Adventures in reading
I am back at the European Literature Network with a review of a novel first published in French in 1976, and now published in English translation by NYRB Classics. Crazy Genie is the tale of a mother and daughter, structured around the patterns that define their lives in the countryside – with trauma that bursts out of the novel’s rhythms and goes straight to the heart.
After an extended break, I’m making another attempt at getting back into blogging at least semi-regularly. Maybe it will only be for specific occasions, or a couple of times a month, or maybe longer – let’s see.
Stu at Winstondad’s Blog is hosting a Hungarian Literature Month this February. I’ve decided to revisit Ágota Kristóf, who escaped from Hungary to Switzerland in 1956 at the age of 21, when the Hungarian Revolution was suppressed, and subsequently wrote in French. I have previously written about Kristóf’s Notebook trilogy (see here and here). Today I’m looking at I Don’t Care, a story collection originally published in 2004, and now issued as part of the Penguin International Writers series in Chris Andrews’ translation.
When I read Kristóf’s trilogy, I was struck by how austere the writing seemed, flattening out details of place and time – and yet how deeply felt it still was. That impression remained with this story collection: the title I Don’t Care seems very much ironic to me.
For example, ‘The Invitation’ consists largely of a husband’s dialogue as he enthuses over throwing a birthday party for his wife, Madeleine, despite her being clear that she he doesn’t want one. After the party, the friends have left, the husband is asleep, and Madeleine is left to clear things away. The piece ends on a simple statement: “she goes to the bathroom and takes a long look at herself in the mirror.” But there’s such a weight of unspoken emotion behind that statement, coming as it does after we’ve seen Madeleine crowded out of her own story and life.
Reality itself can seem to shift when mediated through Kristóf’s prose. ‘The House’ begins with a ten-year-old boy aghast at the thought of anyone moving away: “You can’t do that, leave one house for another; it’s terrible, like if someone got killed.” A few years later, though, the boy has moved house himself. He goes back to visit the old place, but feels betrayed when he finds that someone else has moved in. Time then races ahead in the story, with the boy never quite able to recapture the sense of connection he had with the house. By story’s end, in an uncertain time and place, the boy is an old man revisiting the house, or maybe he’s the ten-year-old yet to leave. Beating underneath it all is the longing to keep hold of the past.
‘Wrong Numbers’ encapsulates my experience of reading Kristóf’s stories. Its protagonist often finds people dialling his number by mistake. He tells of one occasion when he received a call from a woman meaning to ring Marcel, an acquaintance or possible lover of hers. After a conversation, the woman invites the protagonist to meet at a café the next day. He accepts, and changes his appearance to suit what she likes – but he is not happy with the stranger he now sees in the mirror:
He’s better than I am, more handsome, younger, but he’s not me. I wasn’t as good, or as handsome, or as young, but I was used to what I was.
This is a moment of reflection in two senses, and the patterning in Andrews’ translation there illustrates how space is opened up for the protagonist to think, when he might so far have seemed to act largely on impulse. I find it easy to underestimate how much Kristóf’s prose draws me in, because it seems so unassuming at first. But there is a whole world of lost opportunity in this tale of a misdialled phone call – and I can say something analogous across the stories in I Don’t Care.
Small Boat is the first novel by French philosopher Vincent Delecroix to be translated into English. It’s inspired by real events from 2021, when a dinghy taking migrants from France to the UK capsized, and 27 people died. Despite receiving calls from the passengers, the French authorities didn’t send help, judging that the boat was nearer to – and had then crossed into – British waters.
Recordings of the calls between the migrants and the French monitoring station emerged during the subsequent investigation, with the radio operator seeming indifferent and making comments such as, “I didn’t ask you to leave.” Delecroix’s narrator is that radio operator, as she is being interviewed by police.
The operator is adamant that she has done nothing wrong, that she carried out the duties of her job, and that it wasn’t her place to get emotionally involved:
So I didn’t enlist with the Navy to save the migrants sloshing about on the rail tracks of Pas-ds-Calais, that’s for sure, but if I’m asked to do it, or to help do it, I do. So don’t then ask me what I think, deep down, about these people, or rather about their obsession with flinging themselves into the water in search of I know not what. Also, I have to do it with the means available…I cannot send out dozens of dinghies, speed boats, patrol boats or forty helicopters to save forty small boats at the same time. You have to prioritise.
