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Last year I enjoyed Raymond Queneau’s Exercises In Style, arguably his most famous book, although as narrative goes it was rather slight, being the same story told ninety-nine times in all manner of styles. The title, really, is a bit of a giveaway. As such it’s been in my mind to read some more Queneau, to experience him in control of a more substantial narrative, to see how his playful style is maintained over a longer story.

So then, to The Flight Of Icarus (1968), recently reissued by OneWorld Classics and, like most of Queneau’s work, translated by Barbara Wright, who sadly passed away earlier in the year. Prefacing the novel is a note by Wright discussing the task of translating Queneau - the perceived difficulties in a novel full of wordplay and obscure references, the joy of finding solutions, and how she finds herself to be on his wavelength. It’s just as well, for The Flight Of Icarus is a novel that needs someone on the same wavelength to do it justice.

Set in Paris during the mid-1890s and told in the form of a script, the general story involves a writer - Hubert Lubert - who has lost one of the characters - the eponymous Icarus - from his work in progress in a most unusual way:

HUBERT: […] Since I am a novelist, then, I write novels. And since I write novels, I deal with characters. And now one of them has vanished. Literally. A novel I had just begun, about ten pages, fifteen at the most, and in which I had placed the highest hopes, and now the principal character, whom I had barely begun to outline, disappears. As I obviously cannot continue without him, I have come to ask you to find him for me.

MORCOL: (dreamily) How extremely Pirandellian.

Morcol is a private detective hired to track down the escaped character and where the translator, in her notes, cites Queneau as “the master of the intentionally awful pun”, here she proves herself up to the task of rendering an awful pun in English, one that leads to crossed wires and humorous circumstances:

HUBERT: [..] Here - take these ten louis, and see that you find him. soon. I won’t be able to write a word until the mystery’s solved and Icarus comes back.

MORCOL: I acknowledge receipt of the ten louis; I’ll make a note of his name.

He writes “Dicky Ruscombe” in his notebook while Lubert hands him his card.

With Icarus “some ten or fifteen pages old” his life experience isn’t much, and the novel sees him grow as a character as he learns - about love, cars, and absinthe - while continuing to elude Morcol and his search for the elusive Dicky Ruscombe. This growth of character is playfully done, as Icarus rebels against the intentions of Hubert, he develops under the pen of Queneau, eventually fulfilling the intentions of both.

With the parodies going on in The Flight Of Icarus, it seems almost shameful not to have more than a passing knowledge of Pirandello’s work and the occasional nouveau roman so as to appreciate the full joke, but a passing knowledge, I feel, is enough to begin with and I have little doubt that returing to the novel after reading Six Characters In Search Of An Author or some Robbe-Grillet would throw up new laughs and foster a greater understanding of where Queneau is coming from.

The Flight Of Icarus is a hotpot of knowing anachronisms, crude punnery, and all out ridiculousness that, thanks to its script form, races along poking fun at literary styles on the way. If he’s not making jibes at traditional novels with “all that David Copperfield kind of crap” then he’s looking to the future:

What a fate - that of a novelist without characters! Perhaps that is how it will be for all of us, one day. We won’t have any more characters. We will become authors in search of characters. The novel will perhaps not be dead, but it won’t have characters in it any more. Difficult to imagine, a novel without characters. But isn’t all progress, if progress exists, difficult to imagine?  […] Where will it come too rest? In literature the symbolists have already done away with the arithmetic of metre and the rigour of rhyme, they’ll be abolishing punctuation next.

While Hubert Lubert may have lost control of his characters, Queneau shows himself in control of his, something that leads to a satisfying conclusion for both writers.

When Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was named laureate for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, I was like many others in wondering who? His standing in English speaking nations, save for a couple of low profile translations in the States, was practically non-existant. And this is an author who has published over forty books since his 1963 debut. It’s been a frustrating wait, then, for publishers in the UK to rush release some backlist titles into print. No doubt translators up and down the country are soldiering away at more of his works.

The citation of Le Clézio, by the Swedish Academy, described him as “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”- a soup of intrigue, hinting at so much while retaining a cryptic aura. Having looked at the rereleased titles, Terra Amata (1968) seemed to best fit the citation. In fact, it doesn’t so much fit as describe it.

Terra Amata concerns itself with life on earth. It’s the story of Chancelade, looking at his unremarkable life and capturing all the detail and adventures he overlooked.

