And Their Children After Them

And Their Children After Them Nicolas Mathieu

This French novel by Nicolas Mathieu won the Prix Goncourt in 2018 and since then American translator William Rodamor has made it available to a wider audience. Translations are wonderful because of the immersion in another culture and this is particularly true of And Their Children After Them which is admired for its verisimilitude. It provides an exact reflection of what it was like living in small town, North Eastern, France in the 1990s, as did Mathieu. This is not the area of France that middle-class English and Irish families would choose for expatriation.

Heillange, an entirely fictional town in Lorraine, is near the German and Luxembourgian frontiers but, in spite of natural parks and forests, does not attract tourists. It is a post-industrial landscape. The steel mills and blast furnaces rot, corrugated iron sheets flap and mass employment locally is a thing of the past.   Young men hang out in tenement car parks smoking spliffs whilst their fathers’ bodies decay from the lack of physical work and the consumption of red meat and beer. Women fight depression from settees on which they sag watching daytime TV from Florida and California. Disappointment and disillusionment strangle hope and long-lasting marriages collapse into divorce.

The title And Their Children After Them is taken from a verse in The Book of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus, which reads ‘There are others who are not remembered/as if they had never lived/who died and were forgotten/they, and their children after them’. The novel is structured into three long parts representing 1992, 1994 and 1996; finally there is a coda for 1998 – World Cup year.

There are three main characters who are in their mid-teens in the first part and adults by the end. Hacine’s heritage country is Morocco and he and his father, Bouali, travel there every summer to visit his mother who has already returned to her homeland. Anthony’s father, Patrick, was a blue-collar worker and now scrapes by with a few handyman jobs. Anthony’s mother, Hélèn, and Bouali tangentially come into contact when their sons manufacture a contretemps over a motorbike.

The final central character is Stéphanie whose parents are members of the bourgeoisie and the sailing club. She, with her facility in mathematics, has more of a chance of escaping the curse of the valley. She might well go on to live a very different life from those of the provincial professionals with whom her father, Pierre, consorts. Steph, as well as one or two of her peers, quite likes a bit of rough sex with Anthony. And so the three young people ricochet off each other from time to time as they undergo the rites of passage.

Mathieu is mentioned in sentences which name check Emil Zola and D. H. Lawrence. Gritty realism is the plat du jour and there is literally plenty of grit in the air. Hopeful entrepreneurs grab government loans to improve the area. They smash up the wastelands and clear dereliction causing clouds of dust whilst instigating lovely tourist trails through the hills and round the lakes. At the end of the novel the entire nation is embroiled in the final matches of the World Cup but the mood of euphoria is undermined, in hindsight, by the looming failure of the holiday camps and, further down the road, recession, terrorism and pandemic. Racism, seemingly muted as citoyens embraced their multi-ethnic national team, whilst viciously hating the homogenous Caucasian players of Croatia, will re-emerge in the years to follow.

Mathieu does well in presenting a credible point of view for each protagonist and portraying their mothers, fathers, siblings, uncles and cousins. Rodamor does a fair job of transforming prose that is so quintessentially French that it really does not bear anglicising. It is a depressing story but one that allows glimpses of hope or, at least, stoicism.

Works cited

Mathieu, N. And Their Children After Them. Sceptre. 2020.

A version of this review first appeared on page 34 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 15th August 2020.  It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

 

 

 

 

 

Becoming Beauvoir: A Life

Becoming Beauvoir: A Life   Kate Kirkpatrick

Simone De Beauvoir was an important philosopher and woman-of-letters and this biography rebalances her reputation against that of her compatriot, confidant and companion, Jean-Paul Sartre.

When I was ten my grandfather died and from his possessions my father chose two items for me. One was a well-thumbed copy of the Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the other was The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. Both, I think, had a formative effect on my character.

Bantam Edition 1952

Simone de Beauvoir is a mysterious woman. This seems strange when you consider her vast literary, philosophical and commercial output. Much of what she wrote concerns herself, her thoughts, her loves and her life. But like Facebook she presented a profile which was not entirely real. In other words there was a Beauvoir for public consumption and another one for friends and lovers. These friends and lovers got different stories from one another depending on whom she was trying to deceive or whose hurt feelings she was trying to assuage. When she published diaries or memoirs they were carefully redacted.