[Translation from French by Helen Stevenson.]
As the novel goes on, the operator challenges the premises of the investigation. Who can really be held responsible for the migrants’ situation, she asks. Not her, who was only a voice down the phone. Didn’t their problems really start long before they stepped on that boat? Delecroix holds back from explicitly judging his narrator’s position, which pushes the reader to step in.
There is one third-person chapter depicting events on the dinghy, and here Delecroix moves out, writing as an external observer, in contrast to the close psychological examination of the radio operator. The experience is jarring, as it should be, and raises questions of complicity that go beyond one character or country, beyond the pages of a book.
Published by Small Axes (HopeRoad).
Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.
The Narrator of this novel remembers his late friend Fanny. She struggled with her mental health, and could often appear distant, holding herself still within her own body. But there was a lighter side to her, too. The Narrator recalls that Fanny once stole a leopard-skin hat, and wearing this made her act differently:
She also had in her, popping up from time to time, and always when you least expected it, the jovial young woman in the leopard-skin hat she would have been had certain hatches not got battened down one day, by accident, abruptly, as if by a gust of wind. Whenever this woman turned up in a word or a look, the Narrator was astounded. So Fanny wasn’t just this old friend battling against great odds? She was also this perfect stranger, this person no one had ever heard of whose lineaments had yet to be set down.
[Translated from French by Mark Hutchinson]
A Leopard-Skin Hat is an account of the Narrator’s friendship with Fanny, but all told at a distance like this. The Narrator can see his friend is struggling profoundly, but also knows that ultimately he can’t see the world through her eyes. There’s a push-and-pull to the writing, as we see the Narrator by turns get closer to and further away from his friend.
There is a further distancing, in that even the character called “the Narrator” isn’t speaking to us directly. It’s especially poignant to learn that this book was written following the death of Anne Serre’s sister, and the distancing at work is Serre’s way of approaching that. If the leopard-skin hat in the novel can be seen as a symbol of those times when the Narrator can reach Fanny, then perhaps the novel itself is something similar for its author.
Published by Lolli Editions.
Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.
Meet Louise: she has used a hearing aid since childhood, but her ability to hear has now deteriorated so much that she faces the choice of whether to have a cochlear implant. The issue for her is that, if she does, she’ll lose what ‘natural’ hearing she already has, and the sound she hears will be mediated entirely through an electronic device. Louise wonders if that will change her as a person. Adèle Rosenfeld’s debut novel explores how Louise confronts the different possibilities.
Louise is depicted as effectively living between two worlds: not able to get by easily in hearing society, but also unable to embrace Deaf culture. The way she hears is also on a continuum, sometimes straightforwardly intelligible, but more often a fluid experience of sound that leans towards the abstract:
At the supermarket, the voices blurred into a single echo. An epidemic of sorts had spread across all sound: the jam jars that the stock boy was shelving chattered; the product codes’ beeps at the checkout seeped into the women’s stressed syllables like fantastical outbursts; the deli-counter machine let out a hoarse cough. At the checkout, I overheard “bulgur” or maybe “burer”. To a “you” – static – “there,” I answered yes twice without understanding, replied no three times without understanding, and finally declared “I don’t know,” still without understanding.
Translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
This experience extends to how Louise relates to other people. The other characters tend to feel as though they’re at arm’s length, even those closest to Louise, because she has to stretch to reach them. She imagines some characters, such as a soldier whose story springs forth from the words in an auditory test – and they become no less (or more) important to Louise’s experience of the world than ‘real’ people (if the reader can be sure which characters are real, that is).
For me, Louise’s dilemma is perhaps best summed up in the person of Thomas, her lover. On the one hand, he’s willing – more so than any other character – to accommodate Louise’s needs and desires; for example, he adjusts a music recording to make it more accessible to her hearing profile. On the other hand, Thomas is much more enthusiastic about the idea of a cochlear implant than she is. So, would Louise rather engage with the world from here, or step over there into the unknown? Either way, her journey is absorbing.
