow of the Forests'), Alfred Eibel states 'Un roman digne de ce nom devrait créer une sorte de choc nerveux sinon à quoi bon la litterature, autant téléphoner à un copain pour prendre de ses nouvelles, comme disait Georges Perros' ('A novel worthy of that name should create a kind of nervous shock or else what value does literature have: you may just as well phone up a friend and ask him for the latest news, as Georges Perros used to say'). I can understand this: there's the kind of literature that holds your attention, keeps you reading and transfixed to the text but from which at the same time you learn nothing, you've just whiled away some hours or even days, but from which you've escaped with your pre-set ideas intact, your precious mental state unaffected, and all is as it was: but the truth is that you haven't been reading a book so much as mentally masturbating. Jean-Pierre Martinet is a perfect cure for that, although he'll change you. For ever.

If you're easily disturbed then don't read Jean-Pierre Martinet, if you have fixed ideas about what literature should be then don't read Jean-Pierre Martinet, but if you like literary challenges then Jean-Pierre Martinet's the guy for you. L'Ombre des forêts, at 242 pages, is only half the size of his masterpiece Jérôme (1978), although the earlier La Somnolence (1975) – at about the same number of pages as L'Ombre des forêts and which I have yet to read – may well be just the book for Martinet virgins to begin their exploration of this very odd, and often terrifying, writer.

Jean-Pierre Martinet died before he was fifty of a drink-related illness, and drink plays a large part in the lives of the five characters in this book. All of the characters are – this is Martinet after all – to some extent mad and/or obsessive, withdrawn from society at the same time as they are (to a minor degree) also a part of it. The descriptions are usually dreamlike, causing the reader to doubt the reliability of the narrator.

Firstly there's Monsieur, who is not given – and doesn't give himself – another name. He lives in a house in the imaginary small town of Rowena on the Franco-German frontier and has enough money to live on without actually being rich. He has retreated from the social world to such an extent that he has thrown his address book down the gutter, left his answering machine on wasteland, and since moving in about a year ago experiences vicarious enjoyment reading the fast-diminishing mail of the people who used to live in the house but died in a car crash. His principal relationship is with 'Globe sale', his lamp which is always lit and never dusted, left to collect insects attracted to it.

Secondly there's Céleste, Monsieur's housekeeper who doesn't have much to do apart from bring Monsieur his provisions, whisky and beer perhaps being the priority. She also changes the bed linen in the spare rooms, even though there are never any guests. She falls to sleep watching television and drinking pastis neat, on one occasion dropping the bottle and then licking up the spilt liquid along with the dust and fluff.

Thirdly, Rose Poussiére, who is no doubt named after the influential experimental novel of the same name by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, and who used to be called Edwina Steiner. She lives in an unsavoury hotel called Saratoga and is perhaps the maddest of all the characters. She only goes out when there's no possibility of rain as she is frightened of disintegrating in it. She is most probably deluded about several things, although it's not possible to judge clearly.

A fourth character is the duc de Reschwig, who is a tramp who used to be the film director Jean Bolaine, who wanted to make a film on Friedrich Hölderlin, although he intended his work to last for seventy-three years – the length of Hölderlin's own life: his frustration over the failure, and the subsequent failure of his marriage, led to him gouging out his eyes. He now spends his time looking in dustbins for pairs of women's tights, which he washes and adds to his collection. He is last seen living after a tussle with Monsieur, during which the latter finishes the tramp's last swigs of rum.

Finally, there's Oeil-de-Lynx, as Monsieur calls Jacques Torny, the dozy and forgetful barman at the Saratoga, who has a glass eye but not as he says from his days as a sailor because he never was a sailor. Rose Poussiére is in love with him after meeting him in the bar once, and towards the end of the book she leaves the hotel to meet him although she's not sure where she should go.

