Prize-winning novels from France
Anita Brookner
My choices: La Maladie de Sachs by Martin Winder (P.O.L.) which won the Prix Inter as long ago as January 1998 and has been in the bestseller lists ever since; Le Crime d'Olga Arbelina by Andrei Makine (Mercure de France), also pub- lished at the beginning of the year and not given much weight; Son Nom d'avant by Helene Lenoir (Editions de Minuit); and Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules de- mentaires (Flammarion) which caused a scandal because it was thought too disgust- ing and depraved to be submitted for any of this year's prizes (`porno-misere' said Le Figaro Litteraire) but which remains an intriguing if deranged account of sexual excess. It has a higher purpose, the author asserts: it propounds a solution to what he sees as a practice that enslaves men and women alike.
La Maladie de Sachs, written by a doctor in Le Mans who has never published a novel before, is a beautiful and kindly account of, precisely, life as a doctor in a rural corner of France. Its appeal is not only to the hypochondriac, though that undoubtedly exists, but to those who han- ker after some lost spirit of benevolence in contemporary writing. Its success, largely propagated by word of mouth, surprised everyone, but has been maintained. It is extremely skilful: the doctor's patients are not sophisticated Parisians, and the doctor himself is an orthodox Jew, yet there is not a trace of mockery, patronage, or separate- ness in this long, full, and touching portray- al of the maladies that can threaten the precarious human condition. Written easi- ly, without pretension, this is a good novel by a palpably good doctor.
Andrei Makine, who won the Goncourt three years ago with Le Testament Francais, published here under the same title, appealed strongly with Le Crime d' Olga Arbilina. Unlike the earlier novel — a trib- ute to France by a would-be Frenchman this is distinctly un-French. It concerns a group of Russian exiles in France who largely ignore their adopted country and its practices. Like all exiles they cling together in their little enclave. So close are they, so cut off, that the reader accepts it as entirely possible that Olga should sleep with her son, although she does so for his sake and only latterly for hers. The musing, gentle style is beautifully persuasive, giving the novel a serene, archaic air in which the author's Russian origins are clearly visible. Turgenev would have recognised this nar- rative. Completely unclassifiable, it is also completely convincing.
Helene Lenoir's Son Nom d'avant is, by contrast, rigorously contemporary, though without indications of time or place. A woman married to an overpowering indus- trialist and sinking under a weight of family dissension decides to throw in her lot with a man who accosted her at a bus stop 20 years previously and who now returns to undertake a photographic assignment in her husband's factory. The plot is frankly silly, but what is electrifying is the author's ability to enter into the minds of her quar- relsome, dissatisfied protagonists, whose unspoken thoughts are allowed to rage on as their solidarity crumbles. This is domes- tic nightmare writ large, and the controlled hysteria is all the more potent for being relayed in a style that is determined to remain impassive. The novel ends with the two would-be lovers catching trains travel- ling in opposite directions. Happy endings are not on the agenda.
The disgusting and depraved Particules elementaires by Michel Houellebecq led to the author being suspended from a literary journal on grounds of offences against good taste. (The publicity did him no harm at all.) I liked this, though it is undoubtedly obscene, but, more than obscene, despair- ing. The sexual revolution to which the protagonist, Bruno, contributes, vigorously though unappealingly, is held responsible for the disillusionment which overtakes its adherents in middle age and beyond. The answer, says Houllebecq, or his other pro- tagonist, Michel, is genetic modification. In future reproduction will be achieved by cloning. It was the eugenic implications of this idea which so offended the authorities, so that to have admitted this novel would be seen as an act of political incorrectness. Yet what is shocking about it is not the sex- ual extravagance, for which the author blames both New Age philosophies and orgiastic crypto-religious cults (not perhaps adequately documented), but the morose determinism with which he pursues both the addiction and its cure, or rather anti- T'm afraid you and your partner would have to marry before I could help you.' dote. Not everyone will be able to follow this writer in his diagnosis of consumer- oriented sex, but not a few will agree with him in his stoical distaste for a phe- nomenon which has perhaps mutated from appetite to bulimia. His book won the Prix Novembre.
The juries' choices: the Prix Femina went to Francois Cheng for Le Dit de Tianyi (Albin Michel) and the Medicis to Homeric (Frederic Dion) for Le Loup Mongol (Grasset), two first novels by two outsiders, one a professor of Oriental lan- guages, the other a former jockey and pre- sent racing correspondent for Liberation. The first is a tragic fresco of contemporary China interpreted through the lives of two men and one woman, the second a febrile panorama of life under Genghis Khan, in which horses play a predictably prominent part.
The Prix Renaudot was won by Dominique Bona for Le Manuscrit de Port- Eberle (Grasset), an excellent historical novel about a young French girl who goes out to Santo Domingo in 1784 to marry the owner of a sugar estate. Many years later she writes an account of her life, and the manuscript falls into the hands of a 20th- century publisher. After much bloodshed Santo Domingo, the richest of the French colonies, became Haiti in 1804. Delicately written and remaining successfully in peri- od, the book has a shocking and effective ending, as the narrator provides her descendants with an ineradicable mark of her allegiance to her former home.
The Prix Goncourt went to Paule Con- stant for Confidence pour Confidence (Gal- limard). This is total immersion in contemporary feminism: a conversation between four women brought together by a seminar held on a small American campus. Contemporary feminism has, of course, dis- covered its discontents, rather late perhaps; emancipation is not quite a state of perfect freedom, and a life without love and trust, however misplaced, may not be as fulfilling as was once thought. Emancipation can also be a bruising and coarsening process. Panic Constant's women are as tough as men, but much more rueful.
Finally, anyone anxious to know how French politicians position their spin doc- tors should read Gilles Martin-Chauffier's Les Gorrompus (Grasset), in which a Min- ister commissions an amiable journalist to write a biography of Barbey d'Aurevilly which he, the Minister, will sign, thereby gaining a reputation for erudition, sophisti- cation and wit while at the same time evict- ing immigrants from the church they have occupied in a Paris suburb (buses thought- fully provided). It all goes wrong, but not too wrong, give or take a suspicious death and a strategic marriage, but one soul is saved, that of the journalist who resigns from his magazine, and, with the aid of a very golden handshake, settles down to write a novel, the title of which is left in no doubt.
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