Laurent Mauvignier: Histoires de la nuit (2020)

Laurent Mauvignier's Histoires de la nuit was published earlier this month and isn't among the fifteen novels long-listed for the Prix Goncourt, although that rather surprises me. And although this is a psychological thriller, it bears the mark of Mauvignier's other books in many ways: pointilliste writing, trauma and the unspoken at the fore, and the psychology of the characters foregrounded to the actions. All the same, there is much action here, but even that is crammed into less than forty-eight hours in a 635-page novel, so this is Mauvignier's longest by far.

The hamlet La Bassée has come up as a name a few times before in Mauvignier's work, and here virtually all the action takes place in it. Patrice Bergogne, whose two brothers have left the farm after his father's death, has decided to continue the family business and lives in the hamlet with his wife Marion (found on the internet, much to his delight) and ten-year-old daughter Ida. Marion is six years younger than him, has studied printing and works for a printing company in the small (pop.  3000) town nearby and will shortly be celebrating her fortieth birthday.

There's an empty property for sale in the hamlet which the Bergognes are selling, although so far only a few Dutch and English have shown any interest, but eventually backed out. La Bassée really is almost in the middle of nowhere, which is why it has appealed to Christine, a Parisian artist of 67 who likes the anonymity of the place, and who is often driven into town by 'Bergogne' as she calls him, whom she sees almost as a son. The story – and there very certainly is one, although it is deliciously, tantalisingly drawn out in the minutest of detail – begins with a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin in which Bergogne once more has taken Christine to the police station to lodge a complaint about an anonymous threatening letter she's received, which (like the former ones) is increasingly menacing. But that's more or less all we hear of the letters, although they remain in the background for some time.

And then Marion's past revisits her, in the terrifying shape of a trio of brothers: by age downwards, Denis, Christophe and Bègue. In dribbles, we learn of Marion's past in a place 500 kilometres away, of the life she ran away from, of her sexual promiscuity, the drugs she took, her life with the violent Denis, her being an accomplice with him in a killing but escaping imprisonment, of her escape (pregnant with Ida) to another life while he spent ten years behind bars. Daddy Denis has come back for revenge.

As I said in the first paragraph, trauma is one of Mauvignier's preoccupations: Marion has had a miserable childhood, and her penniless, alcoholic mother slashed her wrists in the bathroom of a hotel she couldn't afford; Bergogne has been taught by his parents to be completely selfless, only to care for the interests of others, and after two rather fruitless relationships he marries a woman who wants to flee from her past and doesn't believe in love; Bègue has a history of psychiatric illness and is used by his brothers; Christine is escaping from the cultureless idiots in Paris who would rather talk about the quality of the champagne at her exhibitions than her paintings, etc.

And then there's the unspoken, which is so deafening in Mauvignier's work: Bergogne's sexless marriage and his resort to prostitutes; Marion's silence about her past; Christine's blanking out of previous married lovers to the police, which may have provided them with motives for the poison pen letters; Ida's silence to anyone because who would believe a ten-year-old?, etc.

The title Histoires de la nuit relates to the bedtimes stories Marion tells her daughter, also of course to the stories the reader learns on the night of Marion's blood-drenched birthday, and to the histories of the protagonists. This is a masterly performance by Mauvignier, although perhaps slightly overdone: the ending is full of violent horror, the baddies get their just deserts, on the plus side we're not too sure about the ultimate survival of Christine and Marion, but Ida as deus ex machina is surely a little clichéd? I loved it, but as it's so packed with suspense and blood I can't help thinking that Mauvignier is going for the money.

Laurent Mauvignier: Une Légère blessure (2016)

Laurent Mauvignier's Une Légère blessure (lit 'A Slight Wound') is a play, or more specifically a monologue by an unnamed woman in her forties, preparing dinner in the dining room for her parents, her brother and sister-in-law and their three children. As she can't cook she's doing this with the help of a young foreign girl who can't speak French and who is in the kitchen. The woman talks all the time without being understood, and the whole play seems to be a continuous kind of psychoanalysis.

Sex is at the forefront of the monologue, beginning with the narrator's first experience at the age of sixteen with a young boy and the narrator's probable schoolfriend Sandra, with whom the boy has sex with both, of no apparent consequence to either girl.