On entering the woods Rose Poussiére discovers that a tramp has been found dead in the river after three days. Also after three days, Monsieur wakes up in his house to find that in his drunkenness he's dismissed Céleste, although he remembers drinking in the presence of Oeil-de-Lynx at the Saratoga on leaving Reschwig in the woods, and catching sight of Rose Poussière from her hotel window before drinking there: he really has to see her, although the reader isn't too sure why he feels this need. He pays Oeil-de-Lynx handsomely to see Rose, although when he enters her room she kills herself by jumping from the hotel window and he follows her.

Jean-Pierre Martinet is an important literary talent. More than twenty years after he drank himself to death he is beginning to be recognised. But he nevertheless remains an obscure literary figure in the country of his birth, and needless to say he hasn't been translated into English.

My other Jean-Pierre Martinet posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La Somnolence
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Jérôme
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Nuits bleues, calmes bières
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La grande vie | The High Life
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Ceux qui n'en mènent pas large
Capharnaüm 2: Jean-Pierre Martinet sans illusions...

Jean-Pierre Martinet: Jérôme (L'Enfance de Jérôme Bauche) (1978; repr. with slight amplification 2008)

This is not so much a novel as an experience you'll never forget. Jean-Pierre Martinet's Jérôme (L'Enfance de Jérôme Bauche) isn't just a major landmark in French literature but a major landmark in literature tout court. And yet it remains not only virtually unknown in the non-Francophone world, but hardly known even within the Francophone world itself.

Jérôme was originally published in 1978 by the Parisian company Éditions du Sagittaire, and it bombed. The present edition by Finitude (from Bordeaux) is with a Preface by Alfred Eibel and a brief Afterword by Raphaël Sorin.

There are a few good reasons why Martinet's novel (indeed Martinet himself) is not so much forgotten as never been known.

This is a big book with 458 pages divided into eighteen sections – this edition also containing three previously unpublished 'concluding' sections of barely more than two pages in total – which, apart from a few snatches of songs, has no paragraphs within the sections, and virtually no dialogue is indicated as dialogue, often making it a little (but not very) difficult to tell who is speaking: flip through the book and you will see almost nothing but pages and pages of uninterrupted blocks of small text: this appears to be a very uninviting read.

Not a great deal happens in the book in terms of physical action: everything is seen through the mind of the protagonist Jérôme Bauche, who has no friends, who drinks a great deal, uses prostitutes, but is particularly interested in the girls at a nearby college whom he pays for sexual favours: Bauche is 42, has no body hair and a tiny penis, but more importantly is obsessed with Paulina Semilionova (also called Polly). He suffers from hallucinations and paranoia, and because of this he is not exactly a reliable narrator.

Most of all, this is a huge outsider rant. In order to survive the first pages of this book, let alone to finish it, the reader must have a very strong constitution: virtually all human (and even animal) contact is seen as a kind of poison, and can perhaps only be relieved by murder or suicide. Ironically though, through all this comes a kind of jet black view of life that occasionally almost comes across as comedy.

The quatrième de couverture, or back cover, mentions Martinet's main influences as Dante, Dostoevski, Joyce, Gombrowicz and Céline, although that's only the start: Martinet seems to have seen himself as a kind of Malcolm Lowry, as an alchemist transmuting alcohol into poetry; the name Jérôme Bauche may not be instantly obvious to English-speaking readers, but pronounce that surname with a French accent and the resemblance to Bosch becomes quite clear, although the character on the front cover (despite the ironically large and weirdly-shaped penis) is an obvious reference to the medieval painter.

Medieval too is the hellish underworld of the passage Nastenka, especially in the labyrinthine, multi-floored pissotières where homosexual buggery and broute-minou are on semi-public display, although an end is brought to his sex-crazed activities there when Lisa – her hair stiff with Bauche's sperm – hangs herself. Tongue in cheek, Eibel compares the maze-like geography of Nastenka to Châtelet's underground network (and I know what he means).

