Fiction France n°8 (version anglaise) by Institut français

Twenty new French ďŹ ction titlesÂ to be read and translated

foreword

Published twice a year, Fiction France offers a selection of excerpts from French fiction along with English translations. The French publishers wish to highlight these books abroad by targeting translators, agents and publishers who take the risk of promoting contemporary fiction. Fiction France’s aim is to create a new burst of enthusiasm for translations of contemporary French literature, to be a literary showcase for book professionals around the world, as well as an essential support to the French book market abroad. It is a tool which fully reflects the mission of the Institut français. On page 116 of this eighth issue of Fiction France, you will find those titles presented in the previous issues whose foreign rights have since been sold. How can you take part in Fiction FRANCE ? A selection of 16 to 20 titles is compiled in cooperation with the Institut français, the staff in the foreign rights departments of the French publishing houses and the staff of the book offices in London, New York and Berlin—French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs.

Please do not hesitate to contact the Foreign Rights Managers of the publishing houses at the addresses listed in the table of contents and on the page presenting each text.

What are the selection criteria? • The book must be French-language fiction (novel, short story, narration). • Recent or forthcoming publication (maximum of 6 months before the publication of Fiction France). How should work be submitted? • The publishers should submit the book/draft/ manuscript. They will themselves have selected an extract of 10,000 characters. • Every entry should be accompanied by a commentary, a biographical note and the bibliography of the author (maximum of 1,500 characters). • Two printed examples of every proposed work will be sent to the Institut français. Next deadline for submitting texts: 16th May 2011 Next publication date of Fiction France: 15th September 2011

The Institut français is France’s new international agency for cultural policy affiliated to the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs.

Fiction France is disseminated free of charge through the French cultural network to its partners and to book industry professionals around the world. Fiction France is also available on line at www.institutfrancais.com

contents

p. 8

p. 13

p. 30

p. 35

p. 40

Franz Bartelt

Sophie Bassignac

Valérie Clo

Nicolas Fargues

Yannick Haenel

The Fairy Benninkova

Back to Back

Full Sunlight

You’ll See

The Meaning of Stillness

Publisher: Le Dilettante Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Claude Tarrène

Publisher: JC Lattès Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Eva Bredin

Publisher: Buchet Chastel Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: P.O.L Date of Publication: February 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Vibeke Madsen

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: February 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Catherine Farin

claude.tarrene@ledilettante.com Translation: Shaun Whiteside shaun.whitesideı@btinternet.com

ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr Translation: Catherine Spencer catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk

Christine Legrand christine.legrand@libella.fr Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

madsen@pol-editeur.fr Translation: Sue Rose suerosepoet@gmail.com

catherine.farin@mercure.fr Translation: Louise Rogers Lalaurie lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com

p. 18

p. 24

p. 46

p. 51

p. 56

Bruno Bayen

Jean-Philippe Blondel

Aline Kiner

Bertrand de La Peine

Dany Laferrière

Fugue and Rendezvous

(Re)Play!

The Game of Hangman

Soundtrack

The World Trembles Around Me

Publisher: Christian Bourgois Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Raphaëlle

Publisher: Actes Sud Junior Date of Publication: March 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Liana Levi Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Sylvie Mouchès

Publisher: Éd. de Minuit Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Grasset & Fasquelle Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke

Liebaert, raphaelle.liebaertbourgoisediteur@orange.fr Translation: Imogen Forster imogen.forster@talktalk.net

Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr Translation: Georgina Collins glcollins@hotmail.co.uk

s.mouches@lianalevi.fr

Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Translation: Ros Schwartz schwartz@btinternet.com

hwarneke@grasset.fr Translation: Sophie Lewis sophie_l@fastmail.fm

Translation: Frank Wynne

frank.wynne@mac.com

p. 61

p. 66

p. 71

p. 92

p. 98

Michèle Lesbre

Marcus Malte

Bernard Marc & Maryse Rivière

Jacqueline Raoul-Duval

Jean-François Rouzières

A Huge White Lake

Harmonics

When Men Clash

Kafka, the Eternal Fiancé

Lacan’s Revolver

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: April 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton

Publisher: Gallimard Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Calmann-Lévy Date of Publication: February 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Patricia Roussel

Publisher: Flammarion Date of Publication: March 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Le Seuil Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat

jguitton@swediteur.com Translation: Vineet Lal vineet_lal@hotmail.com

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Howard Curtis curtis9@talktalk.net

proussel@calmann-levy.fr Translation: Sophie Leighton s.leighton@clara.co.uk

Patricia Stansfield pstansfield@flammarion.fr Translation: Josephine Bacon bacon@langservice.com

mheissat@seuil.com Translation: Amanda Hopkinson amandahopkinson@hotmail.com

p. 76

p. 82

p. 87

p. 103

p. 110

Gaëlle Obiégly

Pierre Pelot

Anne Plantagenet

Dominique Sylvain

Cécile Vargaftig

The Museum Maria of sentimental Values

Nation Pigalle

Dirty War

The New New Mysteries of Paris

Publisher: Verticales Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Héloïse d’Ormesson Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Sarah Hirsch

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: April 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Viviane Hamy Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Julie Galante

Publisher: Au diable vauvert Date of Publication: March 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Paul Buck & Catherine Petit paul@paulbuck.co.uk

Sarah@editions-heloisedormesson.com Translation: John Fletcher j.w.j.fletcher@kent.ac.uk

Fabienne Roussel froussel@editions-stock.fr Translation: Adriana Hunter adriana@hunterı57.freeserve.co.uk

julie.galante@viviane-hamy.fr Translation: Ian Monk ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

Marie Pacifique Zeltner rights@audiable.com Translation: Will Hobson willhobson@hotmail.com

Franz Bartelt

The Fairy Benninkova

Fairy-tales we know, but a tale relating the misadventures of a fairy is something much rarer, and highly moving. In this instance, it is Franz Bartelt’s Benninkova, who comes knocking, on the stroke of midnight, at the door of Clinty Dabot. The poor thing confesses to being prey to three misfortunes: insistent envy, the loss of her wand and the lurking menace of the Great Black Goblins, horrible evil-doers, eager devourers of fairies, which they flay and gobble up in gangs. Surprised but sympathetic, Clinty Dabot, crutch-ridden, with a gammy foot and a twisted spine, offers her hospitality which will be rewarded, as it must be, by the traditional granted wish, when the regional

Publisher: Le Dilettante Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Claude Tarrène claude.tarrene@ledilettante.com Translation: Shaun Whiteside shaun.whitesideı@btinternet.com

fairy-wand distribution authority has sent another specimen. While the fairy adapts herself and regains her confidence, he begins to smooth out the folds of a life as tortuous and painful as his skeleton. A life haunted by the fixed-price (at the very highest rate!) unveiling of the anatomy of Marlylène, the opulent cashier of the supermarket whose curves, folds and wrinkles, fur and intimate parts are Clinty Dabot’s land of adventure. Dark, mocking, hilarious and fierce, this fairy-story inspired by the fairy Tinkerbell and Pichard’s curvaceous comic-book character Paulette, has been crafted by the gifted Franz Bartelt. A treat!

Biography

Franz Bartelt lives in the Ardennes. He writes all day, since he left the factory in 1985. His fame and literary credibility are well established: he has been published in the white covers of Gallimard for years, as well as by le Dilettante. He is also happy to entrust other, less ‘normed’ texts to small publishers. Some of his books have been published in paperback. Skilled at constructing strong fictions, often dark but tender, using few words, Bartelt is one of the most highly esteemed French short-story writers. His novels have featured on prize-lists, including the Goncourt. In 2006 he won the most prestigious prize for short stories: the short story Goncourt. Publications Among his most recent novels and short stories: La Mort d’Edgar, Gallimard, 2010; La Belle Maison, Le Dilettante, 2008; Les Nœuds, Le Dilettante, 2008; Pleut-il ?, Gallimard, 2007; Le Bar des habitudes, Gallimard, 2005 (republished, Folio collection, 2007).

It wasn’t quite midnight when she knocked at my door. I was busy watching a cartoon. I dragged myself to the corridor, not an easy business with my gammy foot and my twisted back. Through the peep-hole, I saw her. She was in tears, all got up like some poor-looking creature. Normally I wouldn’t have opened the door, I’m too scared of everything. But, I don’t know, I was suddenly filled with pity, as if by a miracle. I opened up. Not all the way, because I still had a residual concern for my own safety. Beautiful she might have been, but beauty is no guarantee against unpleasant surprises. ‘You are Clinty Dabot, the famous disabled person, aren’t you?’ she asked, sniffing back her tears. Famous was a bit strong. But perhaps someone had mentioned me to her. Someone in the neighbourhood. I’m quite well-known in the neighbourhood. So I said yes, I was indeed Clinty Dabot, the famous disabled person. ‘Can I use your toilet, it’s urgent, thanks,’ she said before pushing her way in front of me and slipping swiftly down the corridor. Her sorrow was moist, and had been going on for some time, because when she shook her head she scattered drops all over the place, as I hobbled after her, like a thing possessed, after slamming the door shut with my crutch. She called back to me that she wouldn’t be long. In fact, a minute later, there she was bang in front of me, in the middle of sitting-room-cum- dining-room, an absolute revelation for me, as I haven’t often had the chance to examine girls at such close quarters. ‘Oh, Clinty, Clinty, Clinty!’ she exclaimed, wiping her cheeks with a bit of toilet paper.

‘Do we know each other?’ I asked, just in case. ‘I am the fairy Benninkova. I’m sure you don’t know me, because I am less renowned as a fairy than you are as a handicapped person.’ ‘Benninkova? It doesn’t ring a bell. But then, I don’t know everything that’s worth knowing. Because of my memory. I have always been very average. But Benninkova, that’s the sort of name that sticks in your mind, I would have thought. I’m sure I will never forget it.’ I didn’t know how right I was. I am in no danger of forgetting the fairy Benninkova. ‘I hope I’m not bothering you?’ she said, taking the trouble to be concerned as she peered at a cartoon gesticulating away on the television screen. She looked alarmed. She glanced nervously all around, biting her lower lip, annoyed with herself for spoiling one of my favourite entertainments, blaming herself. ‘No, no, Madame Benninkova, it’s a film I’ve seen at least sixty times before, they show it three or four times a year, I’ll have other opportunities.’ ‘Can I rest for a moment?’ Without waiting for me to reply, she dropped wearily onto the sofa. I could think of nothing better to do than flop down with her. The upright posture is in fact worse than disagreeable for me. I endure it as a torture, bravely, though, without a word of complaint. In the neighbourhood, everyone admires my good nature. In my state, which has been with me since birth, logically I should groan with each step I take, I should be enraged by kerbs, by the difficulties involved in entering shops, and by all the complications of city life which are all traps for an individual in my poor condition. But the person who could boast that they have seen me pull a face is yet to be born. I could teach many people with both arms, both legs and their whole head a thing or two about happiness. Albin Merino, the tobacconist, has on more than one occasion presented me as an example to his children, who complain at the slightest thing. ‘Rather than whining about nothing, take a look at Monsieur Dabot. He has no reason to be contented, but he smiles from dawn till dusk, and keeps everyone’s spirits up.’ And it’s true. But there are so many true things in life that one gets lost in them, personally I’m not sure, or as convinced as Albin Merino that I should be delighted with who I am, a kind of human wreck, all twists and turns, feet shooting off in random directions, for rather unpredictable reasons that remain unexplained even in retrospect. That is why, I think, I only ever feel really myself when watching cartoons. ‘What will become of me?’ sobbed the fairy Benninkova. ‘I am so weary. I was lucky that you agreed to let me use your toilet. I was at the end of my tether, Monsieur Dabot.’

