Delphine de Vigan: Les jolis garçons (2005)

Delphine de Vigan's Les jolis garçons is one of her earlier published works, and although it seems to be three short stories of three different men the narrator Emma has had contact with, and although the similarities which hold it together are merely the mention of Emma's brother Martin and the occasional reference to one of her other lovers in the stories, the (often very loose if not eccentric) French definition of the work seems to be 'novel'. So be it.

Each section of the book is named after the man in question, the first being the lawyer Mark Stevenson, who is married and only visits Emma for thirty minutes each day. As the section progresses the reader has to wonder exactly what happens in this short period as he seems to spend a lot of time on the phone while at Emma's, in fact he seems to be disappearing altogether from her life. Hardly surprising really because he's just a figment of her imagination: no wonder she needs a shrink.

The writer Ethan Castor's section disappointed me, probably largely because his only interest, while his wife's not in town, appears to be in bedding as many women as possible. And needless to say Emma's attracted, although this reader at least isn't too sure why: it must be his captivating books, about which nothing is revealed.

Milan Mikaev is a famous television presenter of whom Emma (wise woman) knows nothing as she's not into television. But Milan is obsessed with her when she snubs him in a café, continues to follow her until they're both playing cat and mouse, then both living together, then (media fest) going to get married. But then she quietly (while he's sleeping) walks out on him.

Maybe all three men here are supposed to be read as invented, or maybe not. Certainly themes Delphine de Vigan would later highlight in her books – truth versus fiction, alienation, an overall strangeness, the need for love and stability in an unstable world, etc – are all present here. Unfairly, I'm sure, a number of casual blog comments have more of less written off this book, when it clearly contains the seeds of the fruition of Vigan's writing.

Links to my other Delphine de Vigan posts:
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Delphine de Vigan: Les heures souterraines
Delphine de Vigan: Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit
Delphine de Vigan: No et moi
Delphine de Vigan: Jours sans faim

Delphine de Vigan: Jours sans faim | Days without Hunger (2001)

The title of Delphine de Vigan's autobiographical novel Jours sans faim is an obvious play on words: 'faim' has exactly the same pronunciation as 'fin'. The book was originally published in 2001 under the pseudonym Lou Delvig, and probably many people (like me) who read Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit before this much earlier book will feel that the narrator (Laure) is already familiar to them, along with her occasionally mentioned mother.

Here we have the story of an anorexic girl still in her teens, virtually a skeleton who is hospitalised to cure her from an illness she is often very reluctant to be cured of, seeing her battle as not so much against an illness as a battle against hunger itself, anorexia being the winner. Paradoxes abound here, and some of the reasoning is not far removed from madness.

There are some chilling scenes here, although there's friendship too, with the patients tending to each others' needs in small or big ways.

In the end it's perhaps the subterfuges, the tricks used by the patients to deceive the staff that stand out. For me it was Laure's cheating her way out of the hospital by pretending to weigh more than she actually did that amazed me – by concealing a kilo of rice when on the scales, withholding urination, drinking extra cups of tea, etc.

Sometimes there are flashbacks to other battles that serve as indicators of trouble breeding trouble, of problems within the family, of the father leaving for another woman, of the mother's madness and so on.

In the end, I feel that the particular French sub-genre of auto-fiction is not negative navel-gazing (or nombrilisme, to use the French term), and not just a form of self-analysis, but it's digging out the truth of how families pass on their maladies, how the illness within the family perpetuates itself. But Vigan's digging really bites: she has a genuine gift for it.

Links to my other Delphine de Vigan posts:

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Delphine de Vigan: Les heures souterraines
Delphine de Vigan: Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit
Delphine de Vigan: No et moi
Delphine de Vigan: Les jolis garçons

Delphine de Vigan: Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit (2011)

Delphine de Vigan's Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit (translated into English as Nothing Holds Back the Night) takes its title from the line 'Plus rien ne s'oppose à la nuit' in the late rock singer Alain Bashung's song 'Osez Joséphine', which was written by Bashung and Jean Fauque, and Vigan describes it as having 'a dark and daring beauty' that accompanied her throughout the time she was occupied in writing this book.

