Guy Mazeline: Les Loups | The Wolves (1932)

It hardly seems possible to mention Guy Mazeline's Les Loups without also mentioning the fact that Mazeline triumphed in the 1932 Goncourt at the expense of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's masterpiece Voyage au bout de la nuit, and how this was an outrage, a scandal, a travesty of justice, etc. And of course it was all of this: Les Loups doesn't come anywhere near the category of masterpiece. But does the novel really deserve all the opprobrium that's been thrown at it? Certainly much ink has been used over it, and in 1999 Eugène Saccomano published a novelisation of the dispute (Goncourt 32), with a publisher's band 'Le Duel Céline–Mazeline' across the lower part of the cover. Much more recently Les Loups has been called 'illisible' (unreadable) in Figaro and 'Voyage au bout de l'ennui' in a particularly sarcastic article in Le Parisien. Why all the hatred? Have the people who criticise Les Loups actually read it?

The short answer in almost all cases is certainly 'No': in fact I doubt if more than a few people alive today have read it. I resolved to come to my own conclusions, take a deep breath and dip into it. You have to take a deep breath because it's 622 pages of minutely-packed print, or a roomier 775 in the English translation The Wolves. After all the scorn that's been poured on it I scarcely expected to wade through all of it, and yet – to my immense surprise – I not only read it all but in fact really enjoyed it.

Les Loups is not a quick read, and not only due to its sheer bulk: it's so crammed with characters, shifting allegiances and subtle plotting that it demands to be read carefully – if you want to take full advantage of its subtleties, that is. And there certainly are subtleties: this is what I'd call a psychological novel, in which what is going on in the mind of the characters is all-important.

Most of the main characters, though, aren't particularly likable, or at least not a great deal of the time. Pride comes over as a central theme, as does lust for money, and in the dog-eat-dog world of this book – set in Le Havre (where Mazeline was born) towards the end of the nineteenth century – appearances are vital.

Maximilien Jobourg has inherited his father's business and at the beginning of the story lives (financially) comfortably enough with his wife Marie-Jeanne and his children Didier (a lover of the sea), Vincent (who has a limp due to a childhood accident), Benoît (who's headstrong, given to violence and of the three brothers the one most addicted to prostitutes), Geneviève (who's engaged to the wealthy Gilbert), and Blanche (who's married but still lives at home along with her ferociously ambitious banker husband Georges, whom the younger sons accurately call the 'Hypocrite'.

Maximilien has long grown tired of Marie-Jeanne, who is largely concerned with the way things look, and who is exasperated that her husband has no interest in business. Maximilien's mother Virginie hates the working-class-born Marie-Jeanne, whom she insists on calling by her maiden name 'la Bretot' – when she's speaking to Maximilien, that is, which is not often at all: the two don't get on, which seems par for the course in the Jobourg family.

In fact Virginie (it seems) hates Maximilien too, as she plots with her grandson-in-law Georges to bankrupt him by getting him to move all his money into shares which are in fact worthless: a very bad psychologist as well as a very bad businessman, Maximilien can't see through the many faces of his son-in-law: in any case, why should the banker be working against his own interests, thinks Maximilien?

The appearance of Valérie in Le Havre radically changes Maximilien's life. He believes in self-renewal, which he sees as impossible in a family: how can his own family, for instance, ever see him as anything other than lazy, incapable of holding onto his fortune and his prestige? Valérie, though, is his secret daughter, the child his lover Pauline had after she left Le Havre for Martinique twenty years before, when she married Labrête and Valérie was brought up as their child. But Labrête drowns himself on learning Valérie isn't his daughter, and now a dying Pauline has sent Valérie to her 'uncle' Maximilien in Le Havre. Maximilien hides her with a former servant of his and comes to love her more than his children by Marie-Jeanne.

The end is dramatic, with Valérie – on learning that Maximilien is her real father and being incapable of living with the fact that her previous life has been a lie – killing herself with the 'ornamental' weapon her father has unthinkingly furnished her room with, and Maximilien lining his pockets with stones and jumping into the sea.

This may make the narrative sound a little melodramatic, but it isn't portrayed that way. Guy Mazeline can write and can write well, and although we can criticise him for stretching credibility (a twenty-year-old girl not realizing Maximilien is her father, after all he's done for her?), and for writing maybe a few hundred pages in excess and creating several characters too many, but so what? OK, Céline definitely should have won the Goncourt in 1932, but that's no reason to take it out on Guy Mazeline: clearly, this is not the best ever Goncourt, but nor is it the worst by any means.

Guy Mazeline's grave in the Cimetière du Montparnasse:

Michel Host: Valet de nuit (1986)

Following L'Ombre, le fleuve, lété (1983), Michel Host's second novel Valet de nuit (1986) won the Goncourt in the year of publication. Unusually for such a prestigious prize though, it only sold 70,000 copies and in spite of about twenty later publications today the name of the author means little or nothing to most French people.

This is mainly the quest for the narrator Philippe Archer's father, although at the same time it is inevitably a quest for himself. He thought his father a war hero who had died, but reality bites and he's been a long way from the truth. Philippe's being cushioned from everything (especially from material discomfort) throughout his life doesn't really help him.

Didier Decoin: John l'Enfer (1977)

Didier Decoin's apocalyptic, Goncourt-winning John l'Enfer is set in a New York of stark contrasts in fortune, now a faded glory where the skyscrapers are crumbling, the dogs are taking to the mountains and we see the city through three people.

The book begins with the fall of an Indian window cleaner from a skyscraper: the twelfth in the last six months, when Indians don't normally suffer from vertigo. John l'Enfer is a Cheyenne Indian and also a cleaner of skyscrapers in this city of his ancestors until he loses his job following a demonstration about work conditions. He is in love with Dorothy, but the relationship is only platonic.

