Daniel Pennac in Simard (71), Saône-et-Loire (71)

I've no clear idea why a school should name itself after the writer (often of children's books) Daniel Pennac, particularly in a village in Saône-et-Loire where he has no apparent associations. Maybe I'm missing something, but it's in any case unusual for a building to be named after a living person. No matter: Pennac wrote a book, Chagrins d'école, in which he mentions his scholarly problems, specifically dysorthography, the inability to write correctly. I also note that the school pupils have re-written their own version of Paul Éluard's poem 'La Liberté.' Interesting.

Daniel Pennac: Chagrin d'école (2007)

The most annoying thing about Daniel Pennac's Chagrin d'école, to me at least, is the way it eats into your brain, forces you to think back to your own experience of education. I found my reminiscences of my teachers taking over. I certainly wasn't what Pennac was then called – 'un cancre' (or 'dunce') – although my educational progress was marred by poor education, what teachers thought I was and what I actually was.

Of my primary education I have very few positive memories: there was a weird guy (Robertson, Robinson, I give up) whose hair was kind of plaited at the front and he used to hit students' backs when they couldn't come up with the right answer. And then there was the headteacher who used to teach us as well: a sadist called 'Pop Martin', whom I used to call 'Monkey Mush Martin' because that's what he looked like: he used to slap arses if a mouth didn't cough up with the right word(s). I distinctly remember one teacher (whose name I forget) bursting in and excusing the person teaching for his interruption, pointing to one of the pupils and asking 'Do I frighten you?' Well, under the circumstances what answer could the pupil come up with but a negative? I don't vividly recall much else of Seely Primary, Sherwood, Nottingham, and it's probably just as well.

Before I went to High Pavement Grammar, Bestwood Park, Nottingham, Monkey Mush Martin burst into the classroom and feigned incredulity that I hadn't dashed into his room and announced (as if it were the Holy Grail) to him that I'd made it to the school. As my experience of High Pavement proved, I was underwhelmed, and had every reason to be so.

But oh, the horrors of High Pavement Grammar! Memory is obviously selective, and we all tend to remember the best times and/or the worst or the funniest. I think Baudelaire was on the menu at the time, but anyway a French teacher called Rudd (and if I ever knew his forename I forget) was asking a question which involved prostitution. The guy next to me was my former friend Raf Pérez, who showed me a note on a piece of paper saying 'Watch Rudd go red.' Rudd saw the manoeuvre, shot up in appropiate anger and indignation and demanded to know the content of the note. Raf hesitated, but knew he had to say something as outrageous as the note (only not so personal), and just said 'Are you going down the Scotch Bar tonight?'. There ensued an obvious bollocking by Rudd (who once, in private, pompously informed that he knew people who could run circles round me intellectually) but the truth was skilfully avoided by Raf.

The truth always seemed to be hidden at High Pavement, which (to me and many others, I know) just seemed to be a breeding ground or a playing field in which teachers could display their neuroses. Music rehearsals for the horrific speech days (how things looked were vital) were given more importance than, er, education.

There were fortunate breaks from the boredom and insanity of it all, such as the intentionally eccentric English teacher Bill Gray, who almost always wore odd socks and claimed the Earth was obviously flat. In his local boozer, The Grosvenor on Mansfield Road, a little after I'd left the school, he joked that he wanted to put on a school play, Oh Calcutta! (incidentally a pun on the French 'Ô quel cul t'as !', or 'Oh what an arse you've got!'), the lead role being taken by 'the kid with the biggest cock in the school': well, we can all have our fantasies.

For the record, I thought the English teacher Keith Dobson was by far the best of a poor bunch, in spite of his being (like the other English teacher, the writer Stanley Middleton (always Stan Middo to us)) also a dreaded Leavisite, those infuriating people who believed that a work should be read as is, without biographical, social, psychological, etc, umbilical attachments. In retrospect: how can much knowledge be known of a book if no outside knowledge of it is allowed?

My father thought I was a waster and wouldn't sign any university forms, although my mother (bless her) was quite willing to. No, I had principles, and worked for three years to gain independent student status before taking a BA in French of the University of Leicester. I loved it, especially the year in Albi (lengthened to two with a little bit of cunning on my part). But I'd always wanted to continue, be an eternal student or something, get an MA, even (some hope) a PhD. Just who did I think I was?

And then, years later, I filled in a form to study Literature three years part-time with the Open University. And it worked like a dream, I drank in any information I could get, and read, read, read. My tutor for most of the time, Dr Stella Brooks, had faith in me, and that counts for multitudes: I gained an MA with Distinction, my dissertation on local author James Prior's novel Forest Folk seen as a dialogue with the New Woman.