‘You may call me Clinty,’ I suggested, because it seemed to me that the fact of sharing the same toilet could serve as the basis for a certain familiarity. ‘I know, Clinty. You are one of the best. But you will have no cause to regret it. I will grant you one of your wishes.’ She was a fairy, she reminded me, I’d nearly forgotten. ‘Your dearest wish,’ she went on, ‘I will grant. As soon as I have found my wand. You must be saying it’s crazy, a fairy who has lost her wand. But, you see, I am living proof that such things occur. Believe me, I am so sorry. If you knew how helpless I feel without my wand!’ She was going through a terrible trauma. A fairy without a wand is no longer a fairy, but neither is she a woman like other women. ‘It’s nothing at all,’ she said. ‘Don’t exaggerate,’ I suggested with a pout. ‘For example,’ she went on, ‘if I had had my wand, I wouldn’t have had to commit the indelicacy of disturbing you in the middle of the night, I would have made myself a toilet automatically. One wave of the wand, and there you go, a toilet appears wherever you want. You use it for your purposes, and when you no longer need it, there you go again, no more toilet. And no one any the wiser. It’s very handy.’ ‘If you hadn’t lost your wand, Madame Benninkova, I wouldn’t have had the huge pleasure of making your acquaintance.’ I told her again how proud I was to have been able to do her this favour, and how happy I was to be able to chat with her, and how dazzled I was by her beauty and sadness. In fact, I was under her spell. She already held me at her mercy, in her thrall. To come to her aid, I was ready to bend over backwards, which is particularly awkward for someone as disabled as myself. She told me about her life as a fairy, of the good that she had done wherever she went, handing out toys for little children, reading glasses for the elderly, cures for the incurable, and assistance to individuals on sea and on land. ‘I have even turned a frog into a prince charming. It’s a rather an unfashionable deed these days. But never mind, from time to time you must surely be allowed to honour tradition. If you purchase a pumpkin, my dear Clinty, I will turn it into a limousine. All you need to do is choose the make and the colour of the paint job, I will take care of the rest. ‘That’s incredible! You wouldn’t be fibbing to me there, would you?’ ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, my dear Clinty. Not to you. I like you too much. I enjoy a joke, but not when it’s at the expense of someone to whom I owe so much.’ ‘But you owe me nothing, Madame Benninkova. Besides, you didn’t use my toilet very much. A minute, no more. That doesn’t count.’ ‘Yes, she went on, there was the toilet, I will never be able to thank you enough for that. But there is also the fact that you allowed me to sit down on your sofa for a moment.’

Franz Bartelt

The Fairy Benninkova

Sophie Bassignac

Back to Back

‘The very least I could do. I place the greatest importance upon the laws of hospitality.’ ‘You’re the only one in this neighbourhood. I knocked on all the doors. No one answered. These days you can be dying on a doorstep and no one will help you, they won’t even offer you a glass of water, they won’t so much as look at you. Tenants will step over you to get home, that’s all. It’s as if the unfortunate didn’t exist. People don’t realise what they’re missing by turning me away, given that I can grant their dearest wish, you understand? They are losing out. And you, Clinty, you could be winning. Because you are the best, I think. The ideal. As soon as I get hold of a wand, nothing will stop me turning you into a prince charming.’ ‘I don’t look like a frog, though!’ ‘You don’t need to be a frog. The fluid from the wand acts on anything you like. Even upon the prince charming whom you would like to turn into an even more charming prince. A wave of the magic wand and you can grow his hair, change the colour of his eyes, give him pecs, just as you wish, no problem.’ As she talked about her job she became animated, her eyes filled with light, she moved her head softly and a tender smile hovered around her lips. Beside her, on that relatively saggy sofa, in that flat whose furnishings were a constant reminder of the harsh reality of our times, I felt calm and trusting. I felt as if something marvellous had entered my life, and that only good things would happen to me from now on.

Publisher: JC Lattès Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Eva Bredin ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr

Translation: Catherine Spencer catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk

Biography

Sophie Bassignac was born in Dieppe in 1960 but lived in Angers until the age of 25. After a Master’s in English, and qualifications in specialised translation, she taught French in Britain and English in France for three years. She then gave up teaching to become assistant to the culture editor of a weekly magazine. After four years of this, she worked as a press attaché in publishing for another four years before going free-lance. When her son was born, she decided to stop working and devote herself to her passion: literature. Back to Back is her third book. Publications À la recherché d’Alice (Denoël, 2009); Les Aquariums lumineux (Denoël, 2008).

It is the end of the summer. Everyone is asleep when, after a long absence, Arnaud turns up without warning at his parents’ seaside home. The next day, Gabriel, a novelist in his 50s, reads a message meant for Arnaud that hits him like a bombshell: the police are looking for his son. He immediately sets out to find him, overwhelmed with rage and anxiety. Tormented by his writer’s angst but above all by his Italian wife, Ester, filled with bellicose determination to save her son, Gabriel has to rediscover the young man he thought he knew. Other characters gravitate towards this disintegrating family and participate,

powerless, in the impending catastrophe. Pamela, the untiringly curious alcoholic widow and old family friend; Fumiko, Arnaud’s poetic Japanese friend who draws people in the metro; Jean-Mi Causse, the writer-detective of science fiction, and the troubling, fragile Guinevere, a novice, high-heel wearing photographer. A tragi-comedy of desire and filial ties, this novel, written in a joyous, break-neck style, explores themes of artistic creation, guilt and the shadow that inhabits each one of us.

Listening to Shostakovich over and over in the hermetically-sealed shell of the car had hijacked his senses and unhinged the landscape he was driving through. On the other side of the windscreen, the stone pines bordering the coast road resembled giant broccoli, their black, frothy shapes forming cutouts against the sky. In the bay, the lights of St Tropez shone in the darkness like so many fireflies. Arnaud reached over for his mobile and rang the number of the flat. Fumiko was not there, untraceable in Paris since she had disappeared that morning like a phantom evaporating in a discreet flurry of air. He parked at the top of the allée des Oliviers, cutting the syrupy andante off mid-flow, got his bag out of the boot and opened the gate. The rough sound of the gravel under his feet resonated against the walls of the dead houses in the street; night had thrown a black mantle over the gardens. He put his things in the corridor and turned the light on in the sitting room, exposing intact the fading décor of the Villa des Roses: round, convex mirrors framed with woven willow, the wrought iron magazine racks, the low tiled table and the Vallauris vases that bore the sad traces of a glorious, shrivelled family past left behind by defunct grandparents. To this feeling of degeneration was added the vague culpability of a child walking, forbidden, in a silent house after bedtime. Arnaud undressed, went out into the garden and dived naked into the pool. As he entered the cold water, an intense weariness overcame him. He swam just beneath the surface with a long breast-stroke, ridding himself of the stress of the journey and of other drivers who, he thought, pull you like bad influences into a wretched race. Refreshed, his body realigned, Arnaud dallied for a moment in the sitting room. He went through his mother’s holdall, a promising yet always

disappointing disembowelment, then flicked through a couple of magazines that were lying on the table. In the kitchen he ate a piece of stale carrot cake made by Pamela, his parent’s American friend. He felt a fissure slowly appearing in his morale as he took stock of the innumerable traces left by the impossible trio; he still had time to leave, he told himself. But the ancient odour of sun oil mixed with dust in the folds of the sofa reawakened his unquenchable desire to be there where they were and stopped him, just in time. In the suffocating heat of the first-floor landing, he softly pushed open his parents’ door, making out their two silhouettes on the bed. The sheets thrown off onto the floor, his father lay sleeping with a hand on his torso, huge and dark, his mouth gaping open. His mother, in a foetal position and a pale babydoll nightdress, turned towards her double in the wardrobe mirror. Saturated with privacy and absolute interdiction, the room was stifling and Arnaud quietly closed the door behind him. At the end of the corridor, the cavernous cold of his own room disturbed him. It smelled of long disuse, of the absence of anyone living or dead, of memories beginning to be neglected. Opening the cupboard to put away his things, he found that it now served as an annexe to his mother’s dressing room. Arnaud who liked to be fondly missed in his absence, wanted spaces he no longer occupied to be kept vacant. He brushed against Ester’s summer dresses with his fingers, remembering her in that sponge-yellow tunic, a tall, out-of-the-ordinary blonde, beautiful and not kind, walking on his arm along the path that led to the beach. His lungs were full of mothballs. Vexed, he closed the cupboard doors again and lay on his divan, recovering his train of thought of the afternoon. Caught between the devil of his thieving and the deep blue sea of his inability to take it seriously, he had prepared for hassles and, once again, nothing had happened. The great decisions he had taken that day, his “I’m giving up this craziness” shouted out, with all the windows open, over the Millau bridge, slowly took on the aspect of an insignificant detail and, under the Jouy cloth lampshade of the room he had slept in as a boy, he said to himself that, after all, he had to survive. Behind the partition, Pamela twisted and turned in her bed, mumbling in her dreams, the yellowing spit of an old smoker rolling in her throat. In the end, Arnaud blocked his ears with cigarette filters, having searched in vain for his mother’s magical sleeping tablets in the bathroom. In the morning, awoken by the heat in the empty house, Arnaud went to the beach to have a coffee outside. On the freshly-combed sand, a perfect, golden science fiction setting, he saw Pamela and his mother in the distance, sauntering along in rhythm with their arms by their sides, resolute. The air had all the softness of a pardon and the blonde, iridescent light the purity of new life. He breathed in the precious gift and thanked his stars he had come. Pamela turned around and recognised Arnaud’s silhouette. The two women slowly walked away from the shore to join him. Ester and Pamela, both tall,

