Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Nuit de feu (2015)

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's La Nuit de fer is a part-autobiographical novel set in the south of Algeria. The title of the book comes from a phrase Blaise Pascal used about his conversion to Christianity in 1654, and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt made a similar visit to Algeria in 1989.

The philosopher narrator, with director Gerard who wants to make a film about Charles de Foucauld and Eric-Emmanel to write the scenario, join eight others on a walking expedition from Temanrasset, through the Hoggar (a mountainous area in the middle of the Sahara Desert) to Assekrem, the place of Foucauld's hermitage.

The expedition is led by the Tuareg Abaygher (a man of the old wisdom of pre-industrialised societies) and the American guide Donald. They camp rough over ten to eleven days, in fear of snakes and scorpions and perhaps other humans. Ségolène is a Catholic who questions Eric-Emmanuel on his atheism and he tells her about the three philosphical 'proofs' of the existence of God: the universal consensus proof, the cosmological proof, and the ontological proof, all of which can be blown away in a few words.

However, Eric-Emmanuel rather stupidly loses himself from the group in a particularly anonymous, mountainous area. He has no food and virtually no water, and with night coming on he has to dig himself a bed to shield himself from the bitter cold. It is during this time that he had an epiphanic moment, and comes to believe in God: in the morning he finds his way to the camp and the worried team by following the path the stars showed him the night before.

In the Epilogue, the present-day Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt talks about his profound experience in the desert, when he was born a second time, and explains that he remains a philosopher, and if asked if he believes in God he would say 'I don't know', followed by 'I think I do'. He has a sentence to 'explain' things: 'What I know isn't what I believe.' He believes that certainty, a person knowing that he or she does or doesn't believe, is the problem, as this position goes beyond the rational, and certainties create dead bodies. He seems sure of this, but all I can think is 'Er, just a second...'.

My Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt posts:
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Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Nuit de feu
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: Milarepa
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Tectonique des sentiments
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Femme au miroir

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Femme au miroir (2011)

This is a novel in three stories, although the stories continuously alternate, making forty-two sections, or fourteen for each story. The reader knows there must be a number of links between the stories, and struggles until near the end to find the main ones. To begin with, all three main female characters have similar names. although live in different places at very different times:

Anne is from the 16th century and is about to marry when a vital mirror breaks and she knows she must flee. She never marries, never has sex, and is destined for a religious life. But her murderous, arsonist cousin Ida, a survivor of a self-made fire and a failed suicide attempt, will ensure that Anne is tried and burned at the stake for witchcraft and poisoning.

Hanna's story is epistolary, mainly her writing to Gretchen about the lack of real spark in her marriage to the nevertheless worthy Franz. Why can't she have an orgasm? Until, that is, she has anonymous sexual relationships with total strangers, and she realises she can no longer live with Franz.

Anny, though, is an LA movie star who sleeps with anyone she likes, or virtually anyone who would like to sleep with her. She is also a drug addict whose nurse Ethan is too, and although he loves her he holds off the moment until towards the end.

So how does this all fit together with three so very different attitudes to sex and/or love? Ah, well, Hanna finds out about Anne ('the virgin of Bruges') and sees her love of God as the unconscious in another (more Freudian) word, and she decides to write a book about Anne called Le Miroir de l'invisible. Anny decides to go for apparent professional suicide by accepting a screenplay written by a European director: this is to be La Fille aux lunettes rouges, an adaptation of a work written by Hanna von Waldberg, which was sent to the director's father's grandmother Gretchen. And so the three threads come together: quite the best Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt I've so far read, and at 453 pages much longer than his usual stuff.

My Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Nuit de feu
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: Milarepa
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Tectonique des sentiments
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Femme au miroir

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: Milarepa (1997)

Eric-Emmanuel wrote Milarepa for Bruno Abraham-Kremer, who later directed it as a play. Milarepa (1040–1123) was a Tibetan Buddhist, and a magician, yogi and poet who fascinates Schmitt, a non-Buddhist partly because he's too passionate, as he explains in the Afterword interview with Bruno Metzger in the above edition.

Milarepa is a short narrative, much like a short story rather than a novel, and Schmitt won the Prix Goncourt for the short story in 2010 with Concerto à la mémoire d'un ange. It forms the first part of Schmitt's 'Cycle de l'invisible', which also includes Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran, Oscar et la dame rose, L'Enfant de Noé, Le Sumo qui ne pouvait pas grossir, and Les dix enfants que madame Ming n'a jamais eus.