You’d never done playing all the games there were. A prisoner on the flat face of the earth, standing on your two legs with the sun beating down on your head and the rain falling drop by drop, you had all these extraordinary adventures without really knowing where you were going. A pawn - you were no more than a pawn on the giant chess-board, a disc that the expert invisible hand moved about in order to win the incomprehensible game.

The narrative drops by special points in Chancelade’s life, following from young boy to old man, then pushing beyond. We see the young Chancelade playing in the garden, God to a number of beetles. (”When the boy realized that he was the potato-bugs’ god, with absolute power of life and death over them, he decided to act.”) and teaching them a lesson. We experience his father’s death, follow his sexual development, witness him becoming a father, and ache with his old age.

Le Clézio’s delivery is a hyperreal tour de force, lush and dense, designed to obverload the senses. His focus is on the minute, regularly picking up on grains of sand, pebbles on beaches, and insects in their nests, inverting the microscopic worlds they inhabit to cosmic concerns. Questions of life and death occur, Chancelade occasionaly wrestling with his own mortality, echoes of which appear in the cigarettes he regularly smokes:

It was a perfect action, beautiful as a play. A tragic action. It had a beginning, when the spurting flame met the cigarette. A development, with unity of time, place and action. And when the cigarette was finished, the same hand that had lit it put it swiftly to death, crushing it against the side o the ashtray. And it was really rather as if you were dead yourself, extinguished, suffocated in your own ash, your inside quietly spilling out of your skin of torn paper.

What’s interesting about Le Clézio’s prose is that he is able to capture a new slant on looking at things. In life, everything is an adventure to be embraced full on. He sees objects strewn around as potential communiques between other entities - between men, animals, and the inanimate forces of nature. There’s a language in everything, and we see Chancelade explore this idea in some brief, yet tedious, episodes of Morse code, sign language, and a babelian stew of words.

While much is made of our time on earth, and how little we fully appreciate it, Le Clézio goes beyond humanity, exploring tens of thousands of years ahead to an enjoyable section in a museum, speculating about how we will be remembered, surprisingly quashing humankind’s achievements in favour of guesswork from archaeological digs, much like the conjecture about the real Terra Amata site in France.

Maldec man seems to have lived in communities, in tall concrete houses divided into rooms. His was essentially a working and fetishist civilization. Wars were frequent and deadly, as is proved by certain burial-places recently discovered. These wars were probably due to to racial or religious differences. The civiliation of Maldec man was also ritual, nationalist, and based on the family. It thus belongs to the polymorphic pre-desertic period, which lasted about 5,000 years. It may be that Maldec man was contemporary with the beginning of the great drought which occurred at that time and which caused his civilization to disappear.

Terra Amata, while living up to the aforementioned citation, is perhaps overlong. At just over two hundred pages, it easily feels like three or four hundred. The detail Le Clézio plunges into is often startling and wondrous, but there’s the feeling that he’s retreading the same ideas on occasion, just presenting them differently. There’s a metafictional thread running through the novel, especially evident in the prologue and epilogue, which brought to mind Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, but doesn’t really bring much to the story itself.

Where Terra Amata succeeds is in holding up a candle to the possibilities of nature, to the potential of life. You may as well use it since you are going to lose it anyway, is the message. Big questions are asked, with no answers forthcoming. Who needs answer, though, when the possibilities are endless? So endless that…

… on the other side of infinity there may be a world just like this one only as if reflected in an enormous mirror: a world where light is black and ants are white and the earth is soft and the sea hard as a slab of marble. A world where the sun is a sooty dot in the sky and volcanoes belch torrents of muddy ice. A world in which you start by dying and end by being born, with the clock-hands all turning frantically backwards. And somewhere in the middle of a big town built downwards into the earth there lives a man perhaps with eyes that look inwards into his head. And perhaps this man has a strange name that can only be said by stopping speaking. Edalecnahc.

While Terra Amata can be reduced to two words - carpe diem - it works because it carries with it the force of infinite experiences. Le Clézio may be an “author of new departures” but he’s also the author of new arrivals on my book shelves.

One of the pitfalls of reading literature in translation is that some authors see their work, if they see it all, come to the English language in a chronology all of their own. Artificial Snow (2002) was Florian Zeller’s debut novel, but it’s the last of his four to be translated and published. Reading his book, therefore, has almost been an exercise in regression. Having started with the mature and satisfying, The Fascination Of Evil, we now find ourselves back when the author, in his early twenties, was learning his trade and was style trying veer off from Kundera to a style all his own.