Two murders sandwich the narrative: near the beginning, Bauche casually strangles Cloret, who's invented the tragic death of a non-existent eight-year-old son choking on a fish bone, but whose fatal error (apart from holding Bauche 'prisoner' by his tedious prattle and offering him the 'prison' of a regular job) is to wear a tie whose colour clashes with Bauche's jumper; and at the end Bauche, constantly tormenting himself that Paulina is having sex with others, embarks on a pedestrianised odyssey to kill her, which he does in seconds on finding her – on a tipoff from a maniac who thinks he's royalty and is most probably part of Bauche's hallucinatory world – giving a client a blow-job: in the snow.

In a neat symmetry, mamame (Bauche's mother) dies of natural causes after Bauche has killed Cloret and nailed his feet to the floor to stop him from swaying onto the dinner table, and the taxi driver at the end has a heart attack after Bauche kills Paulina. Or maybe it's not Paulina at all, but anyway who cares – let's just bundle her into the taxi driver's cab that Bauche can't really drive and take her back to the other stiffs – although this only happens in the added chapters, not in the first edition.

One of the most memorable things about Jérôme – which I shall undoubtedly re-read at least once more to catch some of the things I must have missed – is the way the language often mirrors the state of Jérôme's mind. He may begin a phase of mental regression by making puns, such as remembering the green-lipsticked, single-breasted tart-with-a-heart Bérénice and homophonically expressing the half-comprehensible 'mets ton béret, Nice' ('put on your beret, Nice') and the less 'meaningful' La baie Rénice' (which doesn't exist geographically). Then there's the homophonic (but not orthographic) contradiction 'Polly n'est pas polie'.

So far so Oulipian, but then the language gets worse, and non-existent words appear that can't even be graced with the expression 'neologism', as neologisms usually have a logical rather than a meaningless (or let's call it insane) purpose: 'les nougris, les encervas, les freunisses', and a string of (imaginary) men Jérôme imagines Polly's had sex with. He's so crazy he'll strangle your pet cat in seconds if it passes his fancy that it looks like Polly.

This novel – partly, and in very different ways – reminded me of a number of other writings, such as the obsession in Alexander Theroux's (later written) Laura Warholic, or the rants and repetitions of Lionel Britton's narrator in Hunger and Love, or the excess of Rabelais, or a much more pessimistic Ronald Hugh Morrieson. Or the tremendous reluctance to grow up as seen in some of Amélie Nothomb's novels, in Alexandre Vialatte, or Réjean Ducharme's Le Nez qui vogue. Scorsese's Taxi Driver is in there too.

But most of all, Jérôme reminds me of Charles Perry's only novel Portrait of a Young Man Drowning, with its schizophrenic other: just who is Solange? A female Jérôme clearly, but one who metamorphoses, one who seems reasoning, conscience-like at times, but cold, utterly brutal at others, and more disturbingly, one who is known by mamame, Cloret, and the shopkeeper Madame Parnot: is that all part of Jérôme's psychosis? Just how far does the narratorial unreliability go?

This is a gloriously gruesome, frightening book, the kind that could provoke serial nightmares. But it's not genre fiction – not horror or fantasy – it's literary fiction of the highest order which, if your stomach can take it, is essential reading. I found the journey very painful, although it's emphatically one of the most powerful books I've ever experienced.

Biographical note: Jean-Pierre Martinet (1944–93) was born in Libourne. His father died when Jean-Pierre was a child, leaving his widow to bring up three children: his brother was backward, his sister insane, but Jean-Pierre a brilliant scholar. He only ever loved one woman, but she couldn't stop drinking and the experience destroyed him. A financial failure both as a writer and a small-time businessman, Martinet drank himself to death and died before he reached fifty.

My other Martinet posts:
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Jean-Pierre Martinet: L'Ombre des forêts
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Nuits bleues, calmes bières
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La Somnolence
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La grande vie | The High Life
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Ceux qui n'en mènent pas large
Capharnaüm 2: Jean-Pierre Martinet sans illusions...