Sophie Bassignac

Back to Back

both former beauties, were international figures of style in the holiday resort and were taken for Swedes, Australians or lesbians. “Hot totty from behind, old bags from the front,” shouted the waiter behind the bar. Arnaud huddled up into himself, a reflex when vulgarity came too close for comfort. Pamela led the way. Her hair immaculately blow-dried, her expression a wet blue, with pearly lips and her head carried stock still, the friend of the family was waging a fierce battle against the ravages of time. She had come from the States to be an au pair girl to a baron and had married the eldest son, Charles de Musilles. After several decades of an unmitigated, and childless, happiness, Charles had been found one sad winter morning, his face squashed against the windscreen of his Jaguar, a dead hand looking for a forever-unknown frequency on his radio. Shortly after the burial Pamela had attempted a transplant to her native Texas but thirty years of old Europe had made her hypersensitive and unfit for a life without books, old buildings and drownings in her EntreDeux-Mers wine. Two months later, she had returned to Paris in a flood of panic, declaring that she would end her days there. And so, without permission or contract, Pamela had resumed her place beside Gabriel and Ester, playing the role alternately of clown, warm-up artist or mirror in which they corrected their own posture. Sometimes, still, split-second bursts of dazzling flash-backs made her lose her balance. Then she drew herself up with the pride of a horse and the conversations resumed. “Hi! Arnaud!” she called out in English, grabbing hold of a chair. “Hi! Pamela!” Ester leant over to kiss Arnaud. She placed an icy hand on his neck to make sure his presence was solid and real, for her son seemed as tremulous as a mirage, with the promising colours of a perfect trompe l’œil that deceived the eye before leaving you in the lurch for weeks or months. She sat down facing the shore, a smiling betrothed, bearing her secret knowledge and biding her time. “Even at the end of August, the crowds are still crazy!” declared Pamela with a sigh of great nobility. “How long are you staying?” asked Ester. Without waiting for a reply, she fine-tuned, so that he did not take it amiss: “You’re not just passing through?” “No, no,” he replied, evasive. The vulgar waiter brought the coffees. Then the tranquillity of the beach gradually wrapped them in its diaphanous veils. Pamela thought of Fitzgerald while Ester put out her legs to be caressed by a sun in full foreplay. As for Arnaud, he had noticed, several tables away, a couple who were arguing in low voices. One hand placed on his mother’s knee, a slight little boy in striped trunks was staring at the sea, his mouth open. As the discussion got more and more venomous, the child kissed his mother and stroked his father’s cheek. He is showing them, thought Arnaud. Suddenly heavy with memory of a tattered past, he looked away.

“Is he well?” he asked Ester. Ester frowned. She hated this “he” that Arnaud imposed on her in speaking of his father, a gratuitous violence that she felt she did not deserve. “I have the impression he’s not writing any more,” she replied in the rolling accent and husky voice of an Italian. “I even have the impression he won’t write again.” “Did he say that?” said Arnaud, astounded. “No, “she went on. “I sense it, that’s all.” “I’ve never really noticed the difference between Gabriel who writes and Gabriel who doesn’t write,” intervened Pamela. “Because he has always written. This time, it’s different. There’s something new in his expression. It’s as though he’s telling himself a good joke, the same one, a funny story that makes him laugh all day long,” said Ester, shivering slightly. “Where is he?” “In St Raphael,” replied Pamela. Arnaud remembered that Gabriel used to say, when he went out, that he was going to check. Check what?, he asked himself with a touch of bitterness. Check that his doubles were life-like? That people breathed the same air in real life as they did in his novels? He visualised his father in a jacket on the beach among the people in swimsuits, snatching up the shards of sentences and recording, in detail and without shame, the flaws of the unclothed bodies. Arnaud looked around him to regain his calm and think of something else. He noticed that the couple had disappeared and looked around for them. He thought of that child, devoting every breath of his life to his parents, receiving in return nothing but a drab existence devoid of grandeur or beauty. “They went that way,” said Ester, her arm stretched out towards the changing huts. “The woman was saying she wanted to go back through Lyon and the man disagreed.” She burst out laughing, drawing Arnaud along in her wake. Pamela, abandoned by the side of the road, seemed crushed by the shared joy of mother and son. “Pamela, shall we run back?” said Ester, putting her hand on her friend’s arm. “Oh! Yes!” the other replied in English. Arnaud stayed on the terrace for a moment, then woke Fumiko. He had suggested that she come south with him but he had given the polite and expected reply: a smiling, amiably aggrieved and categoric no. He described to her what he could see from the terrace, asked her how she felt. Dragged too brutally from sleep, she imagined a beach shining with mica, a hostile Japanese beach on which Arnaud was walking alone in the black and white sea spray.

Sophie Bassignac

Back to Back

Bruno Bayen

Fugue and Rendezvous

In order to watch the solar eclipse on 15 February 1961 the narrator, who is then aged ten, stops on his way through the Luxembourg Gardens, misses an hour’s school and on that day makes a promise to himself that the year that is just beginning will be a turning-point for him. The story of that year is a story about borders. On the point of leaving childhood behind, the boy guesses that in order to deal with the world, to navigate and make his way through it, he will have to create a new kind of memory for himself, a language

Publisher: Christian Bourgois Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Raphaëlle Liebaert raphaelle.liebaert-bourgoisediteur@orange.fr Translation: Imogen Forster imogen.forster@talktalk.net

of flight and solitude. Sometimes older than his years, sometimes younger, he is initiated by mysterious female figures, and discovers a larger “history”, in the context of the early 1960s. There is a flight, and a promise kept, that of a distant rendezvous: thirty years later, in order to keep faith with a fable, the narrator goes to a travel agency that now occupies the flat where he lived as a child, and buys a ticket to northern Norway, where the counterpart of an eclipse, the Northern Lights, awaits him.

Around the middle of February daylight plucks up courage and risks defying winter. Since November, the opening hours of the Luxembourg Gardens, set by sunrise and sunset, have meant changing our route, a ruler-straight line from the old junior seminary to school and from school back to the seminary, where my parents’ house now stands. Until now, after school, we’ve had to skirt the gardens in the dark (it takes five minutes longer), past their prison-like railings. Since the day of the eclipse, as soon as we’re released by the sound of the bell, Jean-Noël and I have pelted down the Rue Soufflot before the park attendants in their capes can station themselves at the gates and stop us going through.

Biography

Bruno Bayen, born in Paris in 1950, is the author of novels and plays. He is also a theatre director and the translator of works by Sophocles, Goethe, Wedekind, Peter Handke, Lukas Bärfuss and W.H. Auden. He worked at the Nouvelle Revue Française when Georges Lambrichs was editor-in-chief, and from 1988 to 1994 he edited the collection “Le Répertoire de saint Jérôme”, published by Christian Bourgois. He has written an essay on still lifes, Le Pli de la nappe au milieu du jour (Gallimard, 1997) and on the Polaroid camera, Pourquoi pas tout de suite (Melville/MEP, 2004), illustrated by photographs taken while travelling abroad, to South America, Berlin and Kyoto. Fugue and Rendezvous is his eighth novel. Publications His most recent novels and stories include: Laissez-moi seule, Joca seria, 2009; L’Éclipse du 11 août, L’Arche éditeur, 2006; La Vie sentimentale, Mercure de France, 2003; La Forêt de six mois d’hiver, Mercure de France, 2000.

The day we started secondary school, his father, a police Inspector, a big, ruddy, balding chap with soft, thick lips, thought it would be a good idea, since we’re neighbours (we live just round the corner from each other) and in the same class, A6, if we boys teamed up and went over our homework together in the Gardens. One of us would be a model for the other, and I had the feeling I was going to be the “one”. “That’s marvellous, you can work as a pair,” enthused my mother, who was taking me all the way to school for the first and last time. “Look, you’ve got a friend.” I had no idea what was in store for me behind those green portals, but what I did know right from the start, I couldn’t put into words: you don’t have a friend assigned to you. My mother had spoken too soon.

He’s thinking the same as me, I can see it that morning, when Jean-Noël holds out a limp hand and glances at the sign on the school wall—“Stick no Bills”— while I stare at the huge mole below his right ear. I dread this walk through the Gardens, down flights of steps like falling down a well, a place where we’ll have to go over all the angles, formulae and lists of bones that we’ve heard from the teachers’ mouths. But by tacit agreement we’ve followed none of those instructions, never practised together, or whispered the answer to a problem. It was down to which of us walked faster, and as we got near the school it was always a relief to find another pupil, Sérieux-Stroh, for example, coming in between us. Jean-Noël, in his flannel trousers, while I wear shorts cut down from the corduroy knickerbockers my father took from the Hitler Youth stores at the end of the war, doesn’t, like me, have shoulders rubbed sore by the straps of his satchel; he sports a briefcase under his arm. He has more pocket money than me, he’s two years older and much taller, and we don’t subscribe to the same weekly. Every month he waits for the latest hit single to come out and then runs straight to the record shop. But granted we don’t have much in common, all this going back and forth together means we’ve both got the same mad idea: running away. And that involves—low voices and on the look-out for danger— loads of questions. If it’s better to go first thing in the morning, or after school, and what to take with you, as well as a torch, and how to make sure nobody sees you, and would you dare take the train on your own, hide in the loo, cross a border, steal chocolate, avoid asking the way, go through a wood in the dark, and so on. He lives alone with this father, who comes home late, and often has to spend the whole night at Police HQ, so it shouldn’t be too hard for him to get away before dawn. From what the grown-ups whisper among themselves, he almost has “blue blood”, even if his parents are divorced—he’s the only one in our class. Our teachers for the first term have taken that into account, like a handicap, and excuse him for sometimes being far away; in fact, this handicap gives him complete freedom. Jean-Noël is looked after by a maid, who’s smitten with a little postman who isn’t as nice as he seems; she goes out to meet him after making the evening meal, saying, “I forgot to get margarine,” and doesn’t appear again until next morning. Jean-Noël spends whole evenings in front of the TV, till close-down, then he’ll flick through the phone book, dial several LITtré, BABylone or TRUdaine numbers, put on a woman’s voice and wake up the lucky person selected at random for a quiz show or an unbeatable offer on white goods, and then go to bed laughing. He’s met life’s rough and tumble well ahead of me. He lives dangerously, always on the look-out.