This is Vigan's 'livre de ma mère', essentially concerning her mother but necessarily also her mother's family and of course herself. The information is largely culled from people's memories, obviously including her own, and incorporates film, tapes, her mother's autobiographical writings, etc. Inevitably there must be some guesswork in the reconstruction, such as the fictionalization of dialogue.

The narrator calls her mother by her forename Lucile and describes her grandparents' household with its eventual total of nine children, although there were never nine at the same time.

Lucile's parents George and Liane and the rest of the family suffered three early losses: Antonin, who fell down a well at the age of eight; the adopted Jean-Marc, who was abused by his natural mother and died in bed from auto-erotic asphyxiation at fourteen; and Milo, who killed himself at twenty-eight and may have been involved in a suicide pact with two friends.

Lucile suffered from bipolar disorder, her daughter being used to trying to detect when a crisis would occur, when her mother would be re-admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The narrator mentions in passing that she too was briefly admitted to hospital for anorexia, which Vigan describes in Jours sans faim* (2001), translated as Days without Hunger and originally published under the pseudonym Lou Delvig.

It's quite possible that Lucile's life was traumatised by her father raping her at the age of sixteen, which is what she claimed, and the narrator finds two other women – one of them being another daughter – who were rather alarmed by George's behaviour towards them in their youth. But on the other hand Lucile's repeated written descriptions of the supposed rape don't exactly tally.

The narrator sometimes interrupts the narrative to describe how she went about finding her information and/or what difficulties she had in writing the book, and in passing she mentions Christine Angot's L'Inceste (for obvious reasons) and Lionel Duroy's Le Chagrin (as if fearing negative reactions within her own family – although certainly not from her sister Manon). Neither Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire nor Valérie Valère's Le Pavillon des enfants fous is mentioned, although there are similarities.

Towards the end of the book (and Lucile's life) the narrator says the doctor made the situation clear:

'either he put Lucile back in a chemical straitjacket, in which case she wouldn't have been able to work; or he gave her a chance to lead a normal life, and we had to accept that she expressed some irrational or suspicious ideas [...] "Like many people who aren't considered to be ill."'

She had the chance, but tragically it didn't last long.

At four hundred pages this book never flags, and it's even more riveting than the two earlier novels. I'm not too sure how she'll follow it up, but then Vigan's first directed film – À coup sûr – was released at the beginning of the year.

*The word 'faim' is pronounced the same as 'fin', and it's difficult not to see an intentional play on words.

Clip of 'Osez Joséphine', plus links to my earlier posts:

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Alain Bashung: Osez Joséphine
Delphine de Vigan: No et Moi

Delphine de Vigan: Les Heures souterraines
Delphine de Vigan: Jours sans faim
Delphine de Vigan: Les jolis garçons

Delphine de Vigan: No et Moi (2007)

It's almost five weeks since my last blog post and the withdrawal symptoms have been huge – since starting this blog six years ago I have never been this silent. But then I've had no reason at all to go dry on the blog, and in the last month I've been in Paris and have noted and photographed many things. Posts will come thick and fast now, although first I have to include the posts I hadn't finished from my few weeks in London in August. But I feel I should note a few French books I've read in the last few weeks.

I loved Delphine de Vigan's Les Heures souterraines, and although No et Moi at first appeared to me as a YA (Young Adult) novel, perhaps as a naïve plea for an understanding of the plight of homeless, my initial doubts were soon dispelled.

Unlike Les Heures souterraines,  No et Moi only concerns train stations at the beginning and the end, the apparent similarities between the two books just 'mince comme un sandwich SNCF' (pace Renaud). But the two novels have other much deeper themes: alienation, dysfunctional families, and the overwhelming problem of communication.