But there were problems: shortly before getting my MA I had a truly bizarre interview with a certain Dr Guy of the University of Nottingham, who told me that I'd be wasting my money going for a PhD, and that I should be taking an MA (again!) but this time with Nottingham University: the wonderful Stella's email reaction to Dr Guy after I told her of her assessment: 'nevereardover'. And a Stevie something (who didn't even have a PhD) of Nottingham Trent University scoffed and told me I'd never get a PhD.

Thanks to Stella's efforts I obtained a three-year bursary (including a research trip to Southern Illinois University) from the Open University to study the interwar working-class anarchist writer Lionel Britton's work in the context of other British working-class writers of the time, along with (then) contemporary novels by outsiders, in a Sartrean context. I had a marvellous time!

And I passed, which shows that (like the 'dysorthographic' Daniel Pennac) if a teacher has faith in you, you'll have faith in yourself, and succeed.

My other posts on Daniel Pennac:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Daniel Pennac: La Fée carabine | The Fairy Gunmother
Daniel Pennac: La Petite marchande de prose | Write to Kill
Daniel Pennac: Journal d'un corps
Daniel Pennac: Au bonheur des ogres

Daniel Pennac: La petite marchande de prose | Write to Kill (1989)

This, the third part of the Saga Malaussène, felt a little like coming back to a well-loved family: Benjamin Malaussène the expert scapegoat himself, his younger sister Clara and the older star-gazing sister Thérèse, the publisher Queen Zabo, not forgetting Julius the smelly epileptic dog, etc.

Wikipédia calls this a 'roman policier', or 'detective novel', which in a way it is, only it's comedy at the same time, but 'comic detective story' doesn't hit the right button either, as this is literary fiction at the same time: I can't imagine there's an equivalent of Daniel Pennac in the Anglophone universe.

Clara, still in her teens, is marrying Clarence, who's three times older than her and the director of a model prison based on enlightened influences of such teachers as A. S. Neill and Anton Malarenko. Benjamin is very unhappy with the forthcoming marriage and in his distraction decides to part company with Queen Zabo (who is of course based on Françoise Verny, but that's a different story). And then Clarence gets savagely murdered, and all the convicts mourn his passing.

Queen Zabo's prize author is the hugely successful J. L. B(abel), an ex-minister and writer of trashy literature he labels as a new genre – littérature libéral – and who has preferred to keep his anonymity, although Queen Zabo desperately wants Benjamin to pose as the author, an offer which Benjamin takes up under certain conditions. Until, that is, he is shot through the head at a 'coming out' (as J. L. B.) speech, whereupon he falls into a coma. More killings ensue .

Benjamin's partner, the intrepid journalist Julie, tries to track down the killer, who is none other than the real J. L. B., a convict who is killed towards the end and whose organs are used in a miraculous 'kidneys-pancreas-heart-lungs' transplant, which allows Benjamin to be reborn, and of course to continue the saga. Totally unbelievable? Of course, but the 403-page trip is certainly worth it. And this volume is, like its two predecessors, translated into English by the Oulipo member Ian Monk.

My other posts on Daniel Pennac:

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Daniel Pennac: Journal d'un corps
Daniel Pennac: Au bonheur des ogres | The Scapegoat
Daniel Pennac: La Fée carabine | The Fairy Gunmother
Daniel Pennac: Daniel Pennac: Chagrin d'école

Daniel Pennac: Journal d'un corps (2012; repr. with additions 2014)

Daniel Pennac's Journal d'un corps is exactly what it says: the life story of a person's body, concentrating far more on the bodily functions of a man's life than his life story as such. And it's really very clever, but... I find the 'but' part very strong not just because all of this is leading to an inevitable conclusion but because the reader can guess many of the stages in between, no matter how well or how originally they're done here. The result for me was frequent boredom – which partly explains why I took a few days over it – and an increasing feeling of depression as D-day draws nearer. Nevertheless there are many things here to alleviate the boredom.

As I mentioned in my previous posts on Pennac's books, persecution is a common theme, and whereas most of the persecution here comes from the narrator's own body, the diary proper begins at the age of twelve, when he's been tied to a tree by a rival boy scout group during a game. And he sees a nearby ants' nest and fears they'll eat him, so he shits himself. His terrible experience is made worse by the fact that there is more persecution to come instead of the sympathy he deserves when l'abbé Chapelier and his mother start bullying him.

The diary takes the narrator up until a few weeks after his eighty-seventh birthday – presumably the day of his death – and as this is a 434-page book there are many stages leading up to the end which deal with various states of the body developing and degenerating in between. And many of the descriptions are inventive and amusing, such as men comparing parts of their body as they go through life: in youth, it's muscle size; 18-20, it's the bulge in swimming trunks; 30 to 40, it's density of hair; in your 50s, it's (preferably lack of) paunch; in your sixties, it's your teeth.