Kate Kirkpatrick is an expert on Simone de Beauvoir and has written also about Jean-Paul Sartre. She has delved into Beauvoir’s papers but also those of others from her ‘set’. In the web of relationships surrounding the two great philosophers there were many men and women, and thus there are hundreds of letters and archived materials for Kirkpatrick to fillet.

Kirkpatrick is determined to expose as much as she can of the complexities of Beauvoir’s life and thoughts, and to show how she considered that she was not just one self but a series of selves which changed and developed as she collided with other people, altering them also. It is for this reason that Kirkpatrick uses the word Becoming in her title. Beauvoir believed that every decision is a ‘philosophical choice’ and, as she lived it, she forensically studied her own life.

Kirkpatrick is annoyed by the many diminishing ways that Beauvoir has been presented to the world. The Times Literary Supplement described her in 2001 as ‘Sartre’s sex slave’.   Kirkpatrick and Beauvoir, however, are of the opinion that Sartre was not that keen on the actual sex act, preferring the thrill of the chase and the victory of overcoming, in particular, women who thought him very ugly. Sartre was a consummate seducer and Beauvoir was not to be outdone by him.

A previous biographer, Deidre Bair, wrote that Beauvoir was a ‘companion’ who ‘applies, disseminates, clarifies, supports, and administers’ Sartre’s ‘philosophical, aesthetic, ethical and political principles’. Damning her own subject, Bair fails to highlight Sartre’s own view that Beauvoir ‘grasped philosophy more quickly than he did’.

Beauvoir, herself, is depicted as sensual and physical. She honed her body by hiking for hours a day at weekends and in the holidays. She gloried in the way that bodies, be they male or female, responded to her own litheness. She loved, Beauvoir wrote, ‘being in bed in the afternoon on a sunny day’. But, in terms of Sartre she stated that although she had ‘physical relations with him’ it was an infrequent activity and ‘only out of tenderness’.

All this sexual freedom took place in a socially conservative time, just before the Second World War, when the Napoleonic Code gave authority to men over women, and the recent Code de la Famille banned contraception. Women were offered incentives to stay at home and look after the children. Not unlike De Valera’s legislation in Ireland. Beauvoir did not chose to embrace these conventions and although people had suspicions about Beauvoir’s moral sense they didn’t know the half of it.

In Becoming Beauvoir, Kirkpatrick accumulates evidence from as many sources as possible so that she has cognisance of who did what with whom and who knew about what. In one letter Beauvoir is described as ‘shady and dubious’ and rebuked for deceitful behaviour. Although the words were hurtful she did not alter her trajectory and Beauvoir moved into the 1940s still maintaining relationships with at least four lovers, of whom, at least two were women. She felt anxious and sometimes despairing but she did not give anyone up.

Beauvoir’s two male lovers Sartre and Jacques-Laurent Bost were mobilised and, although Sartre was relatively safe in the meteorological corps, Bost insisted on active service. Thus began a period of constant fear as to whether he would be killed or was already dead. Beauvoir was consumed with jealousy about the letters that Bost wrote to his other lover Olga Kosakiewicz, seeing that they were thicker and heavier than the ones he wrote to her.   She was sleeping at this time with both Olga and Bianca Bienenfeld, one of her students, whilst in the not-too-distant future lurked another of her pupils, Nathalie Sorokine.

By the summer of 1940 Paris had fallen, and Beauvoir was living under Nazi rule. Bost had been shot but was recovering in a military hospital near Avignon. Sartre was now a prisoner of war in Stalag XII D in Trier. But it was not long before both men returned to Paris and were available to bed Beauvoir’s new lover, Nathalie. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Nathalie’s mother complained to the Ministry of Education stating that Beauvoir, Sartre and Bost had all seduced her 20-year-old daughter. Although the debauchery charges remained unproven it was easy to discover that Beauvoir taught texts by homosexual writers, Marcel Proust and André Gide. She was dismissed and never taught again.