Artificial Snow, like Zeller’s recent novel, Julien Parme, is a coming of age novel, although it has more in common with his second, Lovers Or Something Like It, in that it deals with young Parisians caught up in the foibles of love, relationships, and their own self-importance. The last of these is exemplified when Zeller makes the decision to include himself in the novel:

Florian was a strange guy. He was twenty-one and a bit. Quite a bit. His life had been turned upside down by one incident and he’s never been the same again. When he was ten, during one of his experiments, he’d poked a piece of wire into an electric socket while holding it in his mouth. […] It was feared he’d lose the power of speech but, after intensive care, the only after-effects were a fierce desire to write books and a weird hairstyle: his hair seemed to be permanently crystallised on his head like untidy stalagmites.

Zeller, author of the novel, opens with a section titled ‘Boring prologue’ that reflects the disaffected nature of himself, which in turn sets the mood for the book itself:

Everything seemed terribly boring: getting up in the morning, going to bed at night, pretending not to pretend, shaking hands, being polite and romantic, studying and getting good marks, everything. I even found the prologue of the novel I was trying to write after a fashion tragically boring. But, then again, deleting it was even more boring.

From here we move into the narrator’s story, which begins with him missing his train on the Metro.  It’s a fine, if obvious, metaphor that foreshadows the main plot of the novel - that of relationships being like trains, where you hop on and off as life dictates. The train the narrator has missed was to take him to a party which carries some importance to him: Lou is going to be there (”In my dreams, she called me “my darling”; in reality, she didn’t call me at all…”) and he’s quite interested in getting back together with her after a brief relationship a few years before, even if it goes against all he believes in:

We’d spent a few nights together at the time and I didn’t like the idea of doing something I’d already done before. I felt that repeating things was always proof of failure. Getting back together with a girl was like admitting you hadn’t found anything better since, it was like admitting you’d reached your sexual peak somewhere between fifteen and sixteen; that sucked.

Even if the narrator would prefer not to go back, his love for Lou snowballs into obsession, so much so that he finds himself following her, maintaining a distance, and seeing his love melt when she doesn’t notice him, kisses another lover. When it looks as if all hope of reconciliation has faded, there seems only one solution: to wreak terrible acts of violence on her, to kill her. However:

The best crime, the best revenge, was to cheat on her, cheat on her as much as possible, defile her memory with fleeting moments of pleasure.

As far as story goes in Artificial Snow, there’s little of it, with Zeller preferring to relay a few events, presumably autobiographical, given his own inclusion in the novel, and to reflect on them, preferring philosophy over plot. While some of his lines are a tad simple (”making love and fucking are two very different things”) there’s still an invigorating energy running through the prose that skips past these, like them or not, and leads straight in to the next. Also, following the narration can be a little difficult at times, what with Zeller narrating in addition to his narrator, who just so happens to have a recurrent friend called Florian Zeller? Are the two Zeller’s the same? It’s foggy, but the openness of it is a welcome ponderable.

Shakespeare provides an epigraph at the start of the book, one that recurs later in the prose, saying where goes the white when melts the snow? Zeller’s snow is that of childhood, those crisp sheets of memory that we play over in our mind but can never return to. Here, the white turns to sludge, something tricky for the narrator to pull himself out from but altogether necessary for growing up. In writing Artificial Snow it seems a vessel for Zeller to grow up in. Later books show that it worked.

One of the most famous works by the French writer, Raymond Queneau, is Exercises In Style (1947), a fiction with the slightest of plots. So slight, the whole story can be summarised in a few sentences, and it wouldn’t be a spoiler to say that the narrator boards the ‘S’ bus, spots a minor conflict between one man - noting particularly his long neck and odd hat - and another passenger, spotting him again two hours later getting advice on a button for his overcoat. Yes, that slight.

It’s not, however, the story that matters as much as the conceit of the book. As the title implies, the book is a series of experiments, taking the same story over and over and presenting it in no less than ninety-nine different ways. To other writers it seems there’s a certain attraction to it, what with some well known writers translating and adapting the book to their own tongue, notably Umberto Eco (to Italian), Patrik Ouředník (to Czech), and Danilo Kiš, to (Serbian).