There follows a series of 'speeches', ostensibly to the cook (who, in the kitchen, is never seen to the audience) but in reality to herself, concerning her inability to have kept up a steady relationship with a man as opposed to her brother with his marriage and children, her lack of usefulness, and finally she comes to a revelation about her father's behaviour to her on one occasion when she was much younger, and I translate:

'My father, his flies open and this almost violet thing in his hand.

'He started to rub this piece of flesh in front of me, this monstrous cock with a blue vein running down it, this idiotic piece of flesh hanging like a lifeless animal or a piece of rubber.'

(Lack of) communication, the sexual abuse of women, family matters, oblique talk deliberately avoiding the real issue, talk as a means of non-communication, this is Laurent Mauvignier, and these are what make him one of the key figures in contemporary French literature. Wonderful.

My other Mauvignier posts:
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Laurent Mauvignier: Loin d'eux
Laurent Mauvignier: Ceux d'à côté

Laurent Mauvignier: Des Hommes

Laurent Mauvignier: Apprendre à finir
Laurent Mauvignier: Dans la foule | In the Crowd
Laurent Mauvignier: Tout mon amour

Laurent Mauvignier: Seuls
Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli
Laurent Mauvignier: Continuer
Laurent Mauvignier: Autour du monde

Laurent Mauvignier: Autour du monde (2014)

Some of the books of the brilliant writer Laurent Mauvignier remind me of the bit at the end of Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall, in which the director/actor comes on and says he sees life as like the joke about the woman who goes to a psychiatrist because she's worried about her husband who thinks he's a hen. When the psychiatrist asks her how long this has been going on she replies several years, and in answer to the astonished psychiatrist's question of why she hadn't seen him sooner, the woman replies that she needed the eggs. That's why we, to allude to Mauvignier's last book, continue: we need the eggs. Which is a total absurdity of course, as there are no eggs.

I'm not saying that Laurent Mauvignier's books are all about absurdity and the pointlessness of existence, although there are certainly elements of that nature in his work: suicide, madness, hopelessness, huis clos and so on but there's also a love of life and hatred of hate, perhaps particularly in this novel and in his new Continuer published this year, both of which move the reader away from the insistent internal monologue turning around itself, essentially to shift to life seen from a third person's point of view, with emphasis on the external world.

At 372 pages, Autour du monde is quite long by Laurent Mauvignier's normal standards too, although in a sense it's a string of (fascinating) short stories held together by the common theme of them all happening, around the world, at the same time as the catastrophic earthquake in Japan on 11 March 2011. There's no link in common with the stories, although virtually all or them can be said – as with so much of Mauvignier's writing – to involve crisis or drama of some nature: a man saving the life of an old, mentally failing man on a liner in the North Sea; a highly charged homosexual encounter in Russia as the wife of one of the men is about to give birth; pirates from Somalia killing the male of the couple on a pleasure boat; two old men planning to win (or is it lose?) a fortune in a Slovenian casino; a severely disturbed nineteen-year-old racist disturbing the family of his elder brother whom he's not seen for nearly ten years; the utter mindlessness of tourism, especially among pseudo-death-defying tourists in Africa who self-deceivingly believe they're not tourists at all; and on it goes.

Autour du monde is riveting, but not the kind of book that reads quickly from cover to cover: you have to pause and wonder – at least if you've read other books by Mauvignier – how this fits in with those, and what he's up to. I find myself returning – in a similar way that I do to Marie NDiaye's work – to Mauvignier's books to find out what I missed the first time. At the moment the parts of this novel don't seem to form a whole, but then I may well be wrong, and anyway with such a powerful work does that matter at all? It's obviously a bold experiment, and how many high-profile English (for instance) writers would dare to attempt a similar bold action? None, I think.

My other Mauvignier posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Laurent Mauvignier: Loin d'eux
Laurent Mauvignier: Ceux d'à côté

Laurent Mauvignier: Des Hommes

Laurent Mauvignier: Apprendre à finir
Laurent Mauvignier: Dans la foule | In the Crowd
Laurent Mauvignier: Tout mon amour

Laurent Mauvignier: Seuls
Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli
Laurent Mauvignier: Continuer
Laurent Mauvignier: Une Légère blessure

Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli (2011)

In December 2009 twenty-five-year-old Michaël Blaise was killed by security workers in the Part-Dieu branch of Carrefour, Lyon: his crime was to walk into the branch and drink a can of beer. He was led into a small detention room and subjected to violence said by a magistrate in the court case to be totally disproportionate to his offence. His death was by asphixiation: pressure was maintained for some time on his rib cage. Laurent Mauvignier's sixty-two page fictional account of the incident is based on the story, told with great sympathy and very movingly.

