Prize-winning novels from France
Anita Brookner
Biographical and autobiographical elements abounded in the French novels published this season, which was no doubt reassuring to readers who must have felt thoroughly at home in a tradition inherited from the 19th century. The Prix Femina was won by Marc Lambron for L'Oeuil du Silence (Flammarion), a tough, gossipy biographie romancee of Lee Miller, the American photographer and beauty who ended life in London as Lady Penrose. The jacket illustration (for the French have suc- cumbed to this fashion) showed Bellini's lady with a Mirror', thus indicating that it is the photographer and not the novelist who takes a mirror along a road, thereby updating Stendhal's worthy dictum, in this case neatly and to the point.
But those who still rely on the novelist to perform this function and who trust them- selves to his rather more attentive eye will have gained pleasure from the two more markedly autobiographical novels of the season: Michel Braudeau's Mon Ami Pier- rot (Seuil), which, in a taut and undisguised form, tells of the death of the narrator's father from cancer, and Philippe Le Guil- lou's Le Passage de l'Aulne (Gallimard). One might add Jean Rouaud's Des Hommes Illustres (Editions de Minuit), in which again a father figures dramatically and in which the subject is again war, thus rather disappointingly emulating but not quite replicating the great success of his first novel Les Champs d'Honneur.
I was greatly taken with Le Passage de l'Aulne, which won no prizes but which deserves a mention. Initially I found this unreadable until I understood the reasons for my resistance. It is exactly like the nov- els one is forced to read as a student, in which a tortured young man describes his rite of passage to adulthood, with a rich accompaniment from the pathetic fallacy. In this Breton extravaganza the sea rages, woods and forests moan, abbeys fall into ruins, and the unheroic hero, feeling the burden of his own devastated emotions, takes off from time to time for Italy or Scotland or Prague to encounter more weather, more scenery, and more Christian relics. As the narrator is young (I have no Idea of the author's age) he is passionately attached to his sage and almost wordless grandfather, falls in love with a fellow undergraduate, and reveres an emblematic artist figure who encourages him in his ambitions to be a writer. If all this seems extremely familiar the actual style is exces- sive, as excessive as the alternately arid and saturated Breton landscape, which provides the author with his most arresting passages (though some of these are slightly redundant). Alain-Fournier and even Chateaubriand come to mind. The narrator-hero fulfils another requirement of the 19th-century novel: he is a great walker, and the chair-bound reader is given a thorough workout as miles of territory are traversed, nearly always in difficult con- ditions. By the end one has succumbed to a narrative in which the past figures more resonantly than the present, and from which one gains the determination to take more exercise.
The ladies of the Femina jury rather cad- dishly advanced the date of their delibera- tions, awarded the prize to Lambron, and thus effectively removed him from among the names being considered for the Goncourt. This went to Amin Maalouf for Le Rocher de Tanios (Grasset). Maalouf is a Lebanese journalist living in Paris, and his novel takes as its setting a small Lebanese village in the 1830s and 1840s, with full complement of legends, folklore and oral tradition. Tanios is the son of Lamia, a village beauty, and the sheikh of a community of 300 families. His official father is Gerios, the sheikh's bailiff, and the story concerns Tanios' love for Asma, whose father is in disgrace because of his previous disloyalty to the sheikh and the community. English and French interests in this corner of the map and the propinquity of Egypt add a wider dimension to the novel without bringing it to life, and this reader tired of its faux-naif style and feudal preoccupations long before the end.
The Prix Renaudot went to the rather more interesting Nicolas Brehal for Les Corps Celestes (Gallimard), an enigmatic and almost archaic novel about a friendship between two boys and, later, men, Baptiste and Vincent. They meet at school, and in the years that follow think of each other constantly without ever giving expression to their intense dependency on each other. Vincent is a womaniser who marries and takes a mistress; Baptiste, on the other hand, is a virgin, a voyeur who contemplates his friend's life. Vincent's death is not unexpected: the whole tone of the novel is elegiac, obsessed, and low- spirited. An irritating style, marred by too many parentheses, almost buries the singu- larity of the story, although this singularity is well anchored in the confessional narra- tive beloved of earlier writers.
This leaves the outstanding novel of the season, Angelo Rinaldi's Les Jours ne s'en vont pas longtemps (Grasset), the first line of which — Dom, it etait mort' — is in no way explanatory of what is to follow. We are promised a detective story; what we get is a mystery so abstruse as to be impenetra- ble, as the narrator searches his soul and his conscience for the reasons for his friend's death. It is by no means excluded that he alone is responsible, but at no stage are we presented with a logical conclusion, or indeed with any kind of conclusion; instead we are taken on a wandering jour- ney which mirrors the interior of the narra- tor's mind, and in which there are few signposts. This Proustian inwardness only occasionally connects with the outside world, notably on a Sunday afternoon walk with Mme Thompson, the deceptive concierge who sings at charity benefits for the retired. It is hard not to feel sorry for these people, as Mme Thompson smoothes down her fashionable skirt and embarks on yet another baroque digression. Although the subject matter is rebarbative it is impossible not to succumb to the mastery with which it is handled, and the beauty of a style which makes no concessions to the lazy reader. A triumph for Rinaldi, and a scandal for the Goncourt jury, which gave it only one vote.
The Prix Medicis went to Emmanuele Bernheim for Sa Femme (Gallimard), a very short and maddeningly abrupt record of a love affair between a woman doctor and an architect. Totally affectless, it can be read in an hour. The grandly named Prix du Roman de l'Academie Frangaise was won by a musicologist, Philippe Beaus- sant, for Heloise (Gallimard), a nerveless 18th-century pastiche which pursues a nice idea too far. Heloise and Jean-Jacques have been brought up in the shadow of Rousseau, the Rousseau of pastoral fantasies, wet-nursing, and endless letter- writing. By 1789 they are entirely unsuited to the contemporary world, and thus unprepared to acknowledge that Rousseau's other theories, notably the one embedded in the Social Contract, have resulted in a revolution which took so many devoted readers by surprise. This causation is now so widely acknowledged that M. Beaussant's thesis seems rather old hat. The award was presumably made for seamless writing, though this may prove too seamless for the more demanding read- er.
With the exception of Rinaldi all these writers appear naif, even virginal. Rinaldi alone maintains an oblique adult stance, as well as being the only writer possessed of an oblique adult style. I believe his novel to have been too difficult for the various jury members (the Prix Interallie was not announced at the moment of writing), or perhaps too unpopular. lin chef-d'oeuvre,' affirmed the lady in the bookshop, thus proving that the general reader needs little guidance from juries when singling out the best.
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