War produces conditions favourable to sexual incontinence and if these individuals had not been writers their intrigues might not have become so public. But Beauvoir and Sartre both published philosophical fiction in which they themselves and their acquaintances were only thinly disguised. It is difficult to accuse observers of salaciousness when the perpetrators publicise their own misconduct.

Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, for example, scandalised some readers whilst others though it was ‘a courageous rejection of the Vichy dogma of “work, family, country”’. But in terms of philosophy the novel discusses the ‘opposition between self and other’.   Are other people, like oneself, ‘conscious beings with rich vulnerable lives’ or should they just be regarded as obstacles or facilitators to the way ‘I’ choose to live my life?

This question forced Beauvoir to challenge Sartre. According to Kirkpatrick he ‘thought that all human beings wanted to dominate each other, and that all relationships are conflictual – so conflictual that love is impossible’. In a way, perhaps, Sartre’s philosophical ideas come from his background as a privileged male student who had had the best education available. So, from his position, it was easy to dominate. Whatever her intellectual prowess Beauvoir’s education had been minimal in comparison and she belonged, by birth, to the ‘second sex’. Sartre would therefore see himself as dominant in their relationship whilst Beauvoir was struggling to be accepted as equal.

Until I read Becoming Beauvoir I would have used the name, de Beauvoir, for Simone. But she suffered from being under the control of her father, Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir. As an adult she was never a vassal and looked to no man for protection or cash. Perhaps Kirkpatrick omits the de, to show that Simone was not ‘of’ any man, referencing Margaret Atwood’s Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Becoming Beauvoir is an admirable biography probing beneath the surface of misogynistic predecessors and exposing the complexities and contradictions of this extraordinary woman.

Works cited

Atwood, M. The Handmaid’s Tale. McClellan and Stewart. 1985.

Beauvoir, S. de She Came to Stay. Becker and Warburg 1943.

—. The Second Sex. Harmondsworth. 1949.

Kirkpatrick, K. Becoming Beauvoir: A Life. Bloomsbury. 2019.

Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Penguin. 1960.  Originally published in Italy in 1928.

A version of this review was first published on page 34 and 35 of the Weekend Section of the Irish Examiner on 21st September 2019.  It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

 

The Book of Wonders

The Book of Wonders by Julien Sandrel.  Translated by Liz Schwartz.

The Book of Wonders is a fairy tale for 2019. It is marketed as a heart-warming tearjerker and Julien Sandrel meets these expectations. Soon there will be a film, La Chambre de Merveilles, which, if it is made with a sufficient sprinkling of humour to sweeten the pathos, will delight audiences worldwide in the same way that the book has already.

This version of the Sleeping Beauty has some unusual elements. The young protagonist is in a coma, unable to communicate physically or vocally. His mother, therefore, takes on the role of adventurer. She finds her son’s notebook of dares, and challenges herself to complete them, filming them for him. But although the nurses can see the resulting videos, Louis lies in his bed with his eyes closed.

It is quite a difficult task for Sandrel, who is nearly 40, to immerse himself into the life of a 12-year-old boy and imagine what he would put on his bucket list. Equally difficult, perhaps, is to convey realistically the thoughts and actions of Thelma, a single mother with a successful career marketing anti-dandruff shampoo. But Sandrel manages, enthusiastically, to stimulate his grieving and apathetic heroine to attempt the tasks.

Thelma, rather than the adolescent Louis, develops and grows as a person. Her initial reaction is to collapse under the burden of self-recrimination and self-loathing, but with the support of several secondary characters, similar to the seven dwarfs, she realises that she is not an evil mother. Instead she had been a loving mother doing her best under difficult circumstances. Now that her world has collapsed she has to find or build the strength to deal with a new tragic reality.

Louis is under the threat of death, literally, as the doctors plan to turn off his life-support in a month if he doesn’t show some signs of consciousness. The narrative asks whether Thelma can tick off all items on his list and whether Louis can respond to her achievements before the time is up.