Dorothy Kayne is a young sociology lecturer temporarily blinded and infantilised after an accident, and who wears a mask. She too is doubtless in love with John, although she's blind to it and her sexual energy is spent on Ashton.

Ashton Mysha is a Polish Jew, a naval officer now grounded due to ill health, who will love Dorothy – if that's the right word – and then leave New York city, leave life, in a well-planned suicide.

Only John l'Enfer appears to be aware of what's really happening to New York. Oddly, there's no English translation of this very incidentally cinematic tale.

Félicien Marceau: Creezy (1969)

Creezy – obviously a distortion of the English word 'crazy', and the same title of which was used in the English translation – is a story of not-so-everyday madness, but certainly of the madness of consumerism and the inability of the market to supply certain demands, such as love or happiness.

Creezy begins and ends in the same place, with député Jacques waiting a half-hour for the engine noise in his car to be fixed in the garage. While he's waiting, though, the reader learns why his life is such a mess, why he no longer has a wife and of the events leading up to the death of his beloved Creezy.

Jacques first caught a glimpse of Creezy – a beautiful and famous fashion model – at the front of the audience at a show. After that he meets her at an airport, the pair hit it off very well in sitting next to each other during the flight, and Creezy seems to be another of the conquests of the député (married with two children).

A fling becomes an obsession, lust turns to love and therefore psychological dependence, and all the hell that that brings. No, Jacques can't keep two lives together and things start to fall apart quickly. There's no indication of this in the form of the book, though, which consists of eighteen sections in a single paragraph, apart from when occasionally being split to incorporate quotations.

Creezy marks my thirtieth Goncourt winner reading, although this relatively short (197-page) novel feels  – at the moment at least, although I'll definitely reread it one day for confirmation or otherwise – like one of the best of them.

The grave of Félicien Marceau (1913–2012) in Le cimetière ancien de Neuilly:

My Félicien Marceau posts:

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Félicien Marceau: La Terrasse de Lucrezia

Félicien Marceau: Creezy

Georges Conchon: L'État sauvage | The Savage State (1964)

Georges Conchon wrote the 1964 Goncourt-winning novel L'État sauvage – translated into English as The Savage State – after he had been secrétaire général of L'Assemblée législative centrafricaine in Bangui. Politically correct it certainly isn't. The epigraph, from Marcel Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe, is instructive: 'Ils avaient l’air d’une bande d’anthropophages chez qui une blessure faite à un blanc a réveillé le goût du sang' ('They looked like a gang of cannibals for whom a white person's wound had aroused the taste for blood.') The quotation at the head of the final chapter – from Blaise Cendrars's Poèmes nègres – is no less provocative – 'Le commerce des Européens sur cette côte et leur libertinage ont fait une nouvelle race d'hommes qui est peut-être la plus méchante de toutes' ('Europeans trading on this coast and their moral dissoluteness have created a new race of men who are perhaps the most vicious of all.')

The novel is set over a twenty-four hour period in Fort-Jacul, a Central African country recently independent from French rule. It begins with twenty-six-year-old French UNESCO employee Avit landing at the airport in Fort-Jacul, and ends with him leaving it. He has spent two years recovering from his very young wife Laurence just leaving him and taking off with another man, although he finds shortly after arriving in Fort-Jacul that Laurence is in Fort-Jacul too and now living with Patrice Doumbé, the country's minister of health.

And on landing, Avit is sent to see Modimbo, the Ministre de l'Information, who in no uncertain terms tells him to go home, although he doesn't say why. It becomes quite clear that the reason is the blacks' prejudice against the whites, and this is seen throughout the book, from the killing of Doumbé whose relationship with Laurence causes anger among the population, through the increasingly violent and threatening atmosphere of the country, all the way to the thousands of black and white people following Laurence and Avit to the airport.

The book was faithfully adapted into a film whose screenplay was written by Conchon and the director Francis Girod in 1978. I'm unsure how such works would fair in a post-politically correct age though.

Jean Rouaud: Les Champs d'honneur (1990)

Jean Rouaud's Les Champs d'honneur was his first novel, and he won the Goncourt with it. Reading back over the immensely enthusiastic reviews, that win seems almost an inevitability.

And reading that novel for the first (and probably not last) time I have to say that I can understand the enthusiasm. Temporarily, the book flits all over the place, but that isn't important. This novel is (the beginning of) a family saga of sorts. Deaths are important here, and some of them relate to World War I. But the three deaths of note are those of the father, the 'petite tante' or great-aunt, and the grandfather.

The book begins with the grandfather and immediately the reader is captivated. His erratic driving, the painstaking way his chain-smoking while driving is described, but most of all his old 2 CV , which is called Bobosse and which lets in water through the canvas roof, make grand-père almost more the partner of his car than his wife.  Great-aunt Marie, with her saints and her lasting belief in their triumph over science and health, is also a fascinating character, and a kind of celestial comeback kid who comes back to life but loses her senses.

But maybe the rain (especially in the département of Loire-Atlantique) is the principal character on, er, reflection: one critic called Rouaud the 'Mozart of the rain-gauge', with his ability to comically describe and differentiate between spitting, drizzling, regular raining, downpouring, etc. Rouaud was an obvious gift to French literature.