In her foreword, the translator Barbara Wright notes that the idea came to Queneau after attending a performace of Bach’s The Art Of Fugue. (”What particularly struck Queneau about this piece was that, although based on a rather slight theme, its variations ‘proliferated almost to infinity.’ It would be interesting, he thought, to create a similar work of literature.”) She also notes that although he stopped at ninety-nine exercises, a later French edition went on to list a further 140 potential exercises.

Each exercise comes with a title descriptive of the stylistic challenge. These offer up a range of different ideas, many representing linguistic ideas such as parachesis, with others forcing more wide ranging constrictions, such as the consistent use of metaphors, colours, or medical terms. One such exercise, Retrograde, tells the story in reverse:

You ought to put another button on your overcoat, his friend told him. I met him in the middle of the Cour de Rome, after having left him rushing avidly towards a seat. He had just protested against being pushed by another passenger who, he said, was jostling him every time anyone got off. This scraggy young man was the wearer of a ridiculous hat. This took place on the platform of an S bus which was full that particular midday.

In the production of so many variations Queneau has obviously had a great deal of fun and the humour flows through the whole book. The premise of Precision has the story told with an over the top level of detail (”In a bus of the S-line, 10 metres long, 3 wide, 6 high, at 3km. 600m from its starting point, loaded with 48 people, at 12.17 p.m…”) while the brilliance of Homeoptotes is in the repetition of a single sound (”On a certain date, a corporate crate on which the electorate congregate when they migrate at a great rate, late…”).

When the exercises work with a simple idea the effect can be witty and varied enough to maintain interest. However, there are times when the exercise looses any sense of coherence and it becomes hard to wonder at the benefit of writing in that particular style. A series of exercises presenting the story in permutations of letter seems meaningless and undecipherabl, like in this opening paragraph using permutations of two letters:

Ed on to ay rd wa id sm yo da he nt ar re at pl rm fo an of us sb aw is ou ay ma ng ho nw ne se wa ck oo st ng lo dw an wa ho ea sw ng ri at ah th wi la ap ro it dt un sa he me.

Even if an exercise confuses, and some certainly do, the brevity of them ensures that a new idea is just a page turn away. One of the longest, Opera English, presents the story in two acts with all the pomposity of the art, while one of few flirtations with poetic forms sees, in Haiku, the story told in the most concise of details:

Summer S long neck

plait hat toes abuse retreat

station button friend

The exercises in this English translation sometimes adhere to the French originals, while others deviate from the mould. It would, as Wright notes, be a futile task to translate to English, an exercise already in English, and in this she is also party to the fun, freely lifting, as she admits, from Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners for an exercise in a West Indian dialect. As an example of Oulipo, it’s no wonder that Exercises In Style was the work Queneau most wanted to see translated - the potential for literature like this, in any language, helps achieve the proliferation almost to infinity that he initially set out to do.

In writing Exercises In Style, the hurdle in how to end it, to ensure a robust ninety-nine, must surely have been entertained by Queneau. After repeating the same story for page after page, be it as a sonnet, antiphrasis, or the triptych of prosthesis, epenthesis, and paragoge, it needs an acceptable conclusion and Queneau delivers a welcome twist, just the thing for an exercise titled Unexpected. Understandably, the book doesn’t add up to much, but as a document of how tackling a subject from myriad angles opens up a story to countless possibilities, it is indispensible.

There’s no mention made anywhere on Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Oscar And The Lady In Pink (2002) that it’s the third title of a loose series called Le Cycle de l’Invisible, four books that deal in some way with world religions. And, if the tone of this novella is consistent with the rest, they do it in a lighthearted way.

From a brief scouring of the internet, it seems only this and the second title, Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, have been translated. Given their seeming brevity, it may have been wise to package them as a whole, and the US edition does this. But, at the same time, Oscar… stands fine on its own.

It’s an epistolary novel, the letters written by ten year old Oscar from his hospital bed. He writes the letters at the insistence of Granny Rose, an elderly nurse. What makes the letters interesting is that they are addressed to God.

To Oscar, writing is  “fluffy, sissy, frilly, prissy, et cetera….just a lie to make things look better” but he takes to the task, introducing himself nicely, before going on to add:

I could just as easily put: ‘People call me Egghead, I only look about seven, I live in hospital because I’ve got cancer and I’ve never spoken to you because I don’t even believe you exist.’