Although Ros Schwartz’s translation reflects the necessary breathless urgency of the narrative voices, her choice of title does not communicate the layered meaning of the original. La Chambre de Merveilles: The Room of Marvels. Because Louis wrote his dares in a book the English-language reader is led to believe that it is his notebook that is full of wonders. But there is equal emphasis for the read of the original, in French, on a room, a chamber of horrors. It is a room of tubes and pumps, of suction and beeps, of nearby cries and moans.

This is the drab hospital room, 405, in which Louis lies immobile and unresponsive.   It has ‘a green lino floor and walls where stickers of laughing birds, weird spaceships and delicate flowers were supposed to distract from the suffocating smell of disinfectant’. It is, for Thelma, a place of ‘forced cheerfulness’ although the doctors are never less than gloomy and pessimistic.

Does The Book of Wonders end happily ever after? Thelma avoids the dramatic end of her namesake in the film, Thelma and Louise. And her mission to save Louis brings her into contact with people who enhance her life.   The novel, and forthcoming film, are heart-warming and tearjerking: suitable for all the family.

Works cited

Sandrel, J. trans. Ros Schwartz. The Book of Wonders. Quercus. 2019.

A version of this review was first published on page 34 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 13th July 2019.  It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

Embarrassing Beliefs

The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère

Emmanuel Carrère

Carrére states that ‘things of the soul, the things involving God embarrass me’ but, there maybe other things that should embarrass him more.

This is an extraordinary book. Carrère subtitles it ‘a novel’ but its form has been described as biographical non-fiction written in the first person.  Essentially it is a history of early Christianity.  Three of the first century characters are named Jesus, Paul and Luke. The narrative is interwoven with Carrère’s 21^st century first person voice – it is as if he is in conversation with the disciples.   It’s compelling and unsettling.

The Damascene Conversion: Tibor Kraus

The Kingdom gives an account of the Damascene Conversion. It has a long section on Luke, who seems to be Carrère’s favourite chronicler. The Gospel of Luke tells a familiar story but Carrère’s apparent intimacy with the narrator is achieved through comparison of available sources/translations and especially a close investigation into style. Carrère gets really excited because at two points in his gospel Luke changes from the third person to the second person. So what was an account of Paul’s travels talking about ‘him’ or ‘them’ becomes ‘we’. Luke is there with Paul apparently. Carrère enjoys speculating about that.

Secondly Carrère is interested in what has been omitted as well as in what has been recorded. In all four gospels there is only one half sentence that suggests that Paul was imprisoned in Jerusalem for two years. Here Carrère uses his knowledge to imagine what Luke did with those 24 months.

Extracts of reviews printed on the blurb are apostolic in their reverence for The Kingdom. Julian Barnes , who clearly read the novel, published in 2014, in its original French, calls Carrère ‘the most important writer in Europe’.  I had never heard of him until the book editor at the Irish Examiner sent me a copy to review.  Since I completed my review of The Kingdom I have looked at others, see works cited below.  All the ones I have read are by men.

They notice, as I did, Carrère’s narcissism but not so much his misogyny.  The choices of  subject matter, characters, sources, attitudes and style are all overtly male.  Although there are strong women in Carrère’s personal life they are under-represented, indeed absent, from The Kingdom.

What embarrasses Carrère is that for three years, from 1990, he was ‘touched by grace’. During that period he became a fervent believer, filling notebooks with daily thoughts stimulated by reading the Gospel of John. He attended mass every day, took communion and made confessions.

Bookending his devout episode Carrère, a French intellectual and urbane Parisian, is more at home with works of philosophy, psychology and literature such as Nietzsche, I Ching, Kafka and Homer. But, in order to write The Kingdom, Carrére had to research Christian exegesis, as he had previously done in the early 1990s, for his own spiritual purposes.

Working over recent years on The Kingdom has, says Carrère, been like writing an early Philip K Dick novel. In the story a child is born to a virgin. The boy’s father is an invisible god. After being killed by rational unbelievers the prophet is resurrected and promises eternal life to those who believe in him.