Pascale Roze: Le Chasseur Zéro (1996)

Pascale Roze, born in Vietnam, was inspired to write on reading Marquerite Duras, who was of course also born in Vietnam, then known as Indochina. Coincidentally, Roze won the Prix Goncourt with this novel, and the woman before her who won the Goncourt was in fact Duras, with L'Amant in 1984. That's twelve years between, which in the 113-year history of the Goncourt makes it about average for a woman. The gap between men and women writers is perhaps beginning to close slightly, but nevertheless in those 113 (soon to be 114) years only eleven women have been successful. There must surely be something wrong here because I can't believe that men are naturally better writers than women – the mere suggestion is absurd.

But to return to Pascale Roze's Le Chasseur Zéro, which was incidentally her first novel. The first person narration is by Laura Carlson (born of a French mother and an American father), a woman who has never known her father and grows up with her psychiatrically disturbed mother and her very odd grandparents.

With the encouragement of her school friend Nathalie she begins to research into her father's past, much to the anger of her grandparents and her mother. Andrew Carlson died in the aircraft carrier Maryland in Okinawa in 1945, killed by a kamikaze pilot in a plane with the same name as the book: 'Le Chasseur Zéro'.  Laura investigates more, reads the journal of the kamikaze pilot Tsurukawa, and becomes obsessed.

Obsession is a dangerous thing as it can lead to psychiatric disorder. Laura becomes preoccupied by Tsurukawa, hears the sound of war to such an extent that she has to take sleeping pills and wear earplugs in an attempt to muffle the noise in her head. Even her long relationship with the musician Bruno is destroyed by it.

Jean-Christophe Rufin: Sept histoires qui reviennent de loin (2011)

Jean-Christophe Rufin is a medical doctor who has done a great deal of humanitarian work overseas. Much of his fictional work, including his Goncourt-winning Rouge Brésil, involves the meeting of different cultures, of which there are several examples in these seven stories from far away, although not necessarily (only) far way geographically, but perhaps far away psychologically, in different concords or conflicts, perhaps of generation or language.

'Passion francophone' is an interesting example of Rufin's multilingual confusions. Here we have a woman from Germany in a hotel in France speaking French, although no one understands her: in fact she is speaking neither French nor German. No, the language she thinks she has been taught as French is Hungarian.

And then there's 'Les Naufragés', set in what seems to be Mauritius or L’île Maurice, but post-colonial Mauritius, where the native population has taken over, where the tourists flock to their tourist hotels where everything is done for them and they don't even have to leave their tourist ghettos and meet the true people who belong to the country, where they believe implicitly in the harmony that the guidebooks suggest exists: in a few words, Rufin demolishes the self-deception, the mindlessness of tourism. Meanwhile the native Indians increasingly express their birthright on the few existing post-colonists, who are ready for physical escape (like the narrator's husband) or suicide (like the narrator herself).

Set in the Dolomites, 'Le Refuge Del Pietro' is a kind of conflict between generations, when the old meet the young in a restaurant in the Alps, where a solitary Englishman (dressed in bizarre Alpine gear) tells the two other (young) diners about (almost) dragging his mainly ailing family through snow to find an inn, even lying to them, until they reach the place and find it in ruins.

'Nuit de garde', set in an unnamed place (mainly a hospital) where there is a hierarchy of staff with a cleaner from Guadeloupe and a junior doctor who makes the decisions about the deaths of patients, seems as if it has come from previous experience of the author.

'Les fiancés de Laurenço Marques' examines a capital city (now called Maputo) which preserves its nineteenth century history in the name of its beer and its colonial and Soviet communist of Marxist past in its street names, as if it wants not to forget its history. The narrator thinks likewise: he originally came to the city with his fiancé forty years before, although they went their individual ways, he as a musician, she as a writer, although now their spouses have died they are re-living the past, coming together in Maputo as if still twenty rather than sixty.

'Garde-Robe' too is about the return of age, with a businessman-turned humanitarian UN worker in war-struck Colombo in Sri Lanka telling the story of the Buchenwald uniform his father (a survivor who later killed himself) once wore that he's kept all the time as a reminder of man's inhumanity to man. Nazi-style inhumanity seems to be returning, though, he learns of the atrocities of civil war.

Finally we have 'Train de vie' in which a young African woman who works as a server in a restaurant in Paris goes off on a train to meet her German fiancé from a very wealthy family. The story is told from a young white French narrator's point of view, who comes to learn all about the woman's problems, her potential mother-in-law's opposition to the marriage, but her son's resolution to marry if she becomes pregnant. Looks that things will fall flat as the train loses hours and Rokaya will miss her connection on the very day of peak ovulation. Unless, of course, narrator Paul becomes (quite casually) a kind of surrogate lover for the night.

Judging by these highly readable stories, I'd say that the principal interest that Jean-Christophe has is difference, in its many varied forms. 

Pascal Lainé: La Dentellière | The Lacemaker (1974)

Pomme's father left the family some time before the book begins, and her mother made do as she could: by working in a bar and by selling her body. Her mother later worked in a dairy, and Pomme never graduated from just shampooing in a hairdresser's. She went to Cabourg with her 'friend' Marylène, a girl with dreams way beyond her station, until she leaves Pomme after finding a partner.

One of the reasons Marylène leaves is because Pomme doesn't really act like a friend, doesn't really act like a person – in fact she hardly seems to exist, have any opinions, have a self. If asked to describe Pomme's character, it would be difficult to know what to say.

And yet Pomme finds a partner of sorts, because almost halfway through the book Aimery de Béligné – a student from a different social class to Pomme's – sort of chats her up and takes her for rides along the coast and (although he at first seems reluctant) they become partners, and even live together in Paris, Aimery continuing as a student and Pomme continuing the shampooing.

Until, that is, Aimery decides to leave her because – apart from the fact that they're completely incompatible – Pomme seems to almost worship him, although she doesn't say so, doesn't really say anything, just immerses herself in a world of material objects, whereas of course Aimery is an ideas man, or so he seems to believe. So what could Pomme possibly object to if they split up? Nothing, of course, as Pomme never objects to anything, just accepts. She doesn't have any opinions or ideas about anything does she?