Sadly, for Oscar, his cancer is terminal, and he seems to be the only one able to face up to it, even if nobody is brave enough to tell him, not his parents (”they were cowards who thought I was a coward!”), or his doctor:

Basically, people here were really disappointed with my transplant. My chemo was disappointing too but that didn’t matter so much because they could still put their hope in a transplant. Now I get the feeling the doctors don’t know what to suggest, I even think they feel sorry for me…[Dr Düsseldorf] looks so sad, like a Father Christmas who’s got no more presents left in his sack.

The conceit of the letters to God is that he imagines each day as being ten years of his life and then writing about them. Even if a tad precocious, the way this is done works well, the lack-lustre events of hospital life made to mirror the paths our lives take as we fall in love, marry, conceive, grow old, and reflect back on who we are. (”It’s great, being in a relationship. Specially in your fifties when you’ve been through quite a lot.”)

Oscar’s ‘relationship’ is with Peggy Blue (”Snow White like those photos of snow when the snow’s blue and not white.”), a young girl on the children’s ward. Like Egghead, the cutesy nicknames work well in giving an innocence to the children while hinting at their specific complaint. (”He’s not really called Bacon, he’s Yves but we call him bacon because it suits him so much better, given how badly he’s burned.”)

In each of the letters Oscar lays himself bare to God, something that would have more of a heartbreaking quality had it more gravitas. But there are lines which highlight his innocence and capture well the inquisitive nature of a child faced by strange reactions around him:

‘My illness is part of me. They shouldn’t behave differently because I’m ill. Or can they only love me when I’m well?’

Sadly, this childlike voice is soon taken over by an Oscar who, in twelve days, sounds like he has literally lived the hundred-and-twenty years and is using all that cached wisdom to strike a conclusion, a stumble at the finishing line that ruins the novella’s credibility by leading to a nasty display of moralising. Of all things, in an enjoyable story about acceptance, that’s the hardest thing to accept.

Florian Zeller is an author probably best marked as ‘one for the future’, given that he is still to reach thirty, but that hasn’t stopped him in recent years putting out a number of novels and plays. Julien Parme (2006), is the fourth of his novels and provides an interesting bit of trivia in that two translations have been released this year - one in the US by Other Press, translated by William Rodarmor, and the pictured edition, in the UK, translated by Christopher Moncrieff, and published by Pushkin Press.

His previous novels, also from Pushkin Press, include Lovers Or Something Like It, a paean to a generation confounded by the abundance of choices facing them, and The Fascination Of Evil, a response to the controversy surrounding Michel Houellebecq’s Platform. Both of these demonstrated a solid style reminiscent of Milan Kundera and Houellebecq himself, the narrative veering off at tangents. So it comes as a surprise to find, with Julien Parme, a change in style.

While you were always sure that Zeller was in charge in previous novels, dripping observations across each page while recounting his characters’ adventures, Julien Parme is told completely by its title character, a fourteen year old boy who dreams of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature by the time he’s twenty. (”Julien Parme, you’ve never heard of him? The great writer? No? Really? Because I forgot to tell you I’d like to be a great writer.”)

Julien begins his account wanting  “to tell you about the incredible thing that happened last year”, before going on to say something contradictory…

That sort of person has always made me want to puke. That’s why if someone says he’s got an incredible thing to tell you, I’d be more the sort to be wary, because someone who says that, you shouldn’t give him the chance to go any further. Never.

…and then going back on that (”But in my case it’s not the same, seeing it’s me who’s doing the telling…”) Zeller captures well this meandering teenage mind as it criss-crosses itself through the story, heading off on imaginative flights, usually around Julien’s future as a famous novelist, something that, given the unoriginality of his titles (The Night Ahead of Me, a take on Celine’s Journey To The End of the Night, and the more obvious A Thousand Years of Solitude).

Julien’s imagination is no doubt the sum of a having few friends and his mother’s relationship with François (”…the latest in the long line of muppets…”). When he gets caught smoking his mother grounds him, forbidding him to attend the birthday party of Émilie, older sister of Mathilde who he harbours a fancy for, even though  he daren’t speak to her. But, teens being teens, Julien goes to the party anyway, and the weekend from there becomes a chain of events, some perhaps a bit unlikely, that lead up to the predicament described at the start of the story: looking back on the past year, having been sent off to a family friend in Saint-Dié.