And of course there are body fluids and solids and sounds, so we're told about not being taught how to piss properly instead of dribbling by pulling back the foreskin; we learn what a perfect turd is; about how having your first wet dream is seen by some guardians as a rite, as a mark of maturity; and then there's vomiting, farting, belching, etc. Even female bodily processes are slightly touched on, as in when the young narrator can't understand why a sign in the toilet warns not to throw sanitary towels down the pan: now who in the world would throw towels there? Inevitably some things would be lost in translation: 'miction impossible' is a good pun on the film title, but in English 'micturition impossible' just gets lost.

As in the other novels below, Pennac's love of language shines through, and this to me is the most interesting factor. The narrator finds the expression 'va te chier' (lit. 'go shit yourself') very strong, and states that the verb 'chier' in the reflexive pronominal sense is a deadly weapon,  reducing the adversary to his own excrement: in French, the expression means what it says quite literally – you are in effect telling the person to do the impossible, a literality only someone like Pennac would notice.

Again, I was reminded of Queneau – surely the baby question used when seeing chimpanzees de-flea themselves: 'keskifonpapa ?' ('Qu'est-ce qu'ils font papa ?') (or 'What are they doing dad?') is surely too much like the first word of Zazie dans le metro – 'Doukipudonktan' (translated by Barbara Wright in the English version of Queneau's novel as 'Howcanaystinksotho') – to be a coincidence.

In the name of delicacy, I won't move on to prostate operations or impotence, but just leave this blog post on a joke, and there are many of them in a book that in the main I'm certainly pleased was written rather than not written. There are several jokes by the character Tijo here, and I think this is the one I prefer, and which I translate so liberally that I leave quotation marks out:

A man has a pain in his little finger that moves to his shoulder, down his sternum and to his knee, and it's becoming unbearable. He goes to the doctor, who tells him that the only cure is to have a testectomy. The guy has to think a little about this, but the pain is so unbearable that he just has to have his balls cut off. Some time later he goes to the tailor's for a new suit and the tailor asks him on which side he dresses, and the man of course isn't too sure what to say. But the tailor says the answer's important because if the suit is made the wrong way the client'll have a terrible pain starting in his little finger, moving up to his shoulder, down to his sternum and to his knee.

Yeah, I know.

My other posts on Daniel Pennac:

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Daniel Pennac: La Petite marchande de prose | Write to Kill
Daniel Pennac: Au bonheur des ogres | The Scapegoat
Daniel Pennac: La Fée carabine | The Fairy Gunmother
Daniel Pennac: Daniel Pennac: Chagrin d'école

Daniel Pennac: La Fée carabine | The Fairy Gunmother (1987)

La Fée carabine is the second part of Daniel Pennac's 'La Saga Malaussène', and like the first novel is also translated by Ian Monk, this time with the amusing title The Fairy Gunmother. Some sources also refer to this as a crime novel, and that tag would certainly have more credence over Au Bonheur des ogres as a crime novel, although again this novel is also a kind of comedy, if a little darker.

In the previous post I mentioned Pennac's use of slang, which evidently exists not simply to give the book a crime genre atmosphere, but because Pennac is obviously preoccupied by the use of language, as might be expected of an author whom an Oulipian has chosen to translate. At one point in the book Bernard Malaussène's mother mentions Verdun, who has been staying at their house, and Bernard's thought patterns are displayed: 'Je pense d'abord à la bataille. [...] Je pense "Verdun", "Verdun d'un", "Vert daim", et ce putain de mot ne veut pas me donner son sens. "Ça doit être un sacré problem pour les étrangers"'. In other words Bernard tells the reader that he thinks of the battle of Verdun, then of possible groups of words that the two syllables can signify, but it won't immediately yield up its meaning, and Bernard thinks this kind of thing must be a real problem for foreign speakers.

Power relationships are of central interest in Pennac's books too, individuals wielding power over others mainly in a working environment but also outside it. But whereas Au bonheur des ogres concentrates on the pecking order within a department store, in La Fée carabine the emphasis is on cops and villains, both against each other and amongst themselves. Interestingly, Bernard seems to more or less have the upper hand in his work situation with his new boss Queen Zebo, who significantly is only heard over the phone as Bernard is hardly ever 'on the job', either as an official scapegoat or incidentally with his girlfriend Julia, but that's another story, and this book – as the reader might expect after the first volume – is full of stories.

