Véronique Ovaldé: Les Hommes en général me plaisent beaucoup (2003)

Les Hommes en général me plaisent beaucoup (literally 'In general I Really Like Men') is a strange, rather uninviting name for a novel, but this is a highly readable book.

I would almost call this first person narrated novel experimental in that it consists of many different sections that mix different times, creating a jigsaw that slowly reveals its content. And the way in which it is written – in vast, comma- and dash-strewn sentences – mirrors the troubled mind of the protagonist.

Lili has every reason to have a troubled mind. She is fourteen when her mother – who for years has protected her and her four-year-old brother from the insanity of her neo-Nazi father (who even calls his wife 'Eva B.' during sex) – dies from a mixture of exhaustion and hopelessness.

Le vieux (as Lili calls her father, although there is not the lop-sided respect in that title that exists in the English expression 'the old man') is a tyrant and leaves his kids to fend for themselves for whole weeks, changing the telephone number and leaving the front door of the flat open but filling his children with huge exaggerations of the terrors of the outside world and leaving them without a key so that they are afraid to ever leave the flat.

When Lili tries to hang herself by the light fixture it crashes down on her, but leaving a small gap in the ceiling that inevitably leads to the tenants above enquiring as to the kids' welfare, which leads to Lili meeting and forming a relationship with the tenants' friend, the enormous lemantin (sea cow) Yoïm. Yoïm not only sexually abuses the consenting Lili (in fact commits statutory rape in American law) a great number of times, but (wholly without her consent) he hires her out to a 'client', gets her commit a bungled burglary, she takes the rap and ends up in a compulsory 're-education centre'.

That's where Samuel comes in. He's a teacher but he spends his Saturdays visiting the centre. He is a good husband who has fallen in love with Lili and given her a completely different – ostensibly happy – life. But all Lili feels for him is gratitude, and when Yoïm returns on the scene she is re-attracted to him. But then, Lili is a very disturbed young 23-year-old, and much of her life is spent in dreams. Those zoo animals she keeps talking about, for instance, are surely only of symbolic significance aren't they: freedom and imprisonment, etc.

There are several similarities between this book and Ovaldé's other novel I reviewed a few years ago (and give a link to below), Ce que je sais de Véra Candida: an abused young woman who takes flight from her home, who lives with an essentially good man, and who returns (albeit with a difference) to her abuser. And the very long, comma-filled sentences. But I enjoyed this one more than Véra Candida, possibly because of those very similarities.

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Véronique Ovaldé: Ce que je sais de Vera Candida (2009)

Véronique Ovaldé: Ce que je sais de Vera Candida (2009)

Women are the key characters in Ce que je sait de Vera Candida (lit. 'What I Know of Vera Candida') – which was originally to be called Vies amazones – although men are often central to the action. Rosa Bustamente lives in Vatapuna – a village on an island and part of an unnamed country in South America – and made her living as a prostitute up to the age of forty, when she turns to catching flying fish to sell at the market. When a conman named Jeronimo begins to build a palatial house near her cabin, where she lives alone, she partly persuades herself, partly is persuaded, into visiting him with a view to selling her property. It doesn't take the lecherous Jeronimo long to get her into bed, but his callous reaction to her pregnancy means she immediately finishes with him.

Violette is the result of the relationship, but she's a very slow girl who soon grows up addicted to the local firewater, gets pregnant (probably by the mayor's son) at fifteen, and soon dies under mysterious circumstances very early in the book.

Violette's daughter is Vera Candida, who is brought up by Rosa and firmly taught to avoid the mistakes of previous generations of women, to avoid succumbing to men, but at fifteen Vera is raped by Jeronimo, and the pregnant girl flees to mainland Lahomeria without telling anyone.

Then begins the second (and longest) section of the book, dealing with Vera and her daughter Monica Rose as they move from a home for single mothers (run by a woman who was married to a Nazi) to a crummy flat, and then to longterm security and warmth with the journalist Itxaga, who's the only decent male in the book, and who's been in love with Vera for some time.

And then, at nearly forty and after eighteen years with Itxaga, she learns she has terminal stomach cancer and returns to Vatapuna, where if he's alive she'll kill the man who made her life a nightmare, who thrust his cock into her mouth and then raped her. But just as she's missed seeing her grandmother alive again, Jeronimo has already hanged himself.

This is a book of love and hate, of beauty and the beast, of strength and weakness, of sickness and health, of tenderness and brutality, enhanced by a strange hypnotic power that often – breathlessly but rhythmically – sweeps through the novel in very long sentences punctuated by many commas, translating thoughts and actions. Compelling.

(Addendum: see below for Robert Hughes's comment on me missing the obvious: Voltaire's Candide.)

My review of another book of Ovaldé's:

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Véronique Ovaldé: Les Hommes en général me plaisent beaucoup (2003)