What finished me off more than anything was the feeling that they wanted to get rid of me. My mother, then my uncle. Basically, no one wanted me under their feet. As far as they were concerned I was a hopeless case. Especially my mother; on the platform I definitely sensed she was telling herself: ‘Come on, just another little effort and that’ll be the end of the nightmare’. It freaked me out that she didn’t even look unhappy.

Where previous Zeller novels would have used the incidents in Julien’s life to wax  on about topics such as romance, friendship, bravado, and more, there’s little of that here in Julien Parme. While we wouldn’t expect a fourteen year old to be spitting aphorisms left, right and centre (or good ones, at any rate) there’s little sense that, in the year since, Julien has grown at all. Being even more isolated than before, you would think, would stir up a stream of reflections on where he went wrong. But the novel tends to wallow in a straightforward account that, because the conclusion is gifted from the off, holds little surprise.

In its defence, Zeller hasn’t went the way of many writers who tackle the child narrator by giving Julien that common get-out-of-jail card: making him precocious. If anything he’s a danger to himself, unsure of the world and just beginning to get interested in its wonders, such as women:

Several minutes dragged by, while in my mind thousands of words were jostling around everywhere, trying to work out what to say. Then the moment came, and I leapt in with both feet.

“The music, it’s not bad is it?”

“You think? I don’t like it much, me.”

“Yeah, that’s true mind you, it’s not brilliant this music…It’s the kind of thing they play on the radio…”

I let it go for a moment, unsure even whether to add: “You’re right frankly, it’s useless this music. I haven’t really been listening. It’s crazy.” But I thought it best to change the subject, so I wouldn’t seem like a guy who’s easily influenced.

It’s a convincing piece of ventriloquism, the way Julien’s mind wanders, and the scrapes he bumbles into set up some interestng scenes, but it really does feel like Zeller’s taken his foot off the brake with this one. The change in style is certainly interesting and I hope that Julien Parme is a halfway house between the two as, I think, a blend of his last novel and this could push him to a larger audience. Florian Zeller, you’ve never heard of him? No? Really? But I already told you, he could be a great writer.

On my regular visits to book shops there has been one book that I’ve picked up on each visit, pondered it awhile, and returned to the shelves. Not because it didn’t interest me, but because other books I picked up interested me more. However, having seen a positive review elsewhere, I decided that the next time I picked it up I wouldn’t put it down until I’d read it. So, it came to be that I read Secret (2004), by Philippe Grimbert, winner of notable French literary prizes. And besides, it’s always fun to be part of a secret.

Grimbert is by trade a psychoanalyst and it appears that for his second novel he has decided to sit himself on the couch and delve into his own family history, providing a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in post-war France. Fiction and reality are almost inseparable here as the narrator is Grimbert himself and the events are real. Secret, then, is an attempt by the author to flesh out his family history prior to his own birth, in which an unearthed secret is hidden:

Of athletic parents, Grimbert is a child of “thinness and sickly pallor”, and begins by talking of how he invented an imaginary brother, someone older and stronger, someone he’d never become, a brother “who would burden [him] with the full force of his weight”, to fill the hole in his world:

I always felt envious when I went to stay with a friend and a similar-looking boy walked in. The same dishevelled hair and lopsided grin would be introduced with two words: ‘My brother’. An enigma, this intruder with whom everything must be shared, even love. A real brother. Someone in whose face you discovered like features: a persistently straying lock of hair, a pointy tooth… A room-mate of whom you knew the most intimate things: moods, tastes, weaknesses, smell. Exotic for me who reigned alone over the empire of my family’s four room flat.

What follows then is the realisation that buried deep in his mind, the imaginary brother has his roots in a half-brother who died before Philippe was born. The novel proceeds to tell a version of Grimbert’s family history, imagined from the bones of what he knows:

For a long time I was a young boy who dreamed of having a perfect family. I used the rare glimpses they gave me to build a picture of how my parents had met. A few incidental words about their childhood, snippets of information about their youth, their love… I pounced on these fragments to create my unlikely tale. In my own way I unwound the tangle of their lives and, much as I had invented myself a brother, created from scratch the meeting of the two bodies from which I was born, as if I were writing a novel.