Jellyfish Have No Ears is published by MacLehose Press in the UK and Graywolf Press in the US.
Right, new year, new start – or at least, the start of getting back into reading. This 1986 novel begins with a small change that becomes all-consuming. “What would you say if I shaved off my moustache?” the protagonist asks his wife Agnes. “That might be a good idea,” she replies, laughing.
The man goes ahead and shaves his moustache, but is annoyed to find that doing so has left behind a conspicuous patch of pale skin in contrast with his tan. He’s surprised that Agnes doesn’t seem to notice, and even more so when their friends Serge and Veronique don’t say anything at dinner that evening.
Thinking that Agnes must be playing a prank, the man questions her, and she insists that he has never had a moustache. He grows ever more desperate in his attempts to prove that his perception is right, and in imagining the elaborate deceptions that he believes Agnes must have arranged. The stakes grow higher when Agnes denies knowing Serge and Veronique, and it looks as though the man may have lost all grip on reality.
Carrère keeps the narration tightly bound to his protagonist’s viewpoint – not so much that it can’t be questioned, but enough that its momentum does not let up. The ending is perhaps the protagonist’s ultimate attempt to assert the validity of his perception. I don’t know that I was drawn in enough for The Moustache to have its full effect on me, but it was quite the journey.
Published in Vintage Editions.
Well, this turned out to be quite a page-turner. From one angle, that’s not so surprising, as there’s plenty of suspense in the set-up. In rural France, artist Christine has been receiving threatening letters. Her neighbour Patrice is getting ready to celebrate his wife Marion’s fortieth birthday. But some mysterious figures are watching, waiting to intrude on the party.
In other ways, The Birthday Party might seem the opposite of a page-turner, because it’s slowly paced and densely written. For example, here is Patrice trying not to contemplate that Marion may be unhappy in their relationship:
…he doesn’t think to himself that his wife goes out of her way to come home late, as though trying to avoid the moment where it’s the three of them together, no, he pushes away this thought that sometimes tries to force its way past the barrier he’s built up against it, a fraction of a second every night, sometimes more than a second, a few seconds, then, when the thought gets loose and spreads across his mind, but each time he rejects this bad, this acid idea that would have Marion go out of her way to come home as late as possible, no, that’s not true…
translation from french by daniel levin becker
I love the rhythm of this writing, a fine translation. Mauvignier’s prose combines this constant flow of interiority with sudden interruptions of action, and this technique is what makes the novel so propulsive for me. There are secrets and turns throughout, right up to the end – and we’re kept so close to the characters, too.
Book published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Click here to read my other posts on the 2023 International Booker Prize.
At 86, Guadeloupe-born Maryse Condé is the oldest author ever to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She says The Gospel According to the New World will be her last book, though it’s my first time reading her. I did wonder whether I was missing out somewhat in terms of not knowing about the themes and concerns across her work that led to this point, but I enjoyed my time with this book nonetheless.
Condé’s protagonist is Pascal, who is born in Martinique to a woman named Maya. Burdened by dreams that say her son will change the world, Maya abandons him at Easter, leaving him at the home of a couple who own a nursery (for plants) called the Garden of Eden.
Pascal’s life is then a parody of the gospels. He heads off in search of his origins , with rumours following him that he might be a new son of God. There are disciples, not-so-miraculous miracles, even a strange figure who might be an angel.
With everything he sees going on, Pascal begins to wonder: if he is to be a messiah, what is he “expected to do with this world streaked with bomb attacks and scarred with violence?” Then again, maybe the mantle of saviour doesn’t suit him anyway. Pascal’s story is told in a storyteller’s voice, the translation capturing that sense of truth in imagination.
Published by World Editions.
Click here to read my other posts on the 2023 International Booker Prize.
Who is Fatima Daas? Both a pseudonym and the main character of this novel. Fatima-of-the-novel is the ‘last one’ in her family, the only one born in France rather than Algeria, the third daughter her parents may not even have wanted.