OK, so she returns to her mother but is ashamed of her own body, thinks she's too fat, so doesn't eat and becomes anorexic. Years later Pomme's mother asks Aimery to visit her, in her psychiatric home, where Pomme tells Aimery about the lovers she's had over the years, of the time she went to Greece, Thessalonika to be precise: she doesn't really want to upset Aimery and tell him the truth, does she?

More of a long short story than a novel, La Dentellière (trans. as The Lacemaker) is intriguing, entrancing and very re-readable. There are obviously some influences from the Nouveau Roman – particularly, I think, towards the end when an emaciated Pomme falls in the road and the cars are described in a geometrical fashion that made me think of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

This Goncourt-winning third novel has plagued Lainé for decades because he just views it as an excercice de style, far from the best novel he's ever written, although he is well aware that he'll always be seen as a one-novel guy. This is the impression I had too, although I'll have to give a few of his later novels a try when I come across them. This one I spotted in a Lourmarin (84) vide grenier and snapped up for 50 centimes. I'd avidly read the book some years before, and this time too it far from disappointed me, and Claude Goretta's film of the book – the movie that really set Isabelle Huppert on the path to stardom – is well worth viewing too.

Lydie Salvayre: Pas pleurer (2014)

The title of Lydie Salvayre's Pas pleurer (lit. 'No Crying') is taken from an expression in one of Marina Tsvetaeva's letters that Salvayre discovered on researching 7 femmes (2013): she thought it apt because the title Pas pleurer, which is set in the Spanish Civil War and largely concerns her mother's situation, sums up her decision not to be a victim.

Salvayre's Spanish-born mother Montse was fifteen at the outbreak of the war, and from a family of 'mauvais pauvres': the kind of people the enraged novelist Georges Bernanos knew were being cold-bloodedly executed in Mallorca by Franco's forces, while he was living there. Bernanos's son had joined the fascist Phalange until he too saw what was happening, and the nevertheless very right-wing Catholic George Bernanos plays an important kind of bit-part in this novel. He returned to France in 1937 and his anti-Franquist (for which read anti-fascist) book Les Cimetières sous la lune was published the following year, and much later had a profound effect on Salvayre.

This is a novelised biographical work about Lydie Salvayre's family some ten years before she was born, partly culled from her mother's fading recollections which nonetheless remain vivid about this particular period. It is a story of two families: the main players are Montse herself and her brother José, and the bourgeois Jaime Burgos Obregón and his son Diego, by (it is revealed towards the end) another woman before Jaime met and married Doña Sol.

José is a young anarchist and has returned from Lérida with ideas about a wonderful new anarchist society that can be lived in Spain, and Montse later discovers the joys of living in an anarchist village. One sentence in the book gives an idea of this society, and I translate:

'From June '36, in fact, numerous villages became free self-governing collective communes outside of a central ruling power, without police, without law courts, without a boss, without money, without church, without bureaucracy, and in almost perfect peace.'

Hmm, so maybe the hippie 1960s in the UK and elsewhere weren't so great after all. The young Montse loved this, it fed into her whole life and is the principal memory her failing mind retains. But one of the results of the free love, the gender equality (hey, women can smoke too!) is that Montse gets pregnant and goes back to (a none-too-pleased) mother. Somehow, you know the end is in sight when Montse improbably marries the ugly Diego, who for some time has been (equally improbably) a communist. This means, of course, that José and Diego (although both on the left) nevertheless hate each other because of their political affiliations. It seems highly improbable too that Diego (according to the local gossip) had a hand in José's death, but the real message is that things are closing in on the left in general and it's time to flee to France, which is exactly what Diego and Montse do (although not together at first), and France is where they stay. Cue for Lydie Salvayre to appear.

But this book, Salvayre likes to think, is written with her mother. Montse not only spoke French with a Spanish accent for the rest of her life, used unconventional (the unkind would call it 'incorrect') French, and also used fragnol (a type of mixture of French and Spanish), and many linguistic tributes to Montse are given here. One expression that struck me was 'Il faut que tu comprends' (without the subjunctive), and then there's 'Il récite des versos [vers] qui hablent [parlent] de la mer' (lit. 'He recites verses which speak of the sea', but so much is lost in that), although the malapropism/fragnol expression I really love is 'tête de litotte' for 'tête de linotte'. This best translates as 'birdbrain' (linotte being French for linnet), but I find it interesting that it also suggests a word with which Montse (but certainly not Salvayre) is surely unfamiliar: 'litote', or litotes, from Greek rhetoric.

It's not just Montse's use of language that is interesting here, as the novel is strewn with Spanish words, expressions and sentences that seem to be not exactly untranslatable, but which describe the time more fully than a straight translation would allow for: how can you cope with an expression such as 'Rabelais était espanol [sic] camaradas, espagnol [sic] en esprit, claro, hermano de Cervantes, claro, [...]. Hybridity rules, time for Bakhtinian theory to take over. But not here.

Pas pleurer won the Prix Goncourt in 2014, although a review in Libé suggested that this was an error of judgement, that Kamel Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête should have taken the title. Dunno, but out of about 115 Goncourts only ten female writers had got it before, and as I've not yet read Daoud's novel I'm not one to judge, but this is still a hell of a book.

Atiq Rahimi: Syngué Sabour: Pierre de patience | The Patience Stone (2008)

The characters aren’t named in this book (trans. as The Patience Stone), and could in fact be many other people in Muslim societies such as this one, which an initial page tells us could be Afghanistan (the country from which Atiq Rahimi (born in 1962) escaped in 1984) or elsewhere.