By doing this he learns how his father’s first marriage spawned the half-brother, despite having always had eyes for the woman who became Grimbert’s mother. But it goes deeper than that, for after his fifteenth birthday Philippe learns “what [he] had always known”: that his past is Jewish. His father, by deed poll, had changed their name from Grinberg to Grimbert, thus allowing him to “plant roots deep in French soil.” Confronted on the truth he replies that “we’ve always had that name”. And so the true nature of the Grimbert history comes to light as the author imagines what it would have been like to live in occupied France, as a Jew:

The yellow stain distinguished them to others but also allowed them to recognise each other, binding together a community that, because it was hiding itself, had sometimes not realised its own existence.

So it continues that Grimbert pieces together his family history during and after the war, taking what is known and supposing the rest, finding in his fictions reasons for why events happened as they did. And as the author works through the memory of his characters, the great secret that lies at the heart of the family is aired and the burden they represent cast aside, leading to final tragic circumstances.

Grimbert’s prose is terse, mildy poetic at times, and, along with its notion of imagining one’s family’s past, is reminiscent of Anne Enright’s The Gathering, only more optimistic, interesting, and enjoyable. At no point does the author brood on the past, each short section being a delicate meditation or revelation, culminating in the harrowing aftermath of one family’s life during wartime that is ultimately poignant in the telling. In sharing the secret of his brother Grimbert no longer needs to invent, for with the secret aired he is no longer alone.

Secret is published as Memory in the US.

It sometimes seems that there’s a precocious streak running through French literature with authors garnering literary respect at young ages. Françoise Sagan springs to mind, publishing Bonjour Tristesse in 1954 at the age of eighteen. As does Florian Zeller who has novels and plays to his name despite still being in his twenties. Now, much to my delight, there’s Raymond Radiguet who, between the ages of sixteen and eighteen wrote The Devil In The Flesh (1923) , having it published when he was twenty, the age at which he would die of typhoid, leaving one other novel, a play, and some poetry to his name.

That The Devil In The Flesh has an air of the autobiographical adds a further layer of tragedy to the life of Radiguet, as this is a novel where, for all the love and happiness the narrator professes within, the wheels are set in motion so that it couldn’t end anywhere else but on a tragic note.

The story opens during the final year of the Great War, with our unnamed narrator, a fifteen year old schoolboy, whose parents “disapproved of relationships between the sexes” and so he finds himself drawn to similary precocious schoolmate, René, due to their “common contempt for the other boys of [their] age” as they “regarded [themselves] as men”. But this friendship soon falls by the wayside when our narrator meets Marthe Lascombe, an eighteen year old woman with a fiancé on the front line:

…since I was sure I would never see Martha again I tried hard not to think about her, with the result that I thought of nothing else.

They do see each other again, however, and a friendship develops, although the narrator openly admits to having designs on Marthe:

I asked her to show me a photograph of her fiancé. I thought he looked handsome enough. But sensing already the importance she attached to my opinions, I was hypocritical enough to say that he was very handsome, but in such a way as to give her the impression that I was not very convinced and was saying so only out of politeness. This, I thought, would plant a seed of doubt in her mind, and at the same time win me her gratitude.

With time, Marthe’s fiancé becomes her husband and the more time he spends away allows the narrator to usurp his home, manipulating Marthe until, the closer they become, and unsavoury thoughts soon pervade:

At any other time to desire the death of her husband would have been little more than a childish piece of wishful thinking; it now became almost as criminal as killing him. I owed my new found happiness to the war; I hoped the war would now complete its task. It must commit the crime for me, like a hired assassin.

But regardless of their love, it makes them miserable, Marthe reproaching the narrator for allowing her to marry so that she could be with him, although their coupling would never have happened without the marriage as he’d never be able to call upon her at her parents’ house where she’d otherwise be living. And as their relationship - a badly kept secret in itself - rolls along, things take a turn for the scandalous when Marthe falls pregnant and all around them support and friendship dwindles, eventually leading the narrative to a final, tragic conclusion.

For one so young, Radiguet displays a mature understanding of love and relationships and the twisted logic that underpins them, the likes of which only first hand experience could bestow. His prose captures his narrators concerns from his position on the verge of maturity, growing up before his time; the inner conflict mirrored in the confusion of a world on the verge of peace. And despite all the morals of the age, Radiguet’s paean to love shines and inspires empathy regardless of what one feels is right or wrong about the situation.