Forced to use the cafeteria, he’s made a note of the time—five to twelve—when the concierge with a few black hairs decorating the corners of her mouth pulls on her black beret to make the trip from her lodge to the toilets. The deputy head, Bobosse, aka Quasimodo, who’s tiny but terrifying, goes up to his little office for lunch at that time, and nobody’s going to check the cloakrooms in the brand new gymnasium, where they haven’t yet thought of putting bars on the windows. Using a door or a window, he goes down to the new Italian stall, between the Mahieu café and the Luxembourg RER station, to buy two sausage rolls and a sugared waffle, or else he goes off to his real godmother’s (his old Jewish godmother, as he calls her), who lives on the corner of one of the boulevards, in an apartment with a dome. She’s a big, flirty woman, who wears a short tie, held in place on her bosom with a gold pin, and I run into her one day, holding Jean-Noël by the arm, in the Rue Champollion, on their way out of the film The Cranes are Flying. I end up dreaming about the apartment with the dome, where she’s never surprised to see him turn up out of the blue, but just asks if they’re still on strike in the kitchen. It’s a pure formality; she immediately points to his place at the oval table under the dome and lightly presses the bell with her foot to summon an elderly lady, who comes limping in to serve elaborate dishes—ox-tongue, followed by a bavarois.

Bruno Bayen

Fugue and Rendezvous

The silver cutlery chinks under the high ceiling. Sometimes his old godmother, who hated school, and keeps saying that’s not what childhood’s about (it’s enough to make you grind your teeth), keeps him there all afternoon. She makes him listen to Wagner, who didn’t like the Jews (but it’s OK for the Jews to like Wagner) and Jean-Noël’s pinned down there till Isolde dies, waiting for her to say he can be excused, which she does, slipping him a banknote that smells of her scent, to buy paperbacks for when he has nothing else to read. “But what about his mother? Why doesn’t he sleep at his mother’s?” I ask mine, in March, when the Police send his father off to some secret destination. He asks us to put Jean-Noël up, and he has to stay with us for two nights. She tells me you don’t let down a boy whose parents are divorced and whose father’s doing his duty. And then, in the bathroom, as she’s rinsing her hands and doing her hair, she whispers that Jean-Noël’s mother is a bit of a bird of passage, and I detect a note of disapproval when she adds that it was a household that didn’t work out well. Since until now I’ve associated the word “household” with cleaning stuff and the women who use it, floor-cloths, polishers and suchlike, I ask her what it means and learn that unlike them, my parents are a “couple”, and fell in love at first sight, for ever. My parents never have rows, so on the love scale a household’s lower than a couple, and at best, if it works out, they resign themselves to the absence of love, attend quietly and efficiently to everyday activities and keep life on an even keel.

We’re not going to sleep in the room I share with my youngest sister, my mother puts us in the studio-flat on the top floor, where my father stores his files and old letters, stuff we’re not allowed to touch. It used to be occupied by a Vietnamese student who wore silky smocks, and worked as our nanny for three hours a day instead of paying rent. She was one of several who had the job of wiping my arse. On Sunday mornings my youngest sister and I liked to go up to her room and say hello. She’d be in bed, painting her nails. In the end, my mother decided she was sneaky, with her slender legs; Marie-Christine lounged around instead of getting up to take us to Mass. And then, when one of her Vietnamese friends, tall and willowy, full of smiles and as French-speaking, Catholic and smartly dressed as you could wish, stayed in the flat till late, twice in a row, my mother pointed out that it wasn’t a hotel, and Marie-Christine left us to continue her pharmaceutical studies in the provinces. All you can see from the flat is the sky. We’ve hardly switched off the light, Jean-Noël in Marie-Christine’s bed and me on a camp bed, when he tells me to keep it secret, but that night, in a skichalet at Megève called the Six-Enfants, his father is grilling Éric Peugeot’s kidnappers. They’ve been on the run and been caught, and the Inspector’s going to interrogate the whole gang till morning. Do I remember that? Of course, a huge drama last year, big commotion all over the place. My mother talked about the bastards who were terrorising a poor little four-year-old kid, and my father brought home the special editions of France-Soir. The little kid from the automobile dynasty was the stuff of dinner-table conversation for as long as he was missing. Looking on the black side, my mother brought up the spectre of the Lindbergh kidnapping, the North Atlantic aviator’s baby who was found murdered after they’d paid a ransom of fifty, seventy, maybe a hundred thousand dollars. Her five little treasures, especially the youngest, metamorphosed into targets, and I couldn’t leave the house without hearing her say, “If somebody approaches you, don’t accept anything from anyone.” It all seemed a bit much to me, a bit of a put-on, my parents weren’t rich enough for anyone to want to kidnap me. I was sure the others would pay up, and little Peugeot, I thought, isn’t being tortured, and anyway, nobody can put themselves in his place. It’s not the nightmare people think, he’s in the countryside, after all, and it’s obvious, when it comes to children’s feelings, grown-ups get it all wrong. The Megève gang had got their inspiration from Rapt, Number 271 in an American thriller series, that Jean-Noël had found on his father’s desk. It may well have been worth copying, but you still have to show some cool if you’re going to avoid the cock-ups the East Coast bunch make, they’re so disastrous, their leader bites the dust at the end of the book. That lesson learned, things went like clockwork, bags or suitcases full of bundles of hundreds of notes with Napoleon’s picture on them were left at the agreed time by the

wealthy Peugeots, or their lawyers, or their flunkeys, and in exchange the little fellow was recovered safe, and above all, “unharmed”, as the papers politely put it, and the gang lived it up for eleven months. As chance would have it, by the way, hostage and kidnappers sat near each other one evening, all open and above board, at one of Megève’s fanciest restaurants—one table apart, the victim in between his parents, the baddies all together—and Éric didn’t spot them, they weren’t bothered, didn’t slip out or pass on dessert; you’d hardly believe it. If he’d been kidnapped, Jean-Noël wouldn’t have gone over to the other side like that stupid little Janie in Rapt, who admired her kidnappers so much she told them, “I bet Mom doesn’t know I’m a member of your gang,” but in the end he would have pulled off some trick and got away on his own. If, on the other hand, he’d been the leader of the Megève gang, he wouldn’t have hired a former Danish beauty queen, whose photo was in all the magazines, to lure the child to a park gate, or a Eurasian striptease artist from “La Mondaine” on TV. And they certainly wouldn’t have taken on as a nanny an under-age pickpocket known to the police for escaping from a string of detention centres. He pictures himself in all the roles, getting excited as he talks and filling out all the details; according to him the stripper shouldn’t have been a suspect. And I’m just about to fall asleep surrounded by a flock of sequinned women, when he shakes me, and says, “Why don’t we go to my mother’s, she can do magic tricks.” “What magic tricks?”. “You just have to show up and she makes jewels appear out of nowhere.”

Bruno Bayen

Fugue and Rendezvous

Jean-Philippe Blondel

(Re)Play!

In Ben’s comprehensive, the imminent arrival of the famous music critic and TV talent show judge, Frank Manning, creates turmoil. Manning is going to talk to the students and a few school bands will even be able to play him some music. But Ben’s band doesn’t exist any more. Originally, Luminescent was made up of just Matt and Ben. Mates for life. Then when Max came along, all the band needed to be a real group was a singer … or rather, a female singer. And along came Clara with her magic voice.

Publisher: Actes Sud Junior Date of Publication: March 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr Translation: Georgina Collins glcollins@hotmail.co.uk

Ben fell madly in love with her, but Clara liked Matt … The band fell apart, the mates for life went their separate ways and since then Ben has been stuck in a rut. Will Frank Manning’s unexpected visit provide an opportunity to heal the past, in words as well as music? And will the urge to play music be so strong that they can finally move forward again—together?

Biography

Jean-Philippe Blondel was born in 1964 and is married with two children. For the past twenty years he has taught English in a senior school near Troyes in north central France. As well as teaching, he writes, and to date has produced nine novels as well as a number of books for young people. Publications Recent novels include: G229 (Buchet Chastel, 2011); Le Baby-sitter (Buchet Chastel, 2010, reissued by Pocket in 2011); À contretemps (Robert Laffont, 2009; Pocket, 2010); This is not a love song (Robert Laffont, 2007; Pocket, 2009). Books for young people include: Qui vive ? (Thierry Magnier, 2010); Blog (Actes Sud Junior, 2009); Un endroit pour vivre (Actes Sud Junior, 2007).

Rupert leant over as we came out of Maths. “Hey!” he said. “I spoke to the librarian this morning you know. And guess what? Apparently, Frank Manning’s coming to school to talk about music journalism in the UK.” I didn’t reply. I pretended not to be interested. That’s when he really socked it to me. “Apparently the thing’s gonna finish up with a concert. And then, right, he’ll listen to bits of music from two or three school bands. Shame Luminescent has split up.” He winked at me and then walked off with a smirk on his face. I don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone as much as I hated Rupert right then. But that’s hardly front page news. I can’t stand Rupert. He’s got this pretty boy face and this floppy fringe, bright blue eyes, and threads that stink of cash. He has this way of organising parties when his parents aren’t home and then inviting a hundred people, and then everyone rushes over to his place because he’s got a swimming pool. His parents have converted the cellar into a music studio and given him loads of equipment, including top-of-the-range guitars, so Mummy and Daddy’s little sweetheart can bang out some serious tunes. His band, called Puzzle, is made up of rahs trying to act all rebellious by taking on songs by Babyshambles. Everything I hate.

I shrugged. I couldn’t have cared less. I am well above all that. Anyway, I was pretty sure it was a load of rubbish. Frank Manning never travelled to schools out in the sticks—he’d plenty of other fish to fry. He’s editor-in-chief of the most popular music magazine in Britain. He’s also producer of two of the hottest bands right now. And what’s more, he’s the nasty one on the judging panel of a TV talent show. A guy like that coming here? To an anonymous school in Lincolnshire? That’s a rumour that will end as quickly as it began—like the one last year, about the headmaster getting beaten up by the caretaker. Rumours are the life blood of comprehensive school kids. It all begins at nine in the morning with the latest round of gossip: “Did you know the biology teacher is off sick …” and it continues throughout the day with made-up love stories and phoney break-ups. When you start year seven, you believe everything. By the time you reach sixth form, the rumours just wash over you. I got my smile back by imagining Rupert’s face when he found out his story was based on naff all. Even passing Matt in the corridor had no effect on me—well, almost. Let’s say that I pretended not to see him, as usual, but I did see him hugging the walls, trying to go unnoticed. These days that wasn’t difficult. I had pulled myself together by the time I reached the library. I was hoping to find Louise there. She was meant to be returning my English Lit notes that she’d copied the entirety of, as per usual. But inside it was chaos. A good twenty or so girls were causing a riot, surrounding old Bert who’d been having a bad time of it for years. The crowd was mental, trampling everywhere and emitting these high-pitched shrieks, with eager little hands reaching out in all directions. Pathetic. I looked at them scornfully and asked what was going on. And Bert, proud as a peacock, replied: “Frank Manning’s visiting the school.” “Has he got nothing better to do?” “Come on, give over being so stroppy! I thought it would interest you, don’t you claim to be inspired by rock music?” “Inspired by—exactly. Manning’s a has-been!” Bert started to laugh. It’s really hard to make him angry. He’s spent years in his library and the pupils’ behaviour washes over him like water off a duck’s back. He just replied that it was better, nevertheless, to be a “has-been” than a “never-has-been.” He also added that Manning is making the effort to visit the school for absolute peanuts—the cost of the train ticket and a 50 quid fee—that he’s doing it purely for friendship. That made me raise an eyebrow. “Friendship with who? I asked.” “With me.” “You what?” “Oh yeah, matey. Manning and me, we were neighbours when we were kids. In fact, we’ve never really lost touch.”