My other Mauvignier posts:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Laurent Mauvignier: Loin d'eux
Laurent Mauvignier: Ceux d'à côté

Laurent Mauvignier: Des Hommes

Laurent Mauvignier: Apprendre à finir
Laurent Mauvignier: Dans la foule | In the Crowd
Laurent Mauvignier: Tout mon amour

Laurent Mauvignier: Seuls
Laurent Mauvignier: Continuer
Laurent Mauvignier: Autour du monde
Laurent Mauvignier: Une Légère blessure

Laurent Mauvignier: Continuer (2016)

This is another of the sixteen novels which made it to the first Goncourt selection, this time by an established writer who has carved out a name for himself as a master of speaking the unsaid, describing the chasm between the spoken and the unspoken, the problems with the spoken, giving voice to the unvoiced, the psychology of the outsider. Continuer is perhaps in a sense more 'accessible' than Mauvignier's other works, if that adjective has any meaning here. There is certainly a lot more physical action here, more characters too.

Sibylle is on the surface something of a failure: she failed to complete her training as a surgeon, her marriage to Benoît has failed, and he accuses her of being unstable. As an example of this, he reminds her of the failed walk around Corsica that she undertook some years before, and which ended in her having to be saved from great danger to herself.

It's of no surprise then that he views her intended expedition through Kyrgyzstan on horseback with her adolescent son Samuel (as in Beckett), or Sam, which sounds like a name in a western, but wouldn't be out of place here. Sibylle (of Russian extraction) sees this as a kind of therapy for Sam, who has been mixing in the wrong kind of company and is at risk of serious criminal behaviour. He's also become something of a racist, as the reader will discover later. Benoît thinks a religious education will knock it out of him, but Benoît doesn't have his way.

Camping in an unhospitable country with the only chance of an internet connection in civilised areas is not Sam's idea of fun, and his only consolation is the Walkman his father's provided him with, which is his only escape from primitiveness, from himself. Sam prefers his father to his mother, and a few catastrophes on the journey suggest to him that his father was right about her instability.

Then a real catastrophe happens, although it's actually Sam that causes it – well, indirectly so, because he's so alarmed about the fact that his mother can be heard enjoying herself in another tent with a man, the first time she's had sex in she can't remember how many years. Furious, and very drunk (like his mother) from some very friendly nomads' vodka, he takes his horse and rides away. By the time she re-finds a trace of him, his horse is dying.

And Sibylle is very seriously hurt too. But Sam has learned so much about her selfless love of him for his sixteen years, read her secret writings, knows far more about her than his father ever knew, and of course he's on her side now, is becoming or has become the caring person her mother wanted him to be.

I read an article somewhere which describes the book as (more or less) unputdownable, and I'm in full agreement.

My other Mauvignier posts:

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Laurent Mauvignier: Loin d'eux

Laurent Mauvignier: Ceux d'à côté

Laurent Mauvignier: Des Hommes

Laurent Mauvignier: Apprendre à finir
Laurent Mauvignier: Dans la foule | In the Crowd
Laurent Mauvignier: Tout mon amour

Laurent Mauvignier: Seuls
Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli
Laurent Mauvignier: Autour du monde
Laurent Mauvignier: Une Légère blessure

Laurent Mauvignier: Seuls (2004)

One critic of Laurent Mauvignier's Seuls remarked that his first three novels – Loin d'eux (1999), Apprendre à finir (2000), and Ceux d'à côté (2000) – could also have been called Seuls, and this is certainly true. Another point is that the title is pluralized: Seuls – alone (also, quite often, lonely). The 'alone', then, doesn't just apply to the main character, but to others. And it's important not to forget the universalizing factor here: with Mauvignier, everyone is alone, irrespective of the presence of others around them.

In Seuls there are the constants that we associate with Mauvignier's literature: death or loss, lack of communication, the unspoken (often with a deafening silence), (self-)alienation – but in this book in particular pretence is a major factor, not the everyday pretence when people automatically say they're fine when they're far from fine, but deeply-rooted self-deception.