An unnamed war is being waged, and a woman’s husband lies on a mattress in a coma after a brawl with one of his own fellow fighter who’s insulted his mother, and in which he gets shot in the neck. The shedding of blood, to men –  especially those living in a phallocratic society, whether fighting or deflowering women – is a source of pride, a badge of honour.

He’s on a drip and his wife sits by his bedside reciting from the Koran, using, hah, a peacock feather as a bookmark. Or at least that’s how it starts, but the man becomes a symbol from Persian mythology, the syngué sabour, or patience stone, of the title, to whom she can tell her secrets, reveal her confessions.

The woman has been married for ten years, although the man has been fighting for so long that she has only lived with him for three years. He wasn’t even present when she married him (only his photo and kandjar (ceremonial knife)), and she only met him three years later, although he wasn’t much of a lover, didn’t even kiss her, probably because he didn’t know how to. They have two children though, and she has grown to kind of love him.

Well, they have two children but. In a phallocratic society fertility is all-important, and if you’re infertile like the woman’s aunt (with whom she and the children stay at night) then you’re thrown aside, left for people (such as the aunt’s father-in-law) to use as a sex object. But the woman isn’t infertile: the man is. So the man’s mother takes her to a pimp, and a loveless relationship with a faceless man in the dark produces two children: see, a happy family, and no one to complain.

The man’s emasculation is complete when the woman – having avoided being raped by one of the soldiers by pretending to be a prostitute – forms a sexual relationship with a sixteen-year-old boy, only she teaches him, she takes the lead.

And taken together, all these confessions to the syngué sabour make the stone explode, lead to apocalypse.

An angry tale full of symbols, such as recurring ones concerning emasculation (yes, quails really are phallic, come to think of it), full of feminist power, eminently re-readable. A triumph which won the 2008 Prix Goncourt.

Jean Carrière: L'Épervier de Maheux (1972)

L'Épervier de Maheux (lit. 'The Sparrowhawk from Maheux') gained the Prix Goncourt in 1972, the year of its publication. It is set in the Cévennes, a relatively small area in central south France, a mountainous region forming a small part of the Massif Central, to the south-east extremity. It is a land of extremes of temperature, as vividly described in this intensely powerful book. In the nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about the land in his Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879).

The plot takes place in the mid-twentieth century, and the characters in it – principally from the Reilhan family – are not exactly sympathetically portrayed. If the bleakness and the extreme harshness of the area – from which most of the people have already moved and most remaining ones move in the process of the book – suggests Jean Giono (who was Carrière's friend), another author is suggested in the book itself by two quotations: William Faulkner. There is certainly more than a hint of Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha here.

One of the quotations is from Sartoris and the other from Absalon: 'Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.' The rather farcical coffin scene also recalls Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Perhaps more than anything, though, the names of the brothers Abel and Samuel – and the apocalyptic nature of the pitiless weather, the violence at the end, recall the Bible.

L'Épervier de Maheux sold almost two million copies, and Carrière suffered because of this literary Grail, went into a deep depression, probably never really recovered. It was eight years before he published another book, and fifteen years after the Goncourt he wrote Le Prix d'un Goncourt (better translated as 'The Price of a Goncourt' rather than its homonym 'Prize', and it was also published as Les Cendres de la gloire ('The Ashes of Glory')). Essentially, Carrière's problems were existential: the way others saw him, the sensation of being divorced from himself. Fame, fame, fatal fame.

Maheux is a fictional name, and although the hamlet Mazel-de-Mort exists, its true location exists in a different place than in the book. And as far as I know there are no characters in the book who bear the same name as any living characters in the region, although locals certainly recognized some of the characters and were very less than happy about it. Ah, Life...

This is a demanding book but the effort pays off.

Francis de Miomandre: Écrit sur de l'eau | Written on Water (1908); repr. by La Différence 2013

'Prix Goncourt 1908' screams the title, rather oddly: 1908? A novel marked by 'frivolity' and 'inconsistency', as suggested by Miomandre's biographer Remi Rousselot in the Preface here? Yes, certainly, but then so what, is what we both think. Écrit sur de l'eau (lit. 'Written on Water') is not only a wonderful title, but a most appropriate one for a work that concerns instability, intangibility, plain impossibility.

Jacques de Meillan is a nineteen-year-old student, or rather ex-student, or, well anyway he doesn't have a job, doesn't do anything, lies in bed until late, and simply allows his father's servant to do all the work while Jacques just thinks about his future, but mainly the future of his social life, especially his love life.

Jacques's father Pierre is a representative of a different kind of parasitism, or would-be parasitism: he dreams, crazily, but really seriously, of becoming a mega-rich businessman, such as in the latest of his schemes to turn alcohol into gold – although in the end Pierre has just been conned and there's not even any alcohol to turn into anything. His main partner was going to be millionaire Mazarakis, although we don't see anything of him in the novel.

We do, though, see Mazarakis's unfaithful wife Anne, and hear a great deal of her in Jacques's waking and sleeping dreams: he's cock-over-tit in love with her, and thinks she is with him, and he's only too willing to mortgage his future on their relationship, until he discovers the truth about her.

So what do you know, Jacques and his best friend Juliette Brémond have been made for each other all along, until of course the relationship can't possibly continue as he has no money so Juliette will have to marry a boring old fart she doesn't love. Moral of the story? Money doesn't buy love, but it pays the bills? All capitalists are bastards? Never trust a woman as it's a woman's world and they'll always win in the end? Don't only watch your back but also your front and above all the person who's supposed to be siding with you? Yes, there's some of all that here. This is a really very readable book.