“You never told us that!” “There are lots of things I never tell you. For example, I never told you that I was a kind of fan of the music you made with your buds last year.” “Mmm. Ta.” “You’re welcome. Besides, Manning wants to know what the kids are made of. He’ll be taking time to listen to different school bands.” “We’ve split up.” “So I hear. But now’s the time to get back together, isn’t it?” “I’d be surprised.” “Problems with overinflated egos?” “No. Yes. It’s too complicated.” “Fine, so should I sign you up for the talk or not? Because there are limited places and the young ladies over there have just filled a third of the room.” “Mmm.” “That’s not much of an answer.” “Yes.”

Jean-Philippe Blondel

(Re)Play!

It was a very small “yes.” A quiet, feeble thing, somewhere between a grumble and an agreement—but I saw Bert adding my name to the list and smiling as he did so. I really like Bert. He’s seriously old, finds new technology overwhelming, and is sometimes on a totally different planet, but he knows how to make himself useful and I think he digs it, his job, that is. Even if he moans all the time. Sometimes I see him when he’s keeping an eye on the library—pupils half sprawled on the tables, schoolbags spewing their contents over the carpet— he might huff and puff but, inside, he’s happy to be there. Happy and sad at the same time. Like he’s sorry to be on that side of the desk. Like he would have given anything to cross the room and go back in time to rediscover being seventeen again. At school he’s never missed a student gig—even if his own bag, really, is more Michael Bublé and his big band music and all that kind of stuff. He goes to bars in the town centre, always alone, orders a beer, listens to a few tracks and leaves without saying anything. The only gig he didn’t check out was his son’s a few years back. In fact it makes sense that he’s mates with Frank Manning. They’re similar, clinging on to their old selves. Frank Manning. Oh shit! Firstly, Frank Manning is one of my dad’s idols. Like, my dad bought his mag when he was my age and later on watched the TV programmes Manning used to present. But over the years it’s all fizzled out, and now dad doesn’t listen to much music any more. Now, if he happens to see Manning on the box, he usually flicks over saying it’s embarrassing to watch people who don’t know

how to grow old gracefully. But deep down you can see that he’s actually jealous and that he would’ve really liked to switch lives with him, to have met every band on the planet, shaken hands with the greatest guitarists in the world, to live with music again, and the frenzy and excesses that it brings. Dad works in a bank as a tax advisor, and now the only excesses he allows himself are fags— he’s incapable of giving them up, although I must say he’s really cut back on the amount he smokes. And then there’s Manning, he’s a sort of role model—and not only for my parents’ generation. He’s never really left the scene, with his roles both in the public eye and out of it—behind the scenes I should say. He’s the one who produces everything that’s anything in guitar music these days. A year ago, I would’ve given anything to meet Frank Manning. Now it’s different. Now I don’t have a band. In fact, that story seriously got me down. I’d been skipping music classes. Music has been my favourite subject since coming to secondary school, because trying out different instruments and learning to write music is the ultimate in cool— as long as you don’t muck about with tambourines and stuff. At break, I sat on a bench and watched everyone on the field. Talking loudly. Laughing. Getting over-excited. It was like I was foreign to it all. I would’ve given anything to be able to run away. For it to be next year already, at uni. Or even better, last year. Because last year, I was at home here. It was my patch. My paradise.

best thing and the worst thing that could’ve happened to me at school. And I owe it to one hell of a cow. On Matt’s folder there were quotes, drawings, logos etc. You could spend hours cutting off from what the teachers were saying by getting totally absorbed in deciphering Matt’s messages. On my stuff, there was never anything. I am always very wary. I don’t want a teacher who’s collecting exercise books for marking to know that I like such and such a group or that I’m in love with so and so. Then, in the middle of a deadly boring lesson on the Spanish Conquest, Matt ventured into unexplored territory—he wrote directly on the inside cover of my exercise book. And he put “Hola. Me llamo Matt,” which he did just to get a reaction, seeing as we’d been neighbours for almost three weeks. I couldn’t stop chuckling. So he continued, in a sort of trilingual mashup—English, Spanish and French. He asked me if I’d ever had fantasies about the teacher, and which bands I liked, and if it didn’t piss me off too much to have hair like a bog brush; instinctively, I ran my hand through my hair, and then he started to laugh. And we got kicked out the lesson. In her office, the deputy head sighed. She was seriously pissed off at having to deal with kids that Mrs Casarès had chucked out of class, especially when it came to us because we’d done nothing wrong. The study room for banished pupils was packed out, so she sent us to the library. On the way I stopped and shook Matt’s hand very formally, saying: “Hola. Me llamo Ben. Que tal?” That’s when we became mates for life.

Jean-Philippe Blondel

(Re)Play!

2 It all started two years ago in November. I’d only been in sixth form for three months. I’d found the transition between years 11 and 12 really tough, but I was beginning to understand what the teachers wanted from me, and my marks were going back up. Most of my friends had left school after their GCSEs and hardly anyone from my old form was in my A Level classes, but I was none the worse for it. I had wanted to see some new faces. I was looking for new mates— lads who would like the same kind of things as me. The Spanish teacher had gone on maternity leave and in her place we’d been given a right witch, like something out of your worst nightmares. She began by reorganising the seating. She separated Ed and me because we’d had the nerve to glance at each other knowingly when she’d mentioned “getting all the good-for-nothings in this classroom back to work.” Ed left to join Lucy at the back of the room and as for me, I inherited Matt. That was definitely both the

Valérie Clo

Full Sunlight

“7am. The countdown has started. In four hours my father will be dead. I’m thirteen months old.” After many years and detours, the author has now taken on the story she never wanted to face: the sudden death of her father. Full Sunlight is a very personal book, marking the end of a long period of amnesia. With great sensitivity, Valérie Clo describes all the characters in the tragedy: her father, her mother, her extended family

Publisher: Buchet Chastel Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Christine Legrand christine.legrand@libella.fr

Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

Biography

Born in 1970, Valérie Clo studied science and communications before working for many years in broadcasting. Her first novel, Papa bis, was published in 2000 and selected for the Laval First Novel Festival. She now lives and works in the Paris region. Since training with Aleph in 2003, she has regularly run writing workshops for children and adults. She also writes a great deal: commissioned pieces for others, novels and short stories for herself. More than anything she loves working and playing with words. Her world is one of feelings within families and between lovers. Publications Amour et cha-cha-cha, Calmann-Lévy, 2004; Encore un peu de patience, Petrelle, 2002 (reprinted by J’ai lu, 2004); Papa Bis, Petrelle, 2000 (reprinted by Points, 2003).

and herself. She remembers her grandparents, whose mother tongue was Arabic, describes Tunisia, picks up the delicate thread that leads to her roots and retells memories that are not her own. For Clo, suddenly, nothing was the same. Suddenly everything was covered by a thick, dark veil. But a love of words can bring salvation. Torn from the night of infancy, this is a moving story of liberation, the relief of a return to the light.

For a long time my father was a black, shiny grave, which, now and then, they’d take me to see. I have no memories of my father other than his grave, my grandparents’ tears falling onto it and my own lack of feeling. That’s your father, they’d say, go and kiss his photo. They’d clean his house, light a candle and call out to some kind of rabbi who used to hang around the graveyard paths, so he’d come and say a prayer over my father’s grave and my head. They’d slip him a few coins. So that’s how it was, I was a dead man’s daughter. My mother had kissed a dead man and with him she’d conceived me. Whenever I thought about my father I’d see that grave, lost amid hundreds of others, always still, ice-cold and unchanging, in darkness, full sunlight or covered in snow. Always the same quiet, the same inertia, while I flailed around among the living. 7am. The countdown has started. In four hours my father will be dead. I’m thirteen months old. Inside the bars of my little white cot I’m still asleep, clenched fists next to my face. I’m breathing quietly. My day begins just like yesterday, like all the days before that. On the other side of the wall my father’s getting ready for work. My mother has got up too. Even though she doesn’t open her shop until 10 and has only our apartment door to pass through, she likes to get up early to spend this time with her husband. They drink coffee together, whispering so as not to wake me. Perhaps they are making plans for the evening, or for later, perhaps they are talking about me, about themselves, their work, their love … In precisely four hours’ time this little world of happiness will all be overturned, sacked, laid waste. I sleep with clenched fists.

A month beforehand, here I am blowing out my very first candle. My parents are holding a big party; they’ve invited the whole family. And today there’s another big thing to celebrate. After years of evening classes my father has finally got his electrical engineer’s diploma. He wanted the family here to share the good news with us. My grandfather puts his hand on my forehead and says a prayer to bring me luck, happiness, prosperity, sweetness and love in my life. That day—apart from me, sulking in almost every photo—everyone looks happy. My father most of all. One of the photos shows me in the centre, in my father’s arms. He’s holding me close to his chest and smiling at me. And there’s my grandmother too, also smiling from ear to ear, with a cake topped by a lighted candle held up in front of me. I’m pulling a face and turning my head away. I look scared to be surrounded by so many people, all waiting for me to blow out my first candle. Given that I’m so young and look so unimpressed, I imagine my father must have helped me blow it out. I remember absolutely nothing of that day, nor any other time with my father. I have only pictures to prove that all this once existed. That precise time in my parents’ lives was a moment of equilibrium. They were happy and the world seemed to be smiling on them. It was a time of luck. They’d got married four years before; they’d just bought an apartment at 66, Avenue Secrétan in Paris’s 19th arrondissement, with a little shop next door where my mother had her beauty clinic. My father had just qualified as an engineer and found a job in a large company. After three years of waiting they’d at last had the child they’d so longed for. My mother was twenty-four, my father twenty-seven. They were young, good-looking, responsible and on their way up. My grandmother said they had baraka—they were blessed. That day, my first birthday, they were calmly sharing their joy with the family. At the moment our happiness was caught by the camera’s click, no one could imagine that a tragedy was being prepared in secret, that it was hurtling towards them. Its echoes were drowned by the noise of the party. It was building in the darkness, soon to splatter across my mother’s life and my own. Less than a month later, my mother and I would step off the marked path to find ourselves cast out, in a foreign land. In the photos from that time, I often look preoccupied; I never smile. Apparently that used to really worry my father. He may even have died before I let out my first smile. Sometimes I imagine that, as a baby, I could sense what the adults couldn’t see—that a tragedy was silently gathering, that it would soon brand my mind with its red-hot iron, denying me any chance to be light-hearted or carefree for a very long time. Faced with any kind of happiness, I could think only how fragile it was.