Three friends – Tony, Pauline and Guillaume – have grown up together, going through their first sexual experiences, getting drunk, smoking grass, going through college, etc. It was Tony who wrote his first love letter to Pauline at the age of twelve, which of course she put down to puppy love. But when she leaves the country with Guillaume Tony quits his studies, works cleaning trains among the polyvocality of foreign workers, loses himself in the repetitive work.

For years Tony has wanted Pauline, and they've even lived together platonically while at college, almost (on the outside) like brother and sister. And then after some years Pauline – who's decided to return to France and leave Guillaume who prefers to stay on – asks if she can stay with Tony while she finds a job and can have her own place. Tony, of course, is delighted.

But he still has to play the pretence game, taking vicarious pleasure in other tenants on the stairs perhaps thinking that he's got himself a beautiful girlfriend - Tony, the guy with yellow teeth and tufts of hair that he has to slick down so as not to look so unsightly, Tony the guy with the inferiority complex who smartens up his act now he has a pretend love, the girl he's yearned for for years, but can only love from a distance, she sleeping in the bed while he makes do on the sofa bed. Until, that is, Pauline finds a job and has to leave Tony and his secret, impossible dreams.

The story – which we're fed bit by bit, jigsaw-like, in usual Mauvignier fashion, with its long sentences and suggestions that often startle the reader, sometimes turn things round, introduce a new slant – is told first by Tony's unnamed father and then by Guillaume, with the occasional unmarked interruption by Pauline or Tony's voice. Tony's father is the only person Tony has revealed his obsession to, the man who turns to Pauline when Tony disappears. And the second narrator is Guillaume, the man who discovers that he can't live without Pauline and returns.

A little after Tony reneges on his promise to help Pauline in her removals his father goes with her to try and seek him out, but they open the apartment and meet only the smell of rotting food, and the piss of the cat starved to death, the unwashed clothes, etc. But no Tony.

Tony it is who will ring Pauline but not speak, and Tony it is who will finally speak when he knows Guillaume is away working, who arranges to meet Pauline in a café, and steal her keys. Pauline rings Guillaume and tells him she can't find her keys, and he drives in terror back to his home, to Tony's father at the door who's rung for the police and begs him to stay there, tries to physically restrain Guillaume from entering, from seeing the tragedy that Mauvignier leaves largely unspoken.

Mauvignier is a poet, from his simple observations of bored people making drumsticks with rolled up newspapers, through the symbolism of the Hopper poster on Tony's wall, to the candy floss clouds. This is brilliant stuff.

My other Mauvignier posts:

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Laurent Mauvignier: Loin d'eux

Laurent Mauvignier: Ceux d'à côté

Laurent Mauvignier: Des Hommes

Laurent Mauvignier: Apprendre à finir
Laurent Mauvignier: Dans la foule | In the Crowd
Laurent Mauvignier: Tout mon amour

Laurent Mauvignier: Continuer
Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli
Laurent Mauvignier: Autour du monde
Laurent Mauvignier: Une Légère blessure

Laurent Mauvignier: Tout mon amour (2012)

I believe I've said it before, but it needs repeating: Laurent Mauvignier is a major French writer, although I'll extend that claim to major writer tout court. Tout mon amour, his first play, confirms this fact. Theatre, with its multiple voices, seems to fit with Mauvignier's area of vision, as the novels of his that went before were polyvocal.

To Mauvignier the reality of anything is plural, or to express it another way reality is unpindownable. His principal preoccupations continue to be death (in all its facets), the psychology of relationships (often familial, particularly parental), the repressed or the concealed (intentionally or subconsciously), the unspoken (or that which is hidden from anything but subjective knowledge), and the nature of truths, half-truths and plain lies and hypocrisies. There is a deeply rich furrow to plough, and Mauvignier makes the most of it.

In the title Tout mon amour (literally 'All My Love') we have an expression casually used on countless greetings cards, emails, letters, and of course wreathes or funeral announcements. And they so often register pyschologically as completely insincere, totally mindless. Laurent Mauvignier – whose father, incidentally, killed himself when his son was an adolescent – couldn't write a mindless sentence if he tried.

Father P (for père) and mother M (for mère) return after ten years to the home of P's father GP (for grand-père), and the play – which consists of fourteen 'sequences' – begins after GP's funeral. GP comes back to life (at least to P), although his comments on his own funeral, which include his being impressed about the village's strong attendance but also his  caustic remarks on only having seen P once in ten years and his disappointment about the non-attendance of P's unnamed brother (who is in Japan) perhaps suggest that this 'ghost' is only in P's head, especially as P makes a point of 're-killing' his father.