Members of his sect spread the word throughout the world and establish one of the great, and most resilient, religions. For Carrère, who currently presents himself as sceptical and agnostic, this sounds like science fiction. Maybe that’s why he calls The Kingdom a novel?

Carrère in his study: New York Times Magazine

Carrère is open about himself, his thoughts and his behaviour. It is shocking to read his self-deprecatory account. He is selfish, self-indulgent, self-revelatory, self-loathing and self-aggrandising. It’s all about him in a way that I find deeply repellent but at the same time I also feel that I may know him better than any other human being, other than myself. He holds nothing back, stating that he ‘loves himself to the point of hatred’.

Pièta Rondanini: Michelangelo 1552

I cannot condemn him though as I think this level of honesty should be applauded, unless, of course it is all an enormous confidence trick.  Maybe, that’s what he means when he calls The Kingdom a novel? Perhaps this soul-baring, breast-beating Emmanuel Carrère is a self-created fictional character and if I were to visit the author in his apartment in Rue des Petits-Hôtels I would find someone completely different.

Interestingly the narrator has two amazing and loyal friends. He mentions others but it’s these I covet. His godmother, Jacqueline, both loving and challenging, is a constant figure in his life.   She, it is, who when he reaches the slough of despond in his early 30s, guides him into Catholicism. She provides an extensive reading list, and, as necessary, reassurance. She warns him of the perils he will face in his pilgrim’s progress.

Jacqueline has a lovely flat in Rue Vaneau, full of beautiful things, like a sanctuary for the soul. If she were still alive I would like to go there. She is ‘well versed in Oriental wisdom and yoga’ and thus is able to provide spiritual leadership in a number of ways. She is a mystic who steps in when therapy and analysis fail Carrère. At the point just before he finds his faith, he remembers, ‘just being me became literally unbearable’.

The other thoroughly desirable companion is Jacqueline’s other godson, Hervé. He is a one-on-one friend with whom Carrère has, for 25 years, spent a fortnight at the end of every summer. They sojourn in Valais, Switzerland and walk and sit for hours in silence. Beyond these trips he and Hervé rarely meet. But Hervé, whose own notebooks juxtapose the words of Christ ‘with those of Lao-tze and the Bhagavad Gita’, is ‘the least fanatic of human beings’. He sounds really great.

There is one episode in The Kingdom which I found especially distressing. Carrère and his first wife, Anne, need a nanny for their two small boys. I am not sure what Anne’s work might have been but Emmanuel was in the habit of going to the office everyday to write screenplays or fiction. The new nanny, whose sole advantage is that she might have been employed previously by Philip K. Dick, is left alone on her very first day. Both parents exit the apartment leaving a baby in a bassinet.

What ensues is shocking and I would say that if it had been part of my experience of parenting I would have been too embarrassed to make my negligence public. For Carrère, however, the embarrassment comes not from his behaviour in the rational world but in his short-lived relationship with the Lord.

N.B. If you are interested in reading about Emmanuel Carrère I urge you to start with two articles in the Guardian.  Robert McCrum writes that Carrère is the ‘most important French writer that you’ve never heard of’. Tim Whitmarsh is entrusted with the same paper’s review of The Kingdom.  There is also a brilliant piece by Wyatt Mason for the New York Times Magazine.

Works cited

Carrère, E. The Kingdom: A Novel. Trans. John Lambert. Allen Lane. 2017. Print.

Mason, W. ‘How Emmanuel Carrère Reinvented Nonfiction’. New York Times Magazine. 2 Mar 2017. Web. 3 Mar 2017.

McCrum, Robert. ‘The Most Important French Writer You’ve Never Heard Of’. Guardian. 21 Sept 2014. Web. 3 Mar 2017.

Whitmarsh, T. ‘Review Emmanuel Carrère The Kingdom: the man who invented Jesus’. Guardian. 24 Feb 2017. Web. 3 Mar 2017.

A version of this review first appeared on April 15th 2017 in the Irish Examiner on pages 33 and 34 of the Weekend Section.