The Devil In The Flesh is an accomplished piece of fiction, its all too believable story enhanced with a remarkable wisdom and punctuated with images that capture the essence of a doomed relationship as it makes the slide from happiness to tragedy. And that its author was so young when it was written makes one wonder how far, with more years and novels under his belt, Radiguet could have taken his legacy.

Florian Zeller, from what I can gather, is the latest darling of the French literary scene. At twenty-six, he is a novelist, a playwright, and a lecturer. And, for one so young, he has received a number of literary awards. His third novel, The Fascination Of Evil, was recently published by Pushkin Press, a publisher well known for producing quality books from international authors, new and old. And, as novels go, it’s a mature work with hints of Kundera, dealing with the decline of morals in both Islamic nations and the West.

The story begins with the unnamed narrator preparing for a flight to Egypt for a literary conference. He is due to meet and travel with Swiss novelist, Martin Millet, of whom he is aware but not acquainted in person or in work. And while the narrator, with his girlfriend at home, is looking for a quiet life, Millet is more interested in kicking up a fuss within Egyptian society, spouting his opinions on Islam, and, for most of the novel, finding local women who will have sex with him. This latter desire is inspired by letters Flaubert wrote about his time in Egypt. And, as Millet’s obsession grows, the narrator finds himself dragged further into the author’s world. Then, without warning, Millet vanishes. The narrator, of course, can do nothing but fear the worst for his companion.

The Fascination Of Evil concerns itself, at a deeper level, with the diminishing power of words. It looks at the suras of the Koran, at their hold over the devout, but then, as Millet learns during a meal, there are those who claim to hold true to the tenets of Islam yet, the minute they head to a more liberal nation, the words that dictate their faith are soon forgotten:

“They’re not Egyptian women. They are often Lebanese or Moroccan, but they are not Egyptian. And they only sleep with Saudis, I believe. In any event, for Egyptians, there is no prostitution and no sexual freedom.”

“What do they do?” lamented Martin.

“They bugger each other.”

Apart from that, the food was excellent.

Zeller, however, is not like Millet and is not out to upset Islam. Indeed, aside from pointing out the hypocrisy inherent with some Muslims, he also takes a swipe at Europe. The continent has allowed freedom to send it into decline. Political correctness has reared its ugly head and when religious groups (say, Muslims) protest at novels (Rushdie gets an honourable mention), we seek to remove the offence rather than staunchly support it. By seeking to be inoffensive we are watering down our own culture. Such subtexts lend the novel an impressive depth and you can’t help but agree with Zeller’s observations.

The book’s title, as it would be giving nothing away, relates to the feeling of fearing the worst. The narrator comes to feel the fascination of evil when Millet vanishes after a night out hunting women. But the true fascination, as implied by the denouement, is the fear of what is happening to the west. There are many facets in which our continent, the narrator believes, is falling apart, one such example being letter-writing:

It’s the telephone, and in particular the mobile, that has killed off the art of letter-writing once and for all. I often think of those women who lived in hope, with the pledge of one single love letter, when the other person, for example, went off to war. Back then, words had a formidable strength, since they decided lives. People waited, and trusted, even without news of the other person, for infinite lengths of time. Today, you start panicking the moment you can’t get that other person on your mobile. What’s he doing? Why isn’t she answering? Who’s he with? Anxiety has gained ground. We have entered a period of no return that signals the end of waiting, that is, of trust and silence.

Zeller’s prose style is not florid – to an extent it’s simplistic, realist. Each sentence serves to make a point or an observation and does so without decoration. If I were to have a criticism it would be the sheer volume of exclamation marks used where they were wholly unnecessary, although that may be a quirk of a translator who had a quota to use up, especially when they would appear in the narrative rather than within speech.

Although The Fascination Of Evil, at times, reminded me of Kundera because of the sporadic digressions the narrator would make, the ending was more reminiscent of Houellebecq (from whom Millet is no doubt inspired) that the narrator goes beyond the original narrative and aims to provide a conclusion to all that has gone before, something, I admit, for which I’m not a convert. But, overall, Zeller succeeds at producing a great tale that offers up some interesting points that merit consideration.

And, while he’s still young, The Fascination Of Evil showcases the wisdom of an fantastic talent who must surely be deserving of a great future in literature. And, since I’ve already been looking into his previous novels, it certainly looks like this novel could just be the beginning to my fascination of Zeller.