Patrick Varetz: Sous vide (2017)

Patrick Varetz's Sous vide (lit. 'In a Vacuum') is the third novel, after Bas monde (2012) and Petite vie (2015), to include the psychologically wounded narrator Pascal, although there is a major difference here: whereas Bas monde concerned Pascal as a baby and Petite vie concerned Pascal as a ten-year-old child, Sous vide sees him in his early thirties at the beginning of the 1990s, thus skipping him during adolescence.

And Pascal's parents Daniel and Violette exist here as memories, although their influence on the narrator is great, frequently intruding on his perception of the world: he is incapable of preventing them from colonizing, or cannibalizing, his thoughts.

Not that this perception is a mature one: the narrator has no personality, indeed is unable to construct himself. The principal positive aspect is that he rejects the violence of his father, although his counteraction is to opt for self-derision, cynicism and disillusionment, to take nothing seriously, including life and death and love. He is in a kind of interstitial life.

Varetz refers to an occasion in which, in a bus shelter in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he found an abandoned bag of books, which as a bibliophile he had to search, and discovered Stefan Zweig's Ungeduld des Herzens (1939) translated into French as La Pitié dangereuse (and incidentally into English as Beware of Pity). This novel involves a relationship between a soldier and a handicapped young woman.

Both the narrator of Sous vide and his partner Claire are handicapped in different ways, although Claire is much more disadvantaged than the narrator. The narrator is employed by Blanc (an interesting name) as a freelance writer, and is invited to join social functions with him, in spite of the narrator being well aware of the emptiness of people getting together and drinking to hide their emptiness. Claire has a more profound psychiatric problem, clearly revealed in the final sentence of the novel, when – the couple being evicted after the narrator hasn't opened his mail for some time – she grabs a tube of benzodiazepines and succeeds in taking some capsules into her mouth, and putting others between her legs.

Patrick Varetz writes with power, and is a hugely compelling and original writer.

My other posts on Patrick Varetz:

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Patrick Varetz: Bas monde

Patrick Varetz: Petite vie

Patrick Varetz: Petite vie (2015)

Petite vie has the same principal characters as the first part of this trilogy, Bas monde: the narrator Pascal, the violent husband Daniel, the half-mad mother Violette, the sinister doctor Caudron, and the dominant nurse grandmother. Violence is still a part of everyday life, although ten years have passed.

Pascal is now ten years old and witnesses his mother nearly overdosing on prescription medicine, and his father sent to hospital. The family now live in a much bigger house provided by the grandmother, the radio (a symbol of consumer society) has been replaced by the television, which displays images of the events of May 1968, one effect of which means that Pascal doesn't have to go to school.

This is also a story of education, with Pascal's barely literate father pushing his son to high achievement at school; his mother giving him a (slightly) transgressive sexual education; and Pascal and his peers beginning their first (sometimes reluctant) sexual discoveries of their own.

Part of Varetz's inspiration came from Nicholas Ray's movie Bigger than Life (1950), starring James Mason as a schoolteacher with arterial problems who is experimented on by a doctor who gives him cortisone, resulting in his abuse of it, which makes him violent.

Not enough readers are aware of Varetz's unusual work, although the current literary review Le Matricule des anges prominently features his now heavily bearded face on the front page with a sizeable article on him inside.

My other posts on Patrick Varetz:

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Patrick Varetz: Sous vide

Patrick Varetz: Bas monde

Patrick Varetz: Bas monde (2012)

Patrick Varetz was born in 1958 in Marles-les-Mines, Pas-de-Calais. His Bas monde is set at the same time as Varetz was born, and concerns the birth of a baby, although he says it's not an autobiography, although it contains anecdotal autobiographical elements, such as his working-class background and his being initially placed in a shoe box (in the book, cushioned by cotton wool and partly clothed in tissue paper). Rather, this is a hyperbole, as is perhaps indicated by the constant repetition of almost anti-heroic expressions such as 'Ma mère, la folle' ('My mother, the mad woman') and 'Mon père, ce salaud' ('My father, that bastard').

The voice in Bas monde speaks as if from that of a thinking, highly articulate embryo and young baby, and is a foil to the limited vocabularies of his mother Violette and his father Daniel: indeed, Varetz sees this as a voice that seeks vengeance; it is cathartic. A quotation from François Augiéras's Le Voyage des morts (1959) is the epigraph: 'Je n'étais qu'une voix hantée par l'avenir, bien décidée à vaincre.' ('I was just a voice haunted by the future, determined to win.)'

And he has a great deal to win in order to transcend his existing conditions: his 'bastard' father Daniel is a manual worker in the petro-chemical industry, chain-smokes and frequently gets drunk in the Bar Royal, where he spends a great deal of time with the manager's two prick-teasing daughters and has a regular habit of beating up on his wife: violence comes naturally in this environment. The baby breathes in a mixture of chemicals, alcohol, nicotine, and perfume smells (from the bar's 'pouffiasses' (slags)) when his father looks into his shoe box: this is not autobiographical, ok, but it still seems difficult to agree with Varetz when in a video clip he says that it is paradoxical not to love the people who have created you and brought you up. Why? I don't understand the logic.

Bas monde is set during what Varetz describes as the beginning of the consumer society, in which we are all 'condamnés au bonheur' ('condemned to be happy'). It is the first of a trilogy, the later novels being Petite vie (2015) and Sous vide (2017), both of which I shall be reading and most probably appreciating as much as this one. Patrick Varetz is a fascinating, original and very powerful writer.

My other Patrick Varetz posts:

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Patrick Varetz: Sous vide
Patrick Varetz: Petite vie