But the main point is that P and M haven't been back from the south of France to see GP because their daughter Élisa (a palindrome of 'asile', or (mental) asylum) disappeared from the place at the age of six and has not been heard of since. She's the other 'ghost' who makes an appearance, although at the age of sixteen, the same age as she would be now after the ten missing years. M refuses to see her, believing that she's a crazy; P, on the other hand, is convinced that this is their daughter, as she has a box of her former clothes, a cuddly toy she had before, a bracelet, and she remembers a trick with a match.

P is so convinced of the truthfulness of Élisa's words that he calls back the couple's son from studying for his Bac, and the long tale that Élisa tells him of being kidnapped by a man and frightened into believing in the evil of the police convinces F (for fils, or son) of the authenticity of her story. But M still refuses to believe and calls the cops, which of course means that Élisa has to go. Powerful stuff, but then nothing else could be expected of Mauvignier.

My other Mauvignier posts:

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Laurent Mauvignier: Loin d'eux

Laurent Mauvignier: Ceux d'à côté

Laurent Mauvignier: Des Hommes

Laurent Mauvignier: Apprendre à finir
Laurent Mauvignier: Dans la foule | In the Crowd
Laurent Mauvignier: Seuls

Laurent Mauvignier: Continuer
Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli
Laurent Mauvignier: Autour du monde
Laurent Mauvignier: Une Légère blessure

Laurent Mauvignier: Ceux d'à côté (2002)

Laurent Mauvignier sculpts – I think that's a decent word to describe them – internal monologues, meandering, poetic, seemingly endless sentences by pained individuals, people terrified by the slings and arrows of existence, numbed by emptiness and striving desperately to fill in the blanks: they are living in an existential jigsaw without end.

Ceux d'à côté refers in part to the people neighbouring Catherine – Claire and Sylvain, although Claire's fiancé Sylvain has never actually lived there: if he had, there would probably never have been a serious crime that deeply affects everyone concerned.

Slowly, the events in the story come together through two voices, whose thoughts are revealed through alternating sequences. At first there's that of Catherine, a part-time school canteen worker studying for her exams to become a music teacher, although if she passes or not is of no interest here, the substance being far meatier. And then there's the voice of a man whose name is never revealed: to do so would humanise him a little too much perhaps, although he is – somewhat disturbingly – sympathetically portrayed in certain respects.

Internal monologues can be parsimonious, only doling out dribs and drabs of information every so often, and such is the case here. Catherine lives in a block of flats – no doubt an HLM – close to Claire, who takes her out to the beach with Sylvain some weekends, and by this action Catherine can at least attempt to move away from the void that surrounds her, her existence otherwise bounded by the elderly man above moving his chair on his uncarpeted floor and her (unnamed) goldfish who surely lives a life symbolically similar to her own?

And then the rapist overturns everything, attacking Claire and leaving her for dead: only she's not dead, she survives, but has to leave for another town with Sylvain, away from the bad memories, away from her friend Cathy with whom she now largely communicates over the phone. But Catherine, whose sexual life seems for some time to have been reduced to one-off encounters, almost envies Claire.

The nameless man, the perpetrator of the unspeakable (the word 'rape' is never mentioned) is confused, as empty as Catherine, with no self knowledge of why he has – and it certainly appears to be his first time – performed this horrific act. He tortures himself over it, is possibly as empty as Catherine, and haunts the area of the crime where he doesn't know if he committed just ('just'?) rape or murder too.

Towards the end of the novel the two internal voices almost merge, with the rapist seeing Catherine in the same places, such as in the public garden feeding the ducks, or in the bar-tabac near the block of flats where Claire is moving out, where he regularly takes a coffee and fills the ashtray while reading the café paper for an hour, and thinks Catherine doesn't notice him, but she knows all his movements, knows he's behind her in the cinema, although (unlike with Claire) he gives up following her. So they never meet in any verbal or physical way, although there remains a nagging doubt – for me at least – as to whether the two voices come from the same person: in other words, is the man's internal monologue an imaginative creation by Catherine, as there are a few suggestions that point that way?