The novel is best summed up by Chief Inspector Coudrier, who, unable to understand what he calls 'fin-de-siècle paradoxes', thinks the time for his retirement has come:

'... a world where Serbo-Croatian Latinists create female killers in catacombs [at Montrouge rather than Denfert-Rochereau], where old ladies kill cops who are charged to look after them, where retired booksellers slit throats at the drop of a hat in the name of Literature, where a bad girl throws herself out of a window because her father is worse than her...' (My translation.)

This is the world of Daniel Pennac, and although there's not too much about the Malaussène family itself this time, both cops and family are joined in two ways at the end: retired cop Van Thien – who's been doing volunteer police work posing as an 'innocuous' Vietnamese woman – is finally forced to take a job telling stories to the family's kids in his Jean Gabin voice; and – it had to happen to some guy – Pasteur runs off with Bernard's mother.

Bordel de merde!

My other posts on Daniel Pennac:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Daniel Pennac: La Petite marchande de prose | Write to Kill
Daniel Pennac: Au bonheur des ogres | The Scapegoat
Daniel Pennac: Journal d'un corps
Daniel Pennac: Daniel Pennac: Chagrin d'école

Daniel Pennac: Au bonheur des ogres | The Scapegoat (1985)

Au bonheur des ogres (1985) is translated into English by Oulipo member Ian Monk as The Scapegoat, and this is the first of the 'la Saga Malaussène' series, which also includes La Fée Carabine (1987), La Petite Marchande de prose (1989), Monsieur Malaussène (1995), Monsieur Malaussène au théâtre (1996), Des chrétiens et des maures (1996) and Aux fruits de la passion (1999).

Some have called Au bonheur des ogres a crime novel, which for me doesn't really hit the descriptive spot: I'd hesitantly call it a superior comedy within the framework of a crime novel, or maybe a crime novel lost inside a comic novel.

Descriptions are therefore not easy for this book, which has a multitude of characters and of course bows to Émile Zola's Au Bonheur des dames, set in a large department store in the late nineteenth century and pointing to a future when the small shop will almost be swallowed up. But Au bonheur des ogres is set at the end of the twentieth century, and although the plot involves a series of bomb attacks on the department store Magasin, a great deal of the interest is on the dysfunctional  Malaussène family.

Bernard  Malaussène is the narrator, who works at Magasin and lives in Belleville in the 20th arrondissement, earning enough money to keep his brothers and sisters alive: in fact they're half-brothers and sisters because the absentee mother spends most of her time with a different partner and seems to return home pregnant at the end of each amorous adventure.

I was in some doubt as to whether Bernard's sexual equipment was also dysfunctional because in his first sexual adventure with the very big-breasted and highly desirable 'Aunt Julia' he only has a 'mollusc between two sea shells', although he fully rises to a later occasion.

Aunt Julia isn't an aunt at all but a journalist he caught shoplifting and rescued from the store detective: the aunt tag could be seen as a compensatory device because he has unexercised incestuous desires towards his beloved sister Clara, a girl who photographs everything she sees and has her bac exams coming up soon.

Of the other siblings there's Louna, who's pregnant by a doctor, decides not to have an abortion and gives birth to twins at the end, causing potential strain on the Malaussène budget; Thérèse who can predict the future and works out that the people who died in the bombings had it coming astrologically; Jeremy is twelve years old and experimenting with explosives; le Petit, as his name suggests, is the youngest and draws ogres. I mustn't forget the remaining member of the family: smelly Julius, the epileptic dog.

Bernard's job is in the complaints department, although he describes himself as a professional scapegoat: he's really good at sending customers back home after they are emotionally blackmailed into withdrawing their complaints about faulty goods – Bernard feigns really wild panic attacks, pretending to have the threat of dismissal hanging over him, leading to poverty for his large family.

I could go on about the riot of characters who work in the shop, or the murders that aren't quite what they appear to be, but this is probably enough to give more than a sprinkling of an idea of the novel's content and its style, which is by the way breakneck because all the characters and the events are shovelled (I think that's an appropriate term) into under three hundred pages.

I'll probably not make it through all the seven novels of the saga, although I'm certainly giving myself a clearer idea of what Pennac is up to by reading the second volume next. Au bonheur des ogres is very liberally peppered with various slang words, and there's a slight feel of Queneau (à la Zazie dans le métro) to it, although Pennac's main intertextual reference – apart from Zola – is Carlo Emilio Gadda's Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1944), which is translated into English as That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, and into French as L’Affreux pastis de la rue des Merles.

My other posts on Daniel Pennac:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Daniel Pennac: La Fée carabine | The Fairy Gunmother
Daniel Pennac: La Petite marchande de prose | Write to Kill
Daniel Pennac: Journal d'un corps 
Daniel Pennac: Daniel Pennac: Chagrin d'école