The thirteen-year-old educationally gifted Lou – her mother deeply, even pathologically, disturbed by the death of Lou's younger brother – makes contact with No, the quintessential outsider who lives on the street. And for the first time ever Lou feels that she is within rather than without a social, indeed existential, circle. But she has a great deal to learn, and the direction of circles is not the most important thing.

A delight.

Links to my other Delphine de Vigan posts:
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Delphine de Vigan: Les heures souterraines

Delphine de Vigan: Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit
Delphine de Vigan: Jours sans faim
Delphine de Vigan: Les jolis garçons

Delphine de Vigan: Les Heures souterraines (2009)

'At thirty she survived the death of her husband.

She's now forty and a bastard in a three-piece suit is systematically destroying her.'

That neatly sums up most of Les Heures souterraines, in which the widow Mathilde — whose husband died ten years earlier when their car hit a tree as they were on their way to a hotel in Honfleur — is losing both her job and her existential integrity. In a novel that reminds us of Amélie Nothomb's Stupeur et tremblements (Fear and Trembling) — which of course is a reference to existentialist Kierkegaard's book — Mathilde, a victim of pathological revenge, is slowly stripped of the duties of her €3000-a-month post, reduced to a tiny room nicknamed 'the shed', or 'the shithouse' because it's next door to the sounds and smells of the men's room, and with no access to the firm's intranet or even any work to do.

Furthermore, when toward the end she tries to communicate with the psychotic Jacques Pelletier (whose assistant she has officially been but who for weeks has not spoken to her), her completely reasonable and calmly stated complaint about her catch-22 situation is distorted by her torturer into one of many gross insults that she simply hasn't made.

Perhaps inevitably, she resigns: insanity would probably have been the only alternative. Ignoring the fact that others in Mathilde's office shun her too — after all, they are only doing so out of fear of Pelletier — the source of the protagonist's alienation only stems from one source, and not from several sources as in Nothomb's novel and Kafka's The Trial. Shouldn't the company be aware that he has a behaviorial problem? To mention just a few indications of this:

He complains that his hotel carpet is dirty, whereas the vacuum cleaner has only been swept against the pile; he sends back his plate in a restaurant because the pattern on it is too phallic for him; he brings the receptionist up to his room in the middle of the night because he can't, among the 120 available channels, find CNN; he can't stand waiting in traffic jams so starts yelling insults at his GPS. The list doesn't end there by any means.

But I've left out a major (or in a sense very minor) theme in the novel: the relationship between Mathilde and Thibault.

Mathilde travels to work in Le Vert de Maisons via the métro and the RER, and the narrator underlines her daily acquaintance with this underworld:

'She knew by heart the corridors, the escalators, the short cuts, this subterranean world woven like a web into the depths of the town.'

Thibault both travels and works on the surface of Paris, being a doctor driving to 'emergency' situations, although many of them aren't emergencies, and he knows the streets of Paris and the inhabitants' assumed and real illnesses as well as Mathilde knows the alienation of the underground. Ten years after the death of her husband, Mathilde's three children can't fill the hole in her life, and nor can she the hole in theirs, and surely paying that 'voyante' over in the 16th arrondissement €150 euros just to be told her life will change on 20 May was a sheer waste of money?

Apart from the backstories, the action in Les Heures souterraines takes place on 20 May, when Matilde resigns after eight years, and when Thibault (who has finished with a woman he loves but who is incapable of loving him) is forced by traffic conditions to abandon his car for the night and take the métro.

They are now aware of each other, and both crave heterosexual warmth. Across strapotins, Thibault studies Mathilde and sees what he thinks is a similar mind, and wants to talk to her. But he doesn't say a word. She disappears into her alienated world, and he into his.

Delphine de Vigan is to be congratulated for giving this really absorbing psychological study a much more realistic (and therefore extremely uncommercial) ending than it could have had.

Links to my other Delphine de Vigan posts:
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Delphine de Vigan: No et moi

Delphine de Vigan: Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit
Delphine de Vigan: Jours sans faim
Delphine de Vigan: Les jolis garçons