My other Mauvignier posts:

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Laurent Mauvignier: Loin d'eux

Laurent Mauvignier: Dans la foule

Laurent Mauvignier: Des Hommes

Laurent Mauvignier: Apprendre à finir

Laurent Mauvignier: Tout mon amour
Laurent Mauvignier: Seuls
Laurent Mauvignier: Continuer
Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli
Laurent Mauvignier: Autour du monde
Laurent Mauvignier: Une Légère blessure

Laurent Mauvignier: Dans la foule | In the Crowd (2006)

I view Laurent Mauvignier as one of the best living French writers of fiction, although I'm a little uncertain that a tremendous number of other readers think the same. Which would be unfortunate, as they'd be missing out on a major talent. Mauvignier specialises in monologue as opposed to dialogue, and Dans la foule (translated as In the Crowd) consists of four voices leading up to, during, or after the disaster in Heysel stadium, Brussels on 29 May 1985, in which thirty-nine people died.

Geoff is the rather sensitive and cultured youngest brother – from a working-class, football-obsessed family from Liverpool – who tells his story of (a little reluctantly) going to the match with his yob brother Doug and his devoted younger brother Hughie. I could easily believe the existence of Geoff and his brothers, although I really couldn't believe in Geoff's girlfriend Elsie: a Liverpudlian nurse who reads Rimbaud in the original French and bakes stilton and fig scones? No, Mauvignier doesn't do English culture entirely convincingly. But this is a minor detail.

There's also the voice of the French Jeff, who goes to Brussels with his Italian-born friend Tonino, and they're slumming it, don't even have tickets, until they meet up with the Belgian couple Gabriel and Virginie. There's a lot of drinking in this novel and Virginie can have a loud mouth and really shouldn't have brandished their precious match tickets, giving Jeff a perfect opportunity to create diversions and so allow Tonino to steal the tickets.

A third voice is that of Gabriel, who's understandably angry that the tickets have been stolen so eagerly waits outside the stadium – later joined by his two friends who were with him at the time of the theft – in the hope of apprehending Jeff and Tonino and confronting them with their outrageous abuse of his and his partner's hospitality. Although jealousy creeps in here too, and there seems to have been a kind of understanding between Tonino and Virginie which clouds things, but anyway the deaths in the stadium are a far bigger cloud on the whole issue.

Mauvignier's writing is firmly planted in the world of the non-spoken, and even though Gabriel and Virginie meet Jeff and Tonino again and even invite them to their place where Tonino is given a change of shirt by Gabriel, we don't get to hear of any confrontation. More important is the state of mental and physical health of the Italian Tana who is also with them, and whom Jeff and Tonino met before the match with her husband Francesco, who was killed in the stadium at the beginning of their honeymoon.

Tana's voice is the fourth one, and in the final section of this 427-page book – the longest Mauvignier novel to date – she dominates it and pitches the reader further into the realm of the non-spoken as her internal monologue strives to cope with her grief and the aftermath as a 23-year-old that her mother seems to want – like her – to remain a weeping widow for the rest of her life. Three and a half years later Tana doesn't attend the trial in Brussels, although a short time after this she welcomes (the now-married father) Jeff and Tonino, and they all – along with her younger sister Grazia – escape from her mother for three weeks with a friendly uncle in Sardinia, where they drink, swim and sunbathe, and where nothing is said of the past.

I think Laurent Mauvignier is incapable of writing a mediocre novel.

My other Mauvignier posts:

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Laurent Mauvignier: Loin d'eux

Laurent Mauvignier: Ceux d'à côté

Laurent Mauvignier: Des Hommes

Laurent Mauvignier: Apprendre à finir

Laurent Mauvignier: Tout mon amour
Laurent Mauvignier: Seuls
Laurent Mauvignier: Continuer
Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli
Laurent Mauvignier: Autour du monde
Laurent Mauvignier: Une Légère blessure

Laurent Mauvignier: Des hommes (2009)

Much French literature has been written about World War One and World War Two, but very little about the Algerian War (1954–62). Laurent Mauvignier is a rare exception, and the Algerian War – its effects on those who took part in it and the effects on their families – is very much a part of the novel. Mauvignier's father was in it for twenty-eight years and killed himself when the author was an adolescent. Obviously he has no idea what part the war played in his father's suicide as he told him nothing about it, although his mother told him, for instance, that he was traumatised by seeing French soldiers trampling on a pregnant woman. His father brought back a large number of photos, although Mauvignier didn't know what they meant.