7am. Countdown. No sooner have I blown out my first candle than the rug is pulled out from under my feet, my father’s love and protection are stripped away. In exactly four hours the thunderbolt will strike. The magnetic poles will switch. The suddenness with which the wheel turns will leave me with a diffuse anxiety, a stomach-gripping fear that the wind might change again. Sometimes, in the distance, I hear it blowing and whistling, striking some unwitting family somewhere, at random. Any news of a sudden death sends me tumbling into the void—nothing beneath my feet, nothing around me to catch hold of. Life hangs by a single thread; the frailty of human existence makes my stomach heave. I turn to stone while others comfort themselves by repeating that life goes on. I could stay stuck like that for hours, petrified, hardly daring to breathe.

Valérie Clo

Full Sunlight

I’m thirteen months old. In four hours’ time, unhappily, my mother and I will become local celebrities. Everyone’s eyes will be on us. I will be the little oneyear-old orphan, my mother the twenty-four-year-old widow, the one who runs the beauty clinic at 66, Avenue Secrétan. People will fall silent as we pass by, with the silence of death. They’ll avoid us, we’ll be dogged by awkwardness, it’ll become our normality. We’ll be labelled: victims of tragedy. No one will be able to think of anything but what has happened to us. We’ll never cross the road again without the dark veil over our heads. How are people supposed to behave, what can they say in the face of such sudden, huge misfortune? The ease of neighbourly chat about the weather will taste so bitter that we’ll no longer meet many neighbours along our way. My father was born in Tunis, in late August 1943. During his mother’s pregnancy the city’s streets were filled with war and fear. The Nazis had taken over the country in 1942 and installed a reign of terror. The first discriminatory measures against Jews were being brought in. Jews were excluded from school and banned from certain professions, their property confiscated. My grandfather, like the other Jews of Tunis, was sent to a forced labour camp on the front line. There was no food, no money. It was a terrible year of fear and anguish. Perhaps that’s why my father was born premature, at seven-and-a-half months. It was a difficult birth, during which he lost the use of his right arm. My father had the short, puny arm of a child, a frail arm in contrast to his imposingly square frame. He never complained. He drove a car with automatic gears. He worked, he fixed things, hiding his handicap as best he could. He could dismantle electronic items such as televisions and radios, and then put them back together again. With the help of his left hand he would rest his right arm on something, and then use both hands any way he wanted. Photos often show him supporting his right arm with his left hand.

Nicolas Fargues

You’ll See

My father was eighteen when his parents decided to leave Tunis. Since the Algerian war, life here had become too dangerous. There was no future; nothing was possible any more. My father dreamed of going to France. There, it seemed, everything was easier, bigger, more expansive, on a par with his ambitions. He knew that in Paris he could work, study and start a family. He knew that his children would have a kinder childhood than his own had been. For him France was the country of modernity and freedom. On arrival in Paris his one thought was to shelter his family from hardship.

Publisher: P.O.L Date of Publication: February 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Vibeke Madsen madsen@pol-editeur.fr Translation: Sue Rose suerosepoet@gmail.com

My father was a modern man who kept his eyes fixed firmly ahead, bustling his family along with him to the land of the future. No tears, no regrets, no questions. He was a visionary who embraced his destiny, body and soul. My father was born so small he could fit in a shoebox. His health was so delicate that the doctor warned my grandmother not to get too fond of him. Your son won’t last long, he told her.

My father is a blind spot, a black hole, a blank sheet. I don’t remember him at all. Everything I know about him has been told to me. My image of him is made of other people’s memories, bits of stories that I reconstruct, using the way he looks in photos. By doing that, I can see him living, talking, walking. I make him re-enact scenes that have been described to me. He’s handsome, as my mother says, tall, as portrayed by my aunts.

Biography

Nicolas Fargues was born in 1972. He spent much of his childhood in Cameroun then Lebanon, returning to France when he was eleven. After leaving school, he studied literature at university and completed a postgraduate thesis on the life and work of the Egyptian writer, Georges Henein. He went on to work in television and as a jazz critic for the press, alternating these jobs with missions for the Coopération Française in Asia and Africa. From 2002 to 2006, he was director of the Alliance Française in Madagascar. He currently lives and works in Paris. He has two children. Publications Most recent novels from Éditions P.O.L include: Le Roman de l’été, 2009; Beau rôle, 2008 (reissued by Gallimard in the “Folio” collection, 2009); J’étais derrière toi, 2006 (reissued by Gallimard in the “Folio” collection, 2007); Rade Terminus, 2004 (reissued by Gallimard in the “Folio” collection, 2006).

My father would yell at me to pull my jeans up over my backside, stop listening to vulgar songs on my iPod, tuck my elbows in when eating and not sulk every time he wanted to take me to a museum. Then he would always add: “One day, you’ll realise I was saying it for your own good, you’ll see.” Narrated in a similar tone to his novel J’étais derrière toi (I Was Behind You), this time Nicolas Fargues takes on the theme of childhood to write about love and loneliness. The story of Tu verras (You’ll See) unfolds in the days and weeks after the accidental death of a preteen

boy. We watch and listen as his father relives not only the circumstances of the tragedy but also their everyday life together, including all the things that were beginning to put them at loggerheads, all the developing conflicts that set sons against fathers, especially when the father is divorced. Nicolas Fargues’ abundant analytical skills and his talent for observing behaviour, social codes and fashions are again apparent in this work. This novel, which reaches its suspended conclusion in Africa, is also a heartfelt hymn to childhood.

The name of the song may well be Nobody Wanna See Us Together. Unless it’s got a shorter, less obvious title. Anyway, in the chorus, this guy Akon sings: Nobody wanna see us together/But it don’t matter no/I got you babe. I couldn’t tell you what the rest of the words are. I never tried to memorise them. The first time I saw Clément listening to the song in the car, I didn’t take much notice. I don’t like corny RnB songs where guys in tightfitting vests and white linen trousers act all broken-hearted. I was surprised, though, when Clément asked to borrow my laptop to put the song on his iPod. Before his classmates converted him to French rap, which I hate, perhaps even more than all that endless RnB bubblegum, before his Black and Arab classmates in year seven had him swearing by Booba, Rohff, Sefyu, Sinik, MC Jean Gabin or Kery James, I was naïve enough to think he’d always like the stuff I played him, stuff which he told me he liked (at least until he started secondary school), and which he regularly asked me to put on his iPod: the Beach Boys, David Bowie, the Stones and Nick Cave, all that tame music that nobody likes when they’re twelve, unless they’re trying to please their dad. Who, because he isn’t listening to Bach or Brassens, or any other boring oldie, is sure that his son will always think he’s young because he’s listening to it at top volume in his clapped-out 206 driving round the Paris ring road. Beats me how I could have been so naïve, or such a fool, to let Clément’s sudden change of musical allegiance get to me so much. How could I have forgotten that he was turning into a teenager and let myself get so worked up that I felt the need to ridicule those lowlife rappers in front of him in an attempt to put him

off? And even though I don’t like their music any more now than I did then, just the mention of their names can reduce me to tears. Now, you know, I’m liable to break down at the mere sight of a New Era baseball cap with its 59Fifty gold sticker, a solid silver chain resting on bulging pecs, baggy jeans worn too low and an xxl basketball jersey, all those hip-hop trappings for which I’d give my health, my two arms and my two legs, for which I’d even happily undergo the most horrific torture, if I could just bring Clément back and watch him put on all that gear too, like his mates. Me, the dad who, during his last few months, yelled at him every morning in our lounge to pull up his jeans which he delighted in wearing halfway down his backside, just like they showed him at school. The dad who ordered him to stop spending all day brooding over stupid, vulgar songs and to quit putting on a ghetto accent on the phone with his mates. That accent, wearing his jeans like a prison inmate and those silly, ignorant songs were so unlike the boy who, when he wasn’t at school, used to get a kick out of using slightly affected and redundant turns of phrase, the boy who, for fun, used to enjoy saying things like: “Just in case it’s of any interest to you, dad, it’s my solemn duty to inform you that we’ve run out of loo-paper.” The boy who knew the names of all the capitals and flags of the world off by heart, who learned all by himself that they spoke Persian and Pashto in Afghanistan, Tagalog in the Philippines and Amharic in Ethiopia, who loved scented moisturising creams and the starched comfort of a well-pressed T-shirt when, all too rarely, I made the effort to iron one for him before school. So that’s why, the day when Nobody Wanna See Us Together started playing on the car radio, which I’d just switched on as we were driving round the Paris ring road in my ancient 206, he got so worked up, begging me please not to change stations—“Leave it on, dad”— while immediately lurching forward from the front passenger seat where I’d only recently let him sit, straining against the seatbelt as if he wanted to shield the car radio with his whole body to prevent me from changing stations. “Leave it on, dad,” he said, turning the volume up without asking, “I love this song.” Then, that evening, when we got home, he asked to borrow my laptop to copy it from some illegal music-sharing site and put it on the blue iPod Shuffle that I’d just bought him again, because Clément had lost the first one I’d given him for his eleventh birthday, or had been bullied into handing it over at school, I never really got to the bottom of it. God, didn’t I call him all the names under the sun after he lost that iPod: “You have absolutely no respect for the things I buy you”, I yelled at him in the lounge, “It’s disgusting the way you can’t look after anything,” “You just can’t be trusted,” “You’re totally unreliable,” “You strut around pretending to be so macho with your underpants showing over your jeans and your ghetto accent, but you’re nothing but a baby, you don’t deserve to be given anything ever again”, I spat nastily, my lip curled in disgust, trying to make him feel as small and as guilty as possible. And that’s why, the same evening, when I heard Clément behind his bedroom door sadly humming that song with his headphones on, like the

