Prize-winning novels of France
Anita Brookner
o the surprise of no one the Goncourt this year was awarded to Pierre Combescot for Les Files du Calvaire (Grasset), a tour de force of baroque improvisation which conceals a multitude of cunningly imbricat- ed themes. Les Filles du Calvaire is the dis- trict in the 1 1 th arrondissement, where, in a bar called Les Trapezistes, opposite the Cirque d'Hiver, Mme Maud, the propri- etor, keeps an eye on her clientele of clowns, prostitutes and gangsters and arranges their destinies. She was not always called Maud. She was once Rachel Aboulafia, a Tunisian Jewess, and the granddaughter of Emma Boccara, once famed for her unbridled behaviour, her skill at letter-writing and her wide choice of friends.
The name Aboulafia may alert the read- er to the influence of Umberto Eco, for Abulafia, the 13th-century cabalist who journeyed to Palestine to find the lost Ten Tribes of Israel, gave his name to the com- puter in Foucauh's Pendulum. The prolifer- ation of separate stories which the apparently inexhaustible Combescot press- es into service to fill his 400-odd pages is impressive but not easy to read, since he begins every chapter at the end and then journeys backward in time and in causation to a notional beginning. The novel itself arrives with a bewildering cargo of charac- ters, and it is with some relief that one emerges into a simpler and more charming narrative in the second section, which describes the Tunisian life of Emma Boccara, whose granddaughter has just been presented as the corpulent proprietor of Les Trapezistes. Patience is required of the reader, and even a great deal of patience, for much of the novel is written in the slang of Parisian low life. Example:
Mais moi, on ne me le fait pas: je savais parce que je connais le zosiau. ca vous le fait aux biscotteaux: et dans le pieu, le soir venu. vrout ! plus personne. Ah ga, to peux parler d'une flanelle.
There is a great deal of this, all undoubted- ly authentic.
What story there is concerns the red- haired Rachel and her evolution as a dancer at the Tabarin, manageress of a brothel in the rue Rochechouart, and final- ly proprietor of Les Trapezistes. As an out- line this is compact but derisory. Rachel believes herself to be an incarnation of Lilith, Adam's first wife, whose progeny fly through the night bringing dreams and thus exist entre les vivants et les morts (the phrase recurs). She also claims to recognise the Angel of Death, the angel saluted by the faithful in the extermination camps. Rachel has a cavalier attitude to both life and death, dealing out fates impassively, wreak- ing revenge, but also recognising a lost child and grandchild when they turn up, as do all the other characters, either in the brothel or the bar. I counted some 38, not all of them easy to retain.
The trace of Eco is noticeable in the rapidity with which the author passes from one character to the other, or allows one to take over from the other, almost without transition. The effect is of being locked in with all 38 of them, all of them contemptu- ous of cause and effect, and all talking at once. The popularity of this novel owes much to the fact that it appears to be so startlingly Parisian, with its loving delin- eation of the petty crime which was once endemic in certain districts and has now been largely replaced by more serious and more organised misdemeanours. Amateurs of argot, of period detail, and of debased Talmudism, will read it with delight. Despite Combescot's undoubted gifts of fabulation I found it wearisome.
If Les Files du Calvaire deals magisterial- ly with a collection of red herrings, Un Long Dimanche de Fiangailles by Sebastien Japrisot (Denoel: Prix Interallie) employs a few of its own, but this time with a sense of growing excitement. Japrisot is the author of those two classic mysteries, L'Ete Meur- trier and La Dame dans l'auto avec des Lunettes et un Fusil. Here he tackles more dangerous subject matter. In January 1917 five French soldiers, drafted to the front line, shot themselves in the hand in order to escape the fighting. They were arrested, roped together, marched a certain distance, and then released into no man's land, where they would presumably be shot by the enemy. And so they were, or so it seemed. All were known by nicknames, some may have exchanged their identity numbers, one had stolen a pair of German boots. Back in France a crippled girl called Mathilde Donnay awaits the return of her fiancé, one of the five, whom she knows by another, local name. One day she receives a letter from a nun working in a hospital near Dax, which informs her that a dying man wishes to see her. This man com- manded the prisoners' escort, but in fact can tell her very little, only that all five are dead. Mathilde then sets up her own enquiry: she is rich, she is patient, and she is very scrupulous.
Her researches lead her up various blind alleys. Gradually she amasses a dossier, makes contact with the wives and mistress- es of the deceased. All have reasons of their own for telling or not telling the truth. But in the course of her enquiries she dis- covers that not one but two of the five sur- vived, and that one of them, if found, will reveal the whereabouts of the other. It is entirely possible that in order to re-enter civilian life the two surviving prisoners have changed their names. One of them, a foundling who had been given an entirely notional name to start with, is tracked down to a farm near Rozay-en-Brie. He tells Mathilde that her fiancé is alive, but of course has a different name. The expectant reader will be relieved to know that he is eventually found: how will not be revealed here.
This is diabolically clever, and Japrisot has the wit to keep his narrative tone sim- ple, or as simple as his plot will allow. The reader is alternately impressed, beguiled, frightened, bewildered, and finally impa- tient, for the solution is withheld until endurance is almost exhausted. Japrisot is at all times master of his effects, as he has proved himself to be in previous novels. A considerable achievement.
Dan Franck won the Prix Renaudot with La Separation (Seuil), a surprising choice since the novel is a sparse if painful story of marital breakdown, recounted in spasmod- ic paragraphs, with plenty of white spaces in between. One has the uncomfortable feeling that this is less a novel than a con- fession; one reacts with sympathy, but with- out indulgence. More white spaces occur in La Derive des Sentiments by Yves Simon (Grasset: Prix M6clicis), a relentlessly post- modern assemblage of affectless fragments, constructed, if that is the word, in a series of cinematic takes. It fails either to impress or to convince. The Femina was won by Paula Jacques for Deborah et les Anges Dis- sipes (Mercure de France), a story about a Cairo brothel which becomes a girls' orphanage. It will be seen that none of these novels is politically correct.
Rather than the above I would recom- mend Jean Dutourd's Portraits de Femmes (Flammarion), a deliciously sly story of an inoffensive man of letters and his tribula- tions at the hands of women, and Frangois- Olivier Rousseau's ravishing novel, Le Jour de l'Echpse, which is about a group of peo- ple growing up and growing older in the middle years of this century. Rousseau, in particular, is a major stylist. Read him for his beautiful ironic French, his long, spacious sentences, and his unabashed gaze at the follies of our age.
Previous page