The unspoken, of course, is important to Mauvignier and is very much what the men in Des hommes carry around with them. This book attempts to give voice to the atrocies caused by this war, and by extension by war in general. Necessarily, it contains some horrifying scenes. And here, it's not the obvious provocative actions that can bring violence but the tiny, almost unseen and barely uttered actions and words.

As with other Mauvignier novels, there is a great deal of internal monologue here, and there are no markers for speech as the dialogue merges into the narrative. And a number of sentences remain either unfinished or are finished in the following sentence, which gives the narrative a greater realism.

Des hommes is divided into three main parts – 'Après-midi' and 'Soir' which are of equal length, and 'Nuit', which is the same length as the first two sections together. A fourth section – 'Matin' – is a kind of coda.

Bernard is now called Feu-de-Bois, an indication of how this old soldier – an alcoholic in his sixties – stinks. But this is the celebration of his sister Solange's sixtieth birthday in the reception room of the village with a number of his old soldier friends. His cousin Rabut does much of the narrating. I like the French expression péter un câble (something like 'bust a gasket'), which although not used here is what Feu-de-Bois does after the incomprehension that greets him giving Solange a very expensive brooch.

The 'Nuit' section is horrific and depicts, for instance, a French soldier shooting a fifteen-year-old boy through the head for no reason other than that he's old enough to be a 'terrorist', and the Algerian opposition stripping a living man's arm to the bone and massacring a village. No one is innocent in war is one chilling message.

But what exactly do the photos in Rabut's possession show of war, of the horror and fear? Nothing of it, only smiling faces, friends playing cards, the sea... Even those images betray nothing of the reality.

Like probably all of Laurent Mauvignier's books, this is amazing. He's definitely one of France's most significant living writers.

My other Mauvignier posts are below:

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Laurent Mauvignier: Loin d'eux
Laurent Mauvignier: Apprendre à Finir
Laurent Mauvignier: Ceux d'à côté
Laurent Mauvignier: Dans la foule
Laurent Mauvignier: Tout mon amour
Laurent Mauvignier: Seuls
Laurent Mauvignier: Continuer
Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli
Laurent Mauvignier: Autour du monde
Laurent Mauvignier: Une Légère blessure

Laurent Mauvignier: Apprendre à finir (2000)

Laurent Mauvignier's Apprendre à finir ('Learning to Finish') is painful to read, partly because it's about pain, the pain of loss, which is the writer's central preoccupation. In this respect it has a resemblance to his earlier Loin d'eux (1999), which is about the death by suicide of a son, told in a number of narratives.

But Apprendre à finir is about the loss of a husband (although not by death) and has just one narrative voice: the relentless internal monologue of a woman whose name isn't mentioned, who is looking after her husband who has just returned from hospital after a significant car accident. His recovery will take a long time, although the already broken marriage that had violently torn them apart before the accident is something that will never mend.

Another similarity between this book and Loin d'eux is the working-class background of the family: the husband here is a dustman, the wife a femme de ménage. Articulateness isn't a noted asset with Mauvignier's characters, and the reader has to forage in the half-said and the unsaid, spot the contradictions, pick out the lies, read in the interstices, in order to snatch at glimpses of the truth his characters hover around, leave clues about, or deny.

Denial is a particularly important word here. The woman's older son Philippe seems to want to tell her something, but she doesn't want to know, is frightened that he might be seeking to tell her the truth about her relationship with her husband: that it is dead, and no matter how much she works on caring for him, delighting in seeing him recover a little more each day, he probably feels nothing for her but hatred.

The woman's monologue is a repetitive, jealous rant of self-deception, weaving in and out between the future and the present in (often very long) sentences, re-living the pain of her husband's adultery, ignoring his contempt for the flowers and newspapers she frequently took to hospital for him, although she ignores his body language and lives for the day when they will be together and happy again as in the beginning, which of course will never happen, which she knows deep down, but will never allow herself to admit it. Meanwhile, her words nevertheless betray her, and neurotically she mentally photogaphs his bedside table before she goes out to work, noting the exact position of the phone so she will know if he has phoned the other woman.

She isn't insane, or even on the verge of insanity, although she is certainly very neurotic. And, in contradiction to the title, she never will learn how to get over the truth behind the lies she tells herself.