Nicolas Fargues

You’ll See

typical preteen he’d become not so long ago, it immediately occurred to me that he was probably in love. Because there was no way his mates, who were so keen on French rap, had advised him to listen to mournful, sentimental Akon after rappers like Rohff and Sinik, no way at all. I began to wonder if it wasn’t more likely something to do with that trip to the Auvergne organised by his teachers at the end of the school year, those four days in La Bourboule after which Clément had behaved so strangely, if it hadn’t been more to do with the very last evening of their trip, just before they came back to Paris, and that end-of-year party organised for the students, if it hadn’t been something to do with that evening in mid-June, the music, the subdued lighting and the coloured disco lights softening and beautifying the faces of the girls in his class, particularly Maria or Rania, I never really knew which of the two he thought prettier, if Clément hadn’t, for the first time in his life, made one of them the focus for his strong emotions and his deep susceptibility to the night, the approaching summer, the music and all that. It was just that I realised from the dejected, faraway look on his face when he came back, from the moment he stepped down from the train with his mates, whom he couldn’t wait to get away from in his embarrassment at being with me, from the joyless, blank expression on his face when, three days later, he shut himself in his room with his iPod headphones jammed over his ears, that Akon’s slow ragga was doing him as much harm as good, more harm probably, if you think about the words and how ironic they were. Because, along with capital cities and flags, Clément loved English. Clément loved making the effort to understand English and use the correct pronunciation in class, despite stupid snide remarks from kids like Saïd, Bacar and Kevin. And I realised that, when it came to asking a boy to hold them close and dance with them to that song, Rania or Maria must have picked someone else that night. That his preteen years had begun with that irresistible, sickly-sweet tune and the indescribable feeling of desiring a girl and bitterly watching her pass you over for someone else. It was not just the sadness and loneliness on Clément’s face as he went to shut himself in his room that gave the game away, but his face itself, still chubby with puppy fat, his cheeks and smile too eager to please; he was still just a kid, with that bulky children’s satchel hanging down innocently over jeans worn halfway down his backside, his hairless little willy in the shower, his innocent lack of modesty when he regularly walked naked and dripping through the apartment to get a nice dry, clean towel from my bedroom cupboard. But although Clément’s cheeks and smile were still those of a kid, Clément’s eyes, if you knew what to look for, gave away everything he kept to himself: all the petty humiliations boys and girls mercilessly inflict on each other at that age. And I knew that my son’s eyes also betrayed his sensitivity and his profound insight into things and people, all kinds of people, including the girls who aren’t worth anywhere

near as much trouble as they want you to think they are, even if that does nothing to stop you desiring them. Those eyes which still had no chance of attracting the attention of girls like Maria or Rania, too used to being desired by all the boys in their class to waste time trying to understand eyes like his. Maria and Rania, who sheathed their already well-developed charms in tight skinny jeans and didn’t wear a bulky children’s satchel hanging down over their buttocks. Girls like Maria and Rania who were already wearing makeup and acting like young women to attract boys like Saïd, Kevin or Bacar: fast-developers who already had hair around their willies and also didn’t wear a children’s satchel on their back, boys without a hint of mystery in their face and eyes, who weren’t at all fazed by girls. But just as, realising how deeply affected Clément was by Akon in his tight vests and white linen, I’d been dying to lecture him about good taste and show him the error of his ways by demonstrating how much better my golden oldies were, so, in the same way, I stopped myself from heavy-handedly teaching him a thing or two about life the day he got back from La Bourboule. Telling myself to respect his first teenage secrets, forcing myself to respect the first time he’d seriously snubbed me by shutting himself in his room, I stopped myself from meddling in something that wasn’t my business and saying exactly what I thought of girls like Maria and Rania, who poured themselves into jeans much too tight for their age and wore makeup like a couple of little tarts. I stopped myself from telling him that, in twenty years’ time, when they were no longer so smug about their youth and their pert breasts, their days of being so choosy on the dance floor would be over and they’d be patiently queuing up in the supermarket like everybody else, with their saggy bums and mediocre looks, with kids to feed at home and problems with money, work and husbands, like everybody else. And that they’d be so wrapped up in their trolley full of dreary shopping, so wrapped up in their husbands called Bacar, Kevin or Saïd, that they wouldn’t even have enough imagination to daydream, they wouldn’t even be lucky enough to remember the intense eyes of someone like Clément. Or to realise that, twenty years down the line, once he’d acquired hair round his willy and had got rid of his chubby cheeks and eager-to-please expression, once he’d shrugged off his bulky satchel and the stupid influence of guys like Jason and Bacar, once he’d got a firm grip on his emotions, well then, the epitome of tact, wit and good taste, their perfect Prince Charming, would be him, my Clément.

Nicolas Fargues

You’ll See

Yannick Haenel

The Meaning of Stillness

Yannick Haenel’s self-portrait looks back over thirteen moments in his life, like the thirteen letters making up his name. Thirteen foundational, revelatory moments, each in its own way a ‘father of the man’—one of France’s most original contemporary writers. A selfportrait marked by high days and celebrations, white nights, illness, drinking bouts and the enlightenment of solitude. Drawing on his experiences, Haenel embarks on a rite of passage, taking the pursuit of literature

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: February 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Catherine Farin catherine.farin@mercure.fr Translation: Louise Rogers Lalaurie lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com

as its central theme, from a forest edge near the northern French town of Laon, to his childhood bedroom in Niger, a school dormitory in Alsace, France’s national military academy, a sleazy London hotel, the night train to Italy, a stay at the Villa Medici in Rome, or his home city of Paris, and the Jardin du Luxembourg. Published in Mercure de France’s Traits et Portraits collection, the book features paintings, drawings and photographs chosen by the author.

1 The death of God I found Jesus in a bin. It was 1977, I was ten years old. I ran down the line of trees in the June light, repeating the words: ‘I found Jesus in a bin’.

With this phrase, my life was set in motion: before that, I’m not sure I existed at all. I have memories, but none that have come down to me intact. The first time the clouds parted was in 1977, with the phrase ‘I found Jesus in a bin’.

Biography

Yannick Haenel was born in Rennes on September 23, 1967. He spent his childhood in Africa and attended the French National Military Academy at La Flèche (the subject of his first novel: Les Petits Soldats, La Table Ronde, 1996). He lives in Paris, where he co-edits the review Ligne de risque with François Meyronnis. He has published four novels and an essay on the celebrated medieval tapestry cycle the Lady and the Unicorn, housed in the Musée Cluny, Paris (À mon seul désir: Éditions Argol, 2005). Publications Jan Karski, 2009 (winner of the Prix du Roman Fnac and the Prix Interallié) (republished in Folio paperback, 2011); Cercle, 2007 (Prix Décembre) (republished in Folio, 2009); Évoluer parmi les avalanches, 2003; Introduction à la mort française, 2001 (all Éditions Gallimard).

It’s my last year of primary—Cours Moyen 2—in Saint-Erme, a small town near Laon. A Saturday in June, under a vast, white sky. I have missed the school bus, because our replacement teacher kept us behind to show us a film. I’m not going to tell the story of my life. I’m looking for precisely those moments that cannot be ‘recounted’, when time seems to step outside itself— when we slip through the hole. There, in the holes, is where it happens. Where I have really come alive: ten, thirteen, fifteen times in forty years. When existence becomes a kind of ecstasy, turning on itself, an illumination. For an hour, a day, the space of a lightning flash, you emerge from the frame—your life stands back. You have no ties: no mother, no father, no country—no identity at all. You no longer belong; sheer joy. Giving voice to these thunderbolt moments is what writing books is all about.

A summer Saturday, then, around noon. I’m coming home from school; walking beside a field of yellow grass covered with poppies. Here are the first buildings, coming into view: cubes of pink, yellow and orange, a thoroughly modern housing scheme. In the distance, a spreading forest of ash and oak, where I often go to pick blackberries. And over there, on the pavement, something shiny: it looks like a cross—I can’t quite see, the sunlight burns my eyes. The heat shimmers, washing over the pavement that floats like a mirage. I’m dazzled by shards of sunshine, but I can make out the cross quite clearly: it’s sticking out of a metal rubbish basket. There are bright reflections all around, forming a bouquet of light. The sky is white, like a desert. The cross is of pink marble, huge, with reddish veins; a small bronze crucifix, with the body of Christ, is fixed to the middle. I feel sorry for the great, beautiful thing shining in the sunlight. I feel its loneliness; I can’t understand what a cross is doing in a rubbish bin. I reach out towards it: it’s heavy—but I have to get it out of there. Could someone really have thrown it away? And yet it’s not broken. It looks usable. A strange way to get rid of a cross; I thought something like that couldn’t be thrown out with the rubbish. Reaching my hand out to the cross, I spoke the words out loud: ‘I found Jesus in a bin’. I spoke the words to call my gesture into being. Without the words, I might not have got the cross out of the bin: it was the words that decided what happened next, the words that decided something important was happening to me. I got the cross out of the bin with some difficulty, because it was huge, and heavy; I started to drag it back to my house. There was still a long way to go; and so, to lift my spirits as I struggled between the pink and yellow cubes, scraping the cross along the pavement, I repeated the phrase: ‘I found Jesus in a bin’. I was pleased with my phrase: it was my first phrase, and it had come all by itself; it brought the adventure to life, consecrated it, too. And without the help of words, my experience of the moment might have been less intense; perhaps it might have disappeared into the folds of my memory. The more I repeated it the more I enjoyed it; it seemed to mellow, like a poem. The phrase’s rhythm punctuated my progress home, where I was waited for, anxiously, because I had not only missed the school bus but taken a long time

on the way back. It was past one o’clock; normally, I was home by a quarter past twelve. If I gave my mother the magnificent cross, perhaps she would forgive me for being late: by saving the cross from the dump, I had turned it into an offering. And the phrase ‘I found Jesus in a bin’: this was what I would say when the door opened. The ideal phrase, I thought—exactly right: even before my mother opened her mouth, before she had a chance to say anything about how late I was, I would pronounce the phrase: ‘I found Jesus in a bin.’

Yannick Haenel

The Meaning of Stillness

I pass the houses; the light has shifted through the poppies; there are shards of pink at the edge of the wood. I want to laugh: I no longer feel the weight of the cross. On the contrary, my efforts are dispelled by some magic charm. My lungs feel light, my arms, my legs: everything is weightless, I feel as if I am flying. I hadn’t the first idea about what people call God; I never believed in it, even as a child—the people who talked about it were old in my eyes, tedious and full of woe. And what name should I give this thing that people threw out like a sack of rubbish? They call it Jesus, and Christ, the Son of Man, the Messiah: I didn’t understand, at all. Something else had happened. A different kind of revelation—void, without object. I don’t know how long it lasted: I could hear cars in the distance, on the Sissonne road; I could clearly see the orange and yellow façade of our house, behind the children’s playground, behind the swings and the slide. But I wasn’t there anymore. Where was I? Floating in a soft space somewhere between. No longer touched by the rays of sunlight. Detached from any sense of scale, I belonged to nothing—not the neighbourhood, nor the school, nor the human race: I was a mere burst of light, a leaf, a feather, a snowflake. Splashing about in this state of nothingness, wildly happy. The void is fresh and cool, it breathes its dew upon you. I felt that suffering had ceased to exist, that my body, my thoughts, would flourish in this timeless ecstasy. Letters fluttered in the air like butterflies: the letters of my phrase, glittering in the light, red, blue, purple, with green-speckled wings. By dint of pronouncing my phrase, I had been absorbed into it. I had become the phrase. And here it was, dissolving in the sky like mother-of-pearl, and here was I, swimming in an ocean of reflected light.