My other post on Francis de Miomandre:

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Remi Rousselot: Francis de Miomandre: Un Goncourt oublié

Antonine Maillet: Pélagie-la-Charrette (1979)

Pélagie-la-Charrette is the seventh novel by Antonine Maillet, and the first by a non-European to win the Prix Goncourt. After the removal of the Acadians from Canada by the British in 1755, Pélagie-la-Charrette is a fictional recreation of the return from the South of the USA to Acadia by Pélagie, family and followers in 1770. It has been translated into English as Pélagie: The Return to Acadie, although I find it difficult to imagine how the many Acadian expressions used in the original could have been translated.

This then is the story of Pélagie LeBlanc (called Pélagie-la-Charrette) and fellow Acadians' ten-year journey to Grand- Pré (Nova Scotia), with a cart pulled by oxen. On the way they move from Charleston (North Carolina), through Baltimore (Maryland), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Boston (Massachusetts), Salem (also MA), to their final stop.

On the way they have picked up other travellers, including a black slave whom they treat with a respect he has never known, bury some people, steal just to survive, and nearly starve. Other principal characters are Bélonie-le-Vieux, who starts out as a ninenty-year-old, and who is the story teller of this essentially oral culture, and Célina the healer and midwife.

There is much 'doubling' in the tale, as in the case of twins, the two Jeannes, the ghost cart of death following the cart bearing the living, and the flashes forward to relatives towards the end of the 19th century. Pélagie's beloved captain Beausoleil also follows in his ship, meeting her at ports of call. There are sad moments, as when a child has to be buried, and humorous ones, such as Pierre à Pitre's thefts and imprisonment in Baltimore, and throughout there is a polyvocality, a Rabelaisian joy, an obvious delight at the re-establishment of a home for the Acadians.

My other post on Antonine Maillet:

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Antonine Maillet: La Sagouine

Simone de Beauvoir: Les Mandarins I (1954)

The dazzling lights that were Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Jean Sartre haven't gone out, and will continue to blaze, I'm sure, long after more recent writers in France and the rest of the world – many still living – have long been forgotten. But I have no intention just yet of saying much about this, Simone de Beauvoir's huge Goncourt-winning novel, which the Folio version here divides into two separate books, both more than 500 pages in length. I've just ordered Les Mandarins II and shall be making a longer comment in due course on the full 1000-page book.

Beauvoir wanted readers to take her book as 'neither autobiography nor reporting, but evocation'. Not too sure about the meaning of that last word for her, although clearly she didn't intend it to be seen as a roman à clef, which it certainly isn't, although a number of the characters in it have a number of resemblances to actual characters within Beauvoir's world: Beauvoir herself is a little like Anne Dubreuilh, the writer Robert's wife; Scriassine recalls Arthur Koestler in a number of ways, etc, etc. But the other principal player in the novel is Henri Perron, who has a great deal of similarities to Albert Camus, notably with his paper L'Espoir, which sounds a little like Combat: Beauvoir even lays the analogies on thicker with a wink to the main character in L'Étranger by celebrating Henri's return with...a bottle of meursault!

As I said above, more comments when I've read the whole work, but it seems great so far.

Roger Vailland: La Loi (1957)

This powerful 1957 novel was awarded the Prix Goncourt in the same year. Communist Roger Vailland was shattered to learn the truth behind Stalin's lies, and sought refuge with his wife Élizabeth for several months in the Pulgia area of southern Italy, more specifically in the town of Gargano, which becomes masked as Manacore in La Loi, and is where almost all of the action in this claustrophobic novel is set.

The title La Loi refers to the translation of La Legge, a (male-only) bar game played in small towns and villages in southern Italy where everyone knows each other and in which, after the casting of a die or the drawing of a tarot card, a 'boss' emerges to chose a second-in-charge to lay down the Law with over a bottle of wine. The boss can drink as many glasses from the bottle as he wishes, and give or refuse glasses to other players who ask. He has the power to criticise, indeed insult, or even praise any of the other players or anyone else he wishes. For the dispossessed, this is a chance for a moment of glory, a chance to become all-powerful in theory, to make 'The Law'. The Law is a microcosm, here, of the social situation in Manacore.

Manacore suffers from often oppressive heat, oppressive mosquitoes, and oppressive men who think it their right to rape young virgins if they are refused that pleasure. Manacore on first appearances seems to be a place that time has forgotten, although there are glimpses of the twentieth century: the scooters, the cars, and the TV sets, for instance. But socially let's say there's room for growth.

There are feudal echoes here, as in the seventy-two-year-old Don Cesare's long-held 'right' to take women, although this right can easily be concealed by him employing them as servants: he owns a fair amount of land as well as money, so he can make the Law.

Matteo Brigante also makes the Law, has a great deal of money, but is a racketeer, not of the same social status as Don Cesare. Brigante is married, but likes to seduce virgins, such as Mariette, who is sixteen to seventeen here, and cuts Matteo deeply on the cheek with his own greffoir, or grafting knife, when he tries to rape her. This is an example of the 'lesser' sex turning the tables, of Mariette standing up for herself rather than accepting her lot as others would do: an example of a woman making the Law.

Making the Law can be complicated, as in prostitution. A hirer of prostitutes makes the Law by using the woman, but then the woman makes the Law by using the 'john' and establishing the price and creating all the conditions: maybe she has the best of both worlds by making the Law and receiving it, the narrator suggests. But there are no brothels in Manacore, a place where it is said that everyone is everyone else's cop, where if anything clandestine is to be done it has to be done by great cunning and/or a great deal of money.