Stunningly written. My other Mauvignier posts are below:

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Laurent Mauvignier: Loin d'eux

Laurent Mauvignier: Ceux d'à côté

Laurent Mauvignier: Des Hommes

Laurent Mauvignier: Dans la foule
Laurent Mauvignier: Tout mon amour
Laurent Mauvignier: Seuls
Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli
Laurent Mauvignier: Continuer
Laurent Mauvignier: Autour du monde
Laurent Mauvignier: Une Légère blessure

Laurent Mauvignier's: Ce que j'appelle oubli (2011)

I've yet to read Laurent Mauvignier's short story Ce que j'appelle oubli (literally 'What I Call oblivion'), which has just been published and is loosely based on the killing of Michaël Blaise in December 2009 at the Part Dieu branch of Carrefour, Lyons, France, by security staff: he had been asphyxiated by pressure on his rib cage.

All this was over the theft of a can of beer. Blaise was reported by the media as being 'SDF' ('sans domicile fixe'), or NFA, which was untrue according to his cousin, and he had been suffering from depression after the death of his father. A book review and video clips about the killing are here.

Laurent Mauvignier: Loin d'eux (1999)

Laurent Mauvignier's Dans la foule (2006) has been translated into English (as In the Crowd (2008)), but Loin d'eux – literally 'Far from Them' – as yet hasn't been translated. In fact, In the Crowd is the only work of Mauvignier's to be translated in English,  in spite of his importance as a French writer. The reason is probably simply that Mauvignier's work is a little too French, too experimental and introspective for English tastes.

His web site says that his novels (and of course I translate)  'try to circumscribe the real but come up against the indescribable, the limits of speech: a language attempting to put words to absence and grief, love or lack, as if striving to retain what slips between our fingers, between the years.' By definition, then, this is a kind of interstitial literature.

The book consists of a series of interior monologues – most of them several pages in length, some a little shorter – of a single paragraph by six people: Jean and his wife Marthe, and their son Luc; and Jean's brother Gilbert and his wife Geneviève, and their daughter Céline. Luc killed himself two years previously, and his are the only internal monologues made before his death. The other voices are those of his relatives trying – with very little (or no) success – to come to terms with this death. And the sentences are often very long and meandering.

We learn that this is a working-class family – Jean works in a factory and Gilbert is a baker – where there is no idle chatter to fill the silences, but just silences with a few words to punctuate them. Feelings are not – cannot – be expressed, and this results in a kind of collective autism that has forced Luc away from the parental home in La Bassée and into night-time work in a bar in Paris.

Jean and Marthe never speak of Luc's suicide to each other, although it is forever painfully present. Luc wrote letters home (read in secret by Jean), and he made visits in which words were absent. When the couple visit Gilbert and Geneviève, the two brothers go into the garden, and this is when Jean speaks, but it's always of Luc, and all Gilbert can say is it's not Jean's fault his son's dead. Similarly, Marthe's conversations with Geneviève are on the same subject but Geneviève can't bring herself to say much about how she feels.

The relationship between Luc and Céline was profound, and they had been tied in a close bond since early childhood. Céline later married, although her husband died in a car crash, and despite now being in another relationship, she still feels a sense of abandonment.

Luc was very sensitive to falseness, the automatic social reflexes, the obligation to sign his letters with an artificial closure, and yet he covers both his rooms – at La Bassée and at Paris –  with posters of famous movie actors. In Paris, this once-avid moviegoer hardly ever goes now, and sees the actors on screen as trying to play out the famous poses in his wall posters, so they're somehow less real on screen.  Earlier, he has shown some interest in a young woman who frequents the bar, and notes that she reminds him a little of Jean Seberg (who of course killed herself) in À bout de souffle, and he's written about her to Céline, who thought on a number of occasions that perhaps the girl could introduce him to a new world. Luc's own familial world was suffocating, the movies opened up a suggestion of a different reality, but he was still stuck in a communication limbo.

Reality is ungraspable, although Mauvignier tries to describe just that. A brilliant effort.

My other Mauvignier posts are below:
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Laurent Mauvignier: Apprendre à finir
Laurent Mauvignier: Ceux d'à côté
Laurent Mauvignier: Des Hommes
Laurent Mauvignier: Dans la foule
Laurent Mauvignier: Tout mon amour
Laurent Mauvignier: Seuls
Laurent Mauvignier: Continuer
Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli
Laurent Mauvignier: Autour du monde
Laurent Mauvignier: Une Légère blessure