It was my first big adventure. The first time I experienced the sensation of existing beyond reach, unattainable. Of passing, unprotected, into some nameless place. Where I was alive, far from the closely-guarded life of a small boy. A place where, no longer anyone, I was someone at last. I reached the door and rang the bell, full of happiness at the surprise I had in store for my parents. My mother appeared, looked dumbfounded, then burst out laughing and asked me what I was doing with a huge cross like that: had I stolen it from a cemetery? And so here I am, retracing my steps, to put the cross back in the bin. Nothing is carrying me along this time: I feel the weight of the heat, the cross is backbreaking, the magic has gone. I’m a little ashamed, too—I hurry, anxious not to be seen. In the afternoon, I go to my ‘place’. At the edge of the wood. I like playing there by myself, or with my sister: sometimes we swim in the little pond. The light is good, like in a clearing. There are dense masses of undergrowth full of thorns and blackberries, a few ash trees, a row of hazel, and a path leading to a bunker covered in moss whose open maw features in my games as the entrance to Hell; I stick my head inside sometimes, but the darkness repels me, it reeks of mould. I stretch out, my back against a tree, at the edge of the little pond. I close my eyes; light trickles through the leaves; big red patches light up beneath my eyelids; I savour the familiar smell of plaster from blank grenades thrown by the soldiers at the nearby army camp, during their exercises. Sufficient intoxication, on a normal day: the light in the trees, the smell of powder, Hell (to which I turn my back); but this afternoon, it doesn’t quite work. What had happened to me earlier on? I saw something else—something new, a rending of the veil. My ‘place’ was not here, now; my games seemed dull. Now, I wanted to go there: through the torn opening. I feel a sudden urge to end it all—right there, right then. A strange desire, shining like the blade of a knife. Perhaps I can no longer stand the beating of my own heart: the first experience of ecstasy was too strong. Like every afternoon, I rub twigs one against the other, and form figures in the sand with bits of wood. The figures point me to a world where signs give rise to a story. I watch the sunshine moving in the trees, until it sets the signs ablaze, and my solitude is haloed in light.

Leaves flicker across my face; protecting me, like a knight’s tent. The sunlight floats between my hands in the grass. I could have killed myself that day just by asking my body to die: it would have stopped living. I get up, leave the wood, and walk through the poppies; without thinking, I look for the cross. It is still over there, on the pavement; shining in its bin. Suddenly, there’s a hellish racket: the rubbish lorry, appearing out of nowhere—a broad stain on the white sky. Two colossi dressed in green, with monstrous gauntlets, leap down from the vehicle, gesticulate at the cross. They look as if they’re laughing. One of them takes hold of the cross, raises it up above his head, then brings it crashing down with all his might on the pavement, striking the ground twice over. The cross shatters. He picks up the pieces and throws them onto the truck. The laughter continues, the truck pulls away.

Yannick Haenel

The Meaning of Stillness

I begin to shake. The poppies are extinguished. The sun scowls in the dusty five o’clock haze. I am standing in the middle of a field, like a statue, incapable of movement. The voice inside us all, endlessly formulating our life, the tireless murmur, phrase after phrase, that constitutes the key to its understanding, alerted me to the decisive nature of the moment. At the time, more than anything else, I loved the romances of the Round Table: Perceval, Lancelot, Yvain, the pensive knights were all my brothers. Nothing is more beautiful or mysterious than those moments when they come to a halt, stock-still in the depths of the forest, oblivious, astride their horse, their faces rapt and smiling, like saints. I stood like that for an hour, absent, rooted to the spot, in the poppy-field. Do I feel pain? Vertigo descends, gathering speed, tearing through my stillness. Something in me is damaged, something deserts me. I become a desert. At last, I break into a run. I scurry in all directions: the empty bin, home. Opposite the first house there is a hole. I don’t see it. I fall in. I head for home, face covered in blood. During my fall, my knee had knocked against my eye socket, breaking the skin. I walk slowly, one hand pressed to my split eye. I walk on with mixed pleasure, as if carrying within me the death of God.

Aline Kiner

The Game of Hangman

December 2004. Police Commander Simon Dreemer is posted to the SRPJ (Regional Criminal Investigations Unit) in Metz. He has only just arrived from Paris when the body of a seventeen-year-old girl is found in a crevasse in a neighbouring village; the corpse has been intricately bound with rope. The following day, a curious pile of twigs is discovered in the local cemetery at the foot of a statue of Dieu Piteux—an image common in the Lorraine, which depicts the body of the crucified Christ bound with ropes. This was the very spot where, in 1944, a group of resistants hanged a man they suspected of being a collaborator.

Publisher: Liana Levi Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Sylvie Mouchès s.mouches@lianalevi.fr Translation: Frank Wynne frank.wynne@mac.com

With the help of his police lieutenant Jeanne Modover, a native of Lorraine, Simon Dreemer learns that this apparently tranquil region cloaks a multitude of sins. Together, Dreemer and Modover delve into the minds, the memories of the “gueules jaunes”—the men whose faces are still stained and yellow from the ore from years of gruelling labour in the iron-mines. What phantom from the war or from the mines has returned to slaughter young girls? Aline Kiner’s confident, sure-footed prose effortlessly evokes the history of Lorraine and recreates the stifling atmosphere of a small village determined to keep its secrets buried.

Friday, December 10, 2004

1 p.m.

Biography

The daughter of a miner, Aline Kiner grew up in the Moselle in a small village not unlike Varange, the fictional hamlet which is the setting for her first crime novel. She studied literature at university and went on to become a journalist. A keen student of history and archaeology, her book La Cathédrale, livre de pierre (photographs by François Guénet) was published by Presses de la Renaissance in 2004. She is the editor of special editions for the magazine Sciences et Avenir. She lives in Paris.

Commissioner Kowalski, his coat thrown over his arm, was leaving his office as Simon arrived at the srpj headquarters in Metz. “Commander Dreemer?” the commissioner held out his hand, “Just in time. Drop your stuff over there anywhere, we’ve got a call out.” “Jeanne’s already at the scene.” He added, as though somehow this explained things. Kowalski was a redoubtable man—some nineteen stone of muscle and fat. He had a stocky frame, his belly spilled out over his belt, his hips and his thighs seemed about to burst the seams of his trousers, but Simon would not have called the man obese. Perhaps because beneath the flab, his face, with its thin, hooked nose and piercing eyes, was a powerful mask of flesh. There was a car waiting for them outside the station. Kowalski introduced the man behind the wheel as Lieutenant Tellier, who shot Simon a vague smile then turned the ignition as Dreemer climbed into the back seat next to Kowalski. “Body of a young woman’s been found in the woods about twenty kilometres north-east of Metz,” the commissioner explained, “We’ll be heading up the preliminary investigation, the local force just doesn’t have the manpower.” “How did she die?”

“The body was found at the bottom of a crevasse. There’s a lot of cracks and crevices round this way—subsidence from the old mines.” “Accident?” “Doesn’t look like it according to Jeanne … to Lieutenant Modover.” Kowalski made a face and tapped Tellier on the shoulder. “You’ll need to swing by Mauduit’s mother’s place and pick him up. Holiday’s over for him.” “It’s a bit out of our way.” “I know, but he says he’s still not fit to drive.” Tellier shrugged, and Kowalski slumped back in his seat, eyes half-closed. He had apparently decided to say nothing further. They drove through the streets of Metz. On his arrival, Simon had been startled by the train station—a bewildering fusion of military and religious architecture, its vast hall vaulted like a cathedral, the main door flanked by carved lions, a tower that looked like something from a medieval castle. He could see the same striking admixture of grey granite and pink sandstone, so utterly different from the sober yellow limestone buildings in the town centre, in the streets they were now driving through. Then the car turned onto the motorway. Kowalski and Tellier were silent as they drove and gradually Simon began to relax. He had been expecting questions, to feel he was being scrutinized, but the two men seemed uninterested. He could see only the back of Tellier’s head, the collar of a striped shirt sticking out of a navy blue jumper. He looked vaguely English. Even from behind he exuded a casual air. After about ten kilometres of suburbs—shopping centres alternating with housing developments—the turned off the motorway onto a secondary road that scaled a small, wooded valley to emerge onto a vast plain which stretched out to the horizon. Here and there were groups of tilled fields, their deep ochre soil bristling with charred stubble. Mauduit was waiting for them at the entrance to a modern housing development on the outskirts of an old village. He was a dark-haired, slightly built man. He was wearing sunglasses and, as he climbed into the front passenger seat, Simon noticed bruising around his right eye. The Lieutenant brusquely greeted everyone then lapsed into sullen silence. With a little laugh, Tellier pulled off again. They drove through the village, a dozen squat farmhouses with walls the colour of clay, then the road dipped and the landscape changed once more. Suddenly the forest reared up, leafy, impenetrable. The car was filled with the smell of leaves and wet clay. It was not what Simon had been expecting. He had imagined a landscape of blast furnaces, with plumes of smoke rising in the grimy sky, disused railway tracks, rusting carriages. The road narrowed, winding in hairpin bends along a steep hill. To the left, the beech tree roots snaked from the grassy embankment

between the undergrowth and the tarmac; to the right was a sheer drop. For a moment, the car sped along, level with the treetops. Simon spotted a small riverbed overgrown with brambles and, farther off, a large deforested area on which stood a few rusting corrugated iron shacks and abandoned plant machinery. Kowalski, whom he had assumed was asleep, sat up slightly. “That’s the pithead of the old iron mine,” the commissioner explained, “Been closed must be ten years now. And that hill there—that’s the slag heap, the waste from the smelting in the blast furnaces.” Through the trees, Simon caught a glimpse of a dust-grey hill that seemed to stretch away to the east. Around the base of the hill, huge blocks of the same grey agglomerate had tumbled onto each other. A lunar landscape, like the debris from a volcano … Varange, the village they were headed for, was a few kilometres further, deep in the valley that carved a north-south scar through the plain. The main road through the village, narrow and shadowy, petered out after the last few houses and on the outskirts of the forest it became a dirt track. Here, there was a uniformed policeman waiting, sitting on a tree trunk. He slid into the back seat of the car, squeezed in next to Simon who huddled against the door. Tellier drove well, deftly avoiding the rutted tracks frozen hard by the recent frost. They quickly came to a fork in the track where a number of cars were parked along the grassy verge. The policeman told Tellier to park. They would have to go the rest of the way on foot. Indian file, the four men crept along a narrow path. Simon kept his hands buried in the pockets of his coat. The air was icy and the cold seeped through the thin leather soