Tanguy Viel: La Disparition de Jim Sullivan (2013)

Ah, France's love of America! It's evident from the number of books translated into French, the number of Americans invited onto La Grande Librairie – and almost always having to speak through interpretation: what exactly do English or American writers have against learning French? And didn't the great philosopher Sartre love American cartoons, and isn't a French writer setting a novel in the USA almost bound to be translated (meaning potentially massive sales, if not turned into a Hollywood film?) The megabucks that could flow in!

Well, La Disparition de Jim Sullivan isn't quite like that, but it's about a novel being made with an American setting, only that novel isn't quite the novel La Disparition de Jim Sullivan. It's about possibilities, shoulds and coulds, some of which don't appear in the theoretical novel, although they do in the real La Disparition de Jim Sullivan. So what is this? Not, then, we're given to believe, the novel we're reading here, which is on the one hand the author's musing about his novel, on the other hand the novel itself at the same time. So the novel we're reading, what's it about?

There are certainly (intended) clichéd main protagonists' names such as Dwayne Koster and his wife Susan, Susan's lover Alex Dennis, and then of course the waitress Milly Hartway, Dwayne's lover until he learns of her playing in porn movies and burns the video store down, but then he is of course deeply disturbed, perhaps suffering from post-traumatic war syndrome even though he's not actually left the USA, but then that's another story.

Jim Sullivan's story is yet another: he was a prominent singer who just disappeared in the desert in the 1970s, someone whose songs and story Dwayne is fascinated by, and whose example he follows, although as an ex-university lecturer he doesn't have anything like the same kudos of course. But this all makes for a hell of a tale, even if (especially because?) most of this is knitted together as the narrator thinks about what his novel should be like.

Links to my other Viel posts:
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Tanguy Viel: Paris-Brest
Tanguy Viel: L'Absolue perfection du crime
Tanguy Viel: Insoupçonnable

Tanguy Viel: L'Absolue perfection du crime | The Absolute Perfection of Crime (2001)

As might be expected with Tanguy Viel, there are a number of references to the cinema in this novel: I particuarly liked, for example, the expression 'vol au-dessus d'un casino', which can only be translated as 'one flew over the casino', but more of that subject later. Although L'Absolue perfection du crime (translated literally as 'The Absolute Perfection of Crime') contains very little dialogue, it reads just like a movie, in parts a B movie at that.

But there's nothing wrong with writing a novel like a B movie, and Viel is very good at it. Here we have the cliché of the foiled hold-up, and the book is divided into three parts: the preparation for it; the hold-up itself and its aftermath; and finally the reprisals.

The main reference in the novel is certainly not to a B movie but to The Godfather, complete with a mafioso-type 'uncle' who is the patriarch of the 'family', although this is a family linked not by blood ties but by criminal activities. And these activities don't take place in Sicily but on the French coast, somewhere like Viel's native Brest in Brittany.

The 'brothers' are the narrator Pierre, his friend Marin who's just spent three years in prison for an unnamed crime, Andrei, and Lucho who is pulled into the gang because of his special skills. Marin's wife Jeanne is also seen as necessary for the smooth working of this supposedly perfect crime.

Nothing is skimped on the preparation of the casino hold-up on 31 December, which appears to be in 1991: Andrei poses as a video cameraman making a tourist documentary of the town, and what could be more normal than videoing the casino, the heart of lucrative capitalist exploitation amusement? Lucho knows that the way to do it is through the roof: taking the booty away through the roof via a small tele-commanded air balloon (well, these days were long before drones) is the way to go. Marin puts the money in the balloon which he and Pierre have stolen after Pierre (who's been playing roulette with Jeanne) causes a diversion by claiming a lot of his money has been stolen and demanding to see the manager, who is of course forced at gunpoint of open his safe.

So far so unbelievable, but it works nevertheless, and the five-million franc balloon lands in the sea as planned, and Pierre retrieves its contents only to find the police waiting for the robbers: Lucho has ratted on his 'brothers', and in the ensuing shoot-out Marin escapes with the money, Andrei is killed and Pierre gets out of prison after seven years.

Seven years is a long time to mull over the ways you've been badly treated, and the, er, fun starts again when Pierre is released and ready to settle accounts. First there's Lucho, who (all things considered) is pretty stupid: he knew about Pierre's favourite game of knocking on future murder victims' doors and then withdrawing for them to find a ripped-up name, meaning they were dead men, but Lucho left it too late and gets a bullet in his head and one in his heart in his supposed escape train. And then there's Marin at the opera, who sees Pierre staring at him and escapes, which leads to an unbelievable car chase and a shoot-out. Just like in the movies. And just as gripping.

My other posts on Tanguy Viel:
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Tanguy Viel: Insoupçonnable

Tanguy Viel: Paris-Brest
Yves Ravey: Trois Jours chez ma tante

Tanguy Viel: Insoupçonnable (2006)

Tanguy's Viel's books are marked by long, tortuous sentences. In the first sentence of Insoupçonnable (lit. 'Above Suspicion'), for example, the first sentence – which is also the first paragraph – is seventy words long. It describes a wedding table, emphasising the light on it.

Light is very important to Viel, whose novels are much influenced by the cinema. In an interview with Thierry Guichard in Matricule des anges (No. 71, March 2006), Viel says that he sees the cinema first of all as a 'reservoir of images, décors, characters, tableaux' that encourage him to write. He is fascinated by the 'inhumanity' of the movie camera, and strives to create a similar effect through his writing.

Several critics have seen the suspense in Viel's books as Hitchcockian, and the author is certainly a fan of the master of suspense. In Insoupçonnable Lise works as a hostess in a bar on the coast, but unlike the other girls refuses to sleep with any customer. She lives with Sam, until a client twice her age – the fifty-year-old, rich auctioneer Henri Delamare – asks her to marry him: at this point Sam becomes her 'brother'. The couple see the marriage as a chance to fulfil their dreams of going to the States. Kidnapping is their plan.

But the 'kidnap' is of Lise, for whose return the pair want one million euros. Henri doesn't inform the police and goes to the arranged meeting point, it's discovered that he's only brought blank papers instead of notes, so he has to be killed and dumped into the sea. Amazingly, the cops don't track the guilty pair down, although Henri's mysterious brother Édouard is on their trail.

The game is finally given away by Sam's Panama hat, an object which takes on a tremendous importance. And it is the selling back of the hat to Sam – by Édouard, by auction – that buys the couple's 'freedom' at the expense of Édouard taking Lise from him.

Links to my other Viel posts:
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Tanguy Viel: Paris-Brest
Tanguy Viel: L'Absolue perfection du crime

Tanguy Viel: La Disparition de Jim Sullivan

Tanguy Viel: Paris-Brest (2009)

Louis is seventeen and lives in a tiny apartment in Brest downstairs from his grandmother, who lives in a huge apartment and has been left eighteen million euros after the death of Albert, whose companion she was for three years. The young man's parents are in 'exile' in Palavas-les-Flots in Languedoc-Roussillon: Louis's father was vice-chair of Brest football team until fourteen million euros were found to have 'disappeared', and his father is continually insulted in the town for being responsible. After his daily dinner with his grandmother at the Cercle Marin – where Louis hates the right-wing old sailors and where his grandmother met Albert – his friend le fils Kermeur comes up to his apartment to join him and they drink wine.

Several years later – after Louis's parents have quietly returned to Brittany but not Brest, and have the ageing grandmother living with them – Louis returns from Paris for a few days over Christmas, although he cuts the visit short.

From the beginning it's clear that Louis doesn't like his parents, and his mother comes across as insufferable: she has always hated le fils Kermeur as a bad influence on Louis, and when she was in Palavas-les-Flots she used to ring her son every evening to check that he wasn't up to mischief. But he was.

We learn more about le fils Kermeur, of how he recruited Louis as a child into the petty theft of chocolate bars from a supermarket, and later how he encouraged Louis to burgle his grandmother's apartment. Shortly after the theft Louis left for Paris, where he rented a place in Paris overlooking Luxembourg. There, he fulfilled his ambition to be a writer.

Louis's 'family novel' is completed but must never see the light of day until his grandmother's death. It contains a great deal of information about Louis's family, and although it's fictionalised (with names and some facts changed) it to a certain extent falls in the relatively recent sub-genre of 'autofiction'. But this is not the book we're reading – which begins with a brief history of Brest – as the 'family novel' begins with grandmother's death.

Other things are different. In Paris-Brest they escape from the burglary with impunity, although in Louis's family book his mother finds le fils Kermeur out and is responsible for his imprisonment. When he gets out he seeks revenge and the whole of Louis's book leads up to le fils Kermeur cornering his mother in order to kill her. Obviously the reader now expects that this last part of Louis's book will come true and le fils Kermeur will in fact kill her in Paris-Brest.

But this is not to be and there's just a little bonfire of Louis's book. It's futile though, as he's caressing a memory  stick in his pocket and will soon be back in Paris and out of his family's life for ever.

Interestingly, Tanguy Viel not only shares the same publisher as Laurent Mauvignier but is also a friend of his.

Links to my other Viel posts:
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Tanguy Viel: Insoupçonnable
Tanguy Viel: L'Absolue perfection du crime
Tanguy Viel: La Disparition de Jim Sullivan