But positions in the hierarchy are by no means permanent, as proved by the huge upward leap by the rank outsider Mariette, who may well be Don Cesare's daughter, and who gains a great amount of property in his will. As opposed, that is, to her mother and sisters and his servant Tonio, who is forced to join the ranks of the unemployed. A complicated story, but a very interesting one.

My other Roger Vailland posts:

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Roger Vailland: Les mauvais Coups
Roger Vailland: 325.000 francs

Jean Vautrin: Un grand pas vers le Bon Dieu (1989)

In 1991 Patrick Griolet lodged a complaint of plagiarism against Jean Vautrin's Prix Goncourt 1989 novel Un Grand Pas vers le Bon Dieu on the grounds that it uses many of the words and expressions in Griolet's works on Cajun words and expressions. Griolet lost his case because although explanatory texts, definitions, examples, etc, are indeed protected the words and their orthography are not; Griolet also lost on appeal. For me, what this exercise shows more than anything is the extent to which Un grand pas vers le Bon Dieu is steeped in the Cajun lexicon.

So steeped in fact that, reading some comments by regular as opposed to professional readers, bafflement is the order of the day – or rather, the order of the daze: this novel is for at least half of its monster 535-page length a mixture of Cajun, straight French, and liberal smatterings of English.

The events in the novel take place between 1893 and 1920 – just twenty-seven years – but a great deal happens in that time, although that time is not represented sequentially: we are to some extent made to lose track of the past half way in. That doesn't concern me as much as the essential joining of two parts does, and in spite of the eventual resolution of the hiatus between the parts there is a number of pages here in the second half that just left me cold as they felt superfluous. All the same, I never at any point wanted to give up on the book because it contains superlative, often very funny, writing.

Before the momentous event of most the killings, which take place on one occasion and almost exactly half way through Un grand pas vers le Bon Dieu, we have Edius Raquin – the surname surely not being gratuitous as this reads throughout like a cartoon Zola – in Bayou Nez Piqué in remote Louisiana with his wife Bazelle and his very choosy daughter Azeline, who just refuses to marry any of the guys around as they're plain boring skirt-chasers.

Until, that is, Farouche Ferraille Crowther, the most wanted outlaw in the country and with a past as unlikely as his name, guns his way into the territory, Edius (in equally unlikely mode) takes to him and hides him in the marshes with a view to taming him for marriage to Azeline and working on the plantation after a change of appearance just to put bounty hunters and (for example) Farouche's notorious enemy Palestine Northwood off the scent.

Wonder of wonders, Azeline is (in theory secretly) turned on by the first erection she's ever seen as Farouche washes himself in the bayou water and she masturbates with a groan. So marriage is inevitable, although all the killings come on the wedding day and Farouche has to leave pretty sharpish. But not before he's sown the seeds of motherhood in Azeline, who moves to New Orleans and, well... another story begins with her son.

It's this second story that often had me yawning, as this reader can only take so many wild stories – and so many larger-than-life characters – in one go. So Azeline's son Jim Crowley (who will become a musician) lives in New Orleans for many years, growing up fast in cockroach infested places, fathering children by (in this order) his black foster mother, by a Japanese prostitute called Tokyo-Rose, and (as a one-legged World War I casualty) by his nurse. In between this he unknowingly has sex with his mother, who now calls herself Lilly Mae.

But the deus ex machina comes in the form of a detective who's been tracking Jim down for a few years to inform him that he's a rich man: in 1916, Jim's gold-rich grandfather Edius died, living the palatial home of his long-nourished dreams – along with pots of money  – all to his grandson. Et le bon temps roulera.

Jacques-Pierre Amette: La Maîtresse de Brecht | Brecht's Lover (2003)

As the title indicates, Jacques-Pierre Amette's novel La Maîtresse de Brecht – translated as Brecht's Mistress in the American translation and Brecht's Lover in English – principally concerns the playwright Bertolt Brecht's woman. Who is the imaginary Maria Eich.

 

The omniscient narrative concerns the return of Brecht in 1948 from his fifteen-year exile from Nazi Germany – spent with his wife Hélène Weigel, mainly in the USA – to East Berlin, now under the control of the Soviets.

 

Vetting is the order of the day on the part of all sides, and just as Brecht has been under close surveillance in California from the McCarthy witch-hunters sniffing the slightest hint of communist sympathy, so the Stasi in East Germany want to know if the great writer has in any way changed his political allegiances over the previous fifteen years.

 

This is where Maria Eich comes in: the Soviets, via Hans Trew, employ the beautiful young actor Maria to spy on Brecht, to glean any information she can on him by taking photos of any of his papers. As a person with an estranged ex-Nazi husband and an ex-Nazi father but herself with no particular political views, Maria easily takes to the job, which inevitably soon includes sharing the bed of the notoriously sexually-oriented but much older Brecht.

 

In fact Brecht doesn't have that many years to live as he has a serious heart condition, and as the relationship with Maria progresses even though she gets nothing from it sexually and grows to severely dislike Brecht as a man in spite of her huge respect for him as a writer, her feelings for Hans grow.

 

Hans has a working partner named Théo Pillat and the couple have an odd, sometimes humorous relationship that reminded me almost of a Laurel and Hardy in reverse at times, and Théo can't understand why Hans – who's also in love with Maria – doesn't act on his feelings. But he can't, and I'm relieved that there wasn't a mushy ending here, although Hans ensures she gets safely to West Berlin where her daughter lives.

 

So there we have it, an interesting and quick read, although I've no idea if it deserved the Goncourt.