The story begins with Simon, who is troubled by a recurring dream that he has to kill someone. A strange woman he initially believes is insane comes up to him in a café and informs him that he is a reincarnation of the hateful Svastika, the uncle of the sage Milarepa. But she is telling the truth and Simon has a long way to go before the cycle of rebirths can be broken.

As Schmitt says in the interview, Milarepa would have been a yawn if he'd started out as a goodie-goodie and became a sage, as opposed to the revengeful mass murderer he originally was, and who grew into a sage through years of duress: it takes no time to be a villain, but to become a genuine sage requires extremely hard work and a considerable gift for the task.

My Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Nuit de feu
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: Milarepa
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Tectonique des sentiments
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Femme au miroir

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Tectonique des sentiments (2008)

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's play La Tectonique des sentiments is a homage to a section in Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste, which had already inspired Robert Bresson's film Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (1945), on which Bresson collaborated with Jean Cocteau.

The back cover of the book asks: Peut-on passer en une seconde de l'amour à la haine ('Can we go from love to hate from one moment to the next?'), and the answer to that can more or less be found in the title: Schmitt isn't interested in the gentle, idyllic shifts in love's nature as seen in Madame de Scudéry's Carte du Tendre, but in the violent seismic shifts of love's construction and destruction.

Richard is a rich businessman who is in love with the MP Diane, who is also in love with him. They see each other very regularly but don't live together, and although Richard has proposed to her several times, he hasn't done so recently and she feels that he must be tiring of her. When she confronts him with this he agrees with her and proposes that they stop being lovers but remain friends. What the audience doesn't know until near the end is that his pride won't allow him to say he feels just the same and really loves her, so the misunderstanding continues: Diane conceals her emotional pain and her wounded pride and turns it into desire for vengeance.

Diane is an MP with a specific interest in the position of women in society. She talks to two Romanian prostitutes: the first (Rodica) is getting past her prime; the other (Elina) is young and beautiful and has been lured to France with the promise of a university education, although she has no legal papers and has been tricked into prostitution. Within no time, Diane sorts things out legally, gets them off the game and provides them with an attic flat, although of course that comes at a price: that they have to befriend Richard, who needs someone to care for him as he only has months to live because he has cancer. He'll obviously be attracted to Elina, but Rodica (acting as Elina's mother) must fend off his sexual advances.

Richard falls hopelessly in love with Elina (who is also in love with him), but Rodica prevents him from seeing her and tries to give back his increasingly expensive presents to her. Nevertheless, the lovers occasionally clandestinely meet in a public park, although the relationship remains chaste. Even when Richard asks Elina to come and live with him Diane refuses to allow Rodica to let her guard down: Richard will die soon, has no one to leave all his money to, and Elina will be out on the street again when he dies.

And so Richard asks for the hand of the 'virgin' Elina, and it seems fitting that on their wedding day Diane (who doesn't attend) can hear a wedding song, whereas her mother thinks that on the contrary it's a war march.

On the morning after, while Elina is in bed, Diane visits Richard and asks him how the night was, and even if the sheets were bloodstained. Although affronted by the untimely intrusion and highly personal questions from his ex-lover, the new husband is more or less forced to agree that there was indeed blood. Diane tells him Elina has acted her part perfectly without a cue, whereupon she brandishes a dossier with the record of her soliciting, proof positive that she was a practising prostitute, and again we see a tectonic shift of feelings, and the marriage is over.

As the play states, in the emotional world you can't just press a 'Replay' button, at least not as far as Diane is concerned: she's the victim of her own machinations, and pride plays just as big a part in this. When Richard (who is of course in perfect health) finds out about the cancer scam from Rodica and on top of that learns that Elina really does love him, there's a tectonic shift back, although Richard won't unleash the full extent of his hatred for Diane by publicly revealing her treachery out of consideration for her mother, who (unlike Diane) is a good person. The only thing left for Diane is death, she feels.

The final scene is in a mortuary chapel, although it's not Diane's death but her mother's. Here, just before Richard leaves with Elina to begin a new life in another country, Diane accepts the situation and says she wishes Richard happiness. And as he leaves with his wife, he turns his head to Diane to say, his voice trembling with emotion, that he loves her, to which she replies that she loves him. He asks: 'Enfin?' 'Enfin...' 'At last?' 'At last...' (And those are the final words.)

Alfred de Musset is mentioned (by Elina) in this book, and the title of Musset's 1834 play On ne badine pas avec l'amour (a loose modern translation of which I would render as 'You Don't Mess Around with Love') would serve as a very good (but far too late) warning to Diane.

My Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Nuit de feu
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: Milarepa
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Tectonique des sentiments
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Femme au miroir