I started with that question because the whole book represents Fatima’s reckoning with her self, the different parts of her identity. All of the chapters bar one begin with a declaration of her name and go on to depict an aspect of her experience, in writing that often echoes the rhythms of a prayer:
My name is Fatima.
I seek stability.
Because it’s hard to always be on the outside looking in, looking at people, never with them, your life passing you by, everything passing you by.
Translation from french by lara vergnaud
Within the pages of this book, we see Fatima as a daughter who feels she doesn’t belong in her mother’s kitchen; as a people-watcher on the train from the suburbs into Paris; as someone who lives with asthma. She’s a lesbian and a Muslim, and is searching for a way to reconcile the two. She enjoys the experience of visiting her family in Algeria, but still ultimately feels like a tourist.
All these different aspects of Fatima’s life jostle together in The Last One. By the end, there’s a sense that she is on the way to working things through and finding a place for herself.
Published by HopeRoad.
Is it really so long since I read Brodeck’s Report? I haven’t read Philippe Claudel nearly enough. His latest book in English translation is a cycle of five stories set in 20th century German, exploring themes of history, memory and complicity.
The opening ‘Ein Mann’ sets the tone. It sees a German soldier abandoning his post. We don’t know his name, and the landscape through which he travels is also largely anonymous. He’s been an unthinking cog in the machinery of the Nazi regime: “Was he guilty? Guilty of having obeyed? Or guilty of not having disobeyed? All he had done was follow. Did that make him less responsible than the others?”
Now that he sees what he has participated in, he wants to get away – he’s not really thinking about where, as long as it’s somewhere else. The ending of the story suggests, however, that he can’t outrun the past.
Recurring throughout the book is the name of Viktor, who may or may not be the same character each time, but always seems to have been an active participant in atrocity. In ‘Ein Mann,’ he’s in charge of the soldier’s concentration camp. In ‘Irma Grese’, though, he’s an old man in a care home in the 1990s, albeit with a past in the regime.
Irma herself is a girl who’s been given a job in the care home, part of which is specifically to look after Viktor, who happens to be the mayor’s father. Irma resents the job, and resents the pitiful Viktor. She takes out her frustrations on him by eating his food and mistreating him other ways. In an inversion of ‘Ein Mann’, the Viktor of ‘Irma Grese’ is victim rather than oppressor now. But, as Irma will find, there are no real winners in these stories, not in the face of the cruelty that flows through the book.
Elsewhere, Claudel explores the fallibility of memory. In ‘Sex und Linden’, an 90-year-old man looks back on his adolescence, and a time when he was seduced by a beautiful woman who kept whispering another man’s name (‘Viktor’, as it happens). It all sounds a bit too good to be true, and along with the man’s happy memory is a sense that the golden past can’t be recaptured, if it was there in the first place.
‘Die Kleine’ is the story of a young Jewish girl who has been rescued from a concentration camp, and taken to start a new life in a new household. She pictures the elements of her old life wrapped up in a handkerchief, but this memory is precarious. First, she recalls the old elements in a different way each time. Later, they start to lose their vibrancy:
The handkerchief, folded and tidied away in her brain, held many things but they were things that no longer moved, the way that clothes that have lost the bodies that used to inhabit them still keep a trace of their shape and their smells, but not much. Everything the little girl kept in the handkerchief reminded her of what had happened before, and over there. But over there was gone. There was only here.
The story which I found to lay down the greatest challenge to the reader was ‘Gnadentod’ – not in the sense of ‘difficulty’ but in its degree of confrontation. In this story, Claudel imagines a version of history in which the German artist Franz Marc did not die in 1916 at Verdun, but was instead placed in an asylum and subjected to a ‘mercy killing’ (to translate the story’s title) by the Nazis in 1940 due to his mental health.
Then again, maybe that’s just the official line. In one startling sequence, Claudel has Marc’s real-life biographer defending his scholarship in the face of the story’s prevailing fiction. This is a stark experience because we’re seeing fake history being created before our eyes and paraded as the truth.
In various ways throughout German Fantasia, Claudel illustrates how history and memory can be distorted (deliberately or otherwise). He also suggests that his characters are caught in the shadow of German history, no matter where or when they are.
Published by MacLehose Press.
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