Andreï Makine: Le Testament français | Dreams of My Russian Summers (1995)

Andreï Makine was born in Siberia in 1957 and didn't move to France until he was thirty. He was brought up by his French grandmother in Russia, thus receiving access to two cultures. Le Testament français (literally 'The French Will') has the distinction of gaining the prestigious Prix Goncourt for 1995, along with the Prix Médicis and the Prix Goncourt des lycéens. It is translated into English as Dreams of My Russian Summers, a title which loses the significance of the document at the end of the novel.

Le Testament français is a partly autobiographical novel which begins and is to a large extent set in Saranza on the edge of the vast Steppes, where the narrator Alyosha spends his childhood and adolescent summers – along with his unnamed sister – with his French grandmother Charlotte. Charlotte speaks to the children in French, although the France she remembers is imbued with a certain glow, a romantic patina which thrills Alyosha, makes him want to understand as much as he can about the country he obviously belongs to, and yet at the same time doesn't know.

The drama of the narrator's double identity – or as he puts it he 'pénible entre-deux-mondes' – his 'painful double-world' – makes up much of the drama in the novel: French is perceived as a 'greffe' ('graft'), 'ma langue grand-maternellel' ('my grand-maternal language'), and his difference can be the subject of discord with his school colleagues, who call him 'Frantsuz', an expression which he views with some ambiguity. The narrator initially, before he attempts to integrate more with his school colleagues, associates with Pashka, the other outsider who doesn't fit in with the norm.

Much of the novel is taken up with the narrator's struggle with his duality, of his acceptance of his double heritage. At the age of thirty we see him in France sleeping rough, almost living the life of a tramp, almost insane, contemplating suicide, and there are little or no explanations for this, apart from his obvious attempts to be granted French nationality, to become an author.

Unable, because unwilling, to re-establish contact with Charlotte in Siberia when living in Paris, the narrator has Alex Bond try to visit her. She was still living at the time, although later an American (via Bond) tells him of Charlotte's death and of his 'testament', by which he means the narrator's legacy, which amounts to a manuscript by Charlotte informing him about the photo (enclosed) that intrigued him at the beginning of the book: the woman saying 'petite pomme' (the French equivalent of 'cheese' to make people appear to smile), who was Charlotte's daughter and the narrator's mother.

Laurent Gaudé: Le Soleil des Scorta | The Scortas' Sun (2004)

Laurent Gaudé's Goncourt-winning Le Soleil des Scorta (translated as The Scortas' Sun) is set in the Pouilles area in the south of Italy, mainly in the (imaginary) village of Montepuccio. Gaudé, whose wife is Italian, is particularly fond of this area.

The novel begins like a spaghetthi western, with Luciano Mascalzone riding into the deserted Montpuccio after fifteen years in prison, although he's on a mule rather than a horse. Throughout his imprisonment he dreamed of making love to Filomena Biscotti, although he fully realises that when he's done so he's fated to die because of it. The back of the book calls his action a rape, although it certainly doesn't read so: he goes to Filomena's house, she accepts her destiny, and willingly accepts him into her bed. But just before Luciano dies from a stoning by the villagers, he learns that Filomena died years before, and he's in fact made love to her almost identical younger sister Immolacolata.

Le Soleil des Scorta takes the reader through five generations of the same family, and the product of the sexual relationship between Luciano and Immacolata is Rocco, a baby who isn't wanted in Montepuccio, isn't wanted at all and the villagers want to kill him, but he's saved by the curé and is brought up in the neighboring village.

Rocco takes the surname of the family that brought him up – Scorta – and as a mature person returns to Montepuccio, where he is feared because of the violence he inflicts on others, because he makes his money by taking anything he wants. He marries a deaf and dumb girl whose name is unknown to anyone so is just called La Muette, or the silent woman. And when Rocco's time to die comes he gives his fortune to the church, on the condition that each member of the Scorta family will receive an extremely lavish funeral and tomb, as if to indicate the importance of the family.

And so Rocco's sons Domenico and Guiseppe and his daughter Carmela are in effect disinherited, they have to begin life afresh. But an attempt to leave for New York is aborted for Carmela at Ellis Island, where she learns that she can't be accepted because of an infection. Her brothers won't allow themselves to be separated from her, so they are as if fated to return to Montepuccio, being denied the chance to become rich. But they make a little money on the return journey and buy a shop where they can sell cigarettes, the first of its kind in the village.

But La Muetta has died and the new curé has chosen not to bury her properly, incurring the wrath of the Scortas. And the wrath of their friend Raffaele, who becomes an honorary Scorta, the brother of the others, in spite – the reader learns later – of his love for Carmela. He helps unearth La Muette to give her a fitting burial.

And Raffaele kills the curé. He strips him naked in the countyside, leaves him to the relentless, merciless sun that burns, the sun that allowed Luciano to ride into Montepuccio, at a time when everyone else was sheltering inside from it. The time of day, the narrator says, 'when the lizards dream of being fish', when they too sweat. But Montepuccio keeps the people a prisoner: they're psychologically if not physically, even genetically, anchored to their geographical fate.

Carmela's son Elia is given the choice by his uncle Domenico – not by his father, a fleshless character who goes off to meet his death fighting in Spain for the fascists – the choice of returning to Montepuccio (after a necessary exile in the next village), or (with money offered) of breaking the family mould and leaving for Naples or Milan. No, young Elia says he must return to Montepuccio.

Some years later Elia falls helplessly in love with Maria Carminella, a girl from a rich family, but who is a free spirit, a kind of feminist, who will only marry Elia if he has nothing. Elia feels forced to burn down the family business, which he does so he and Maria can begin life – as did Domenica, Giuseppe and Carmela – with nothing.

The cycle of struggle, of acceptance of fate, of being rooted to the family, to the village, is broken by Elia's daughter Anna, who will leave for the north, for a decent education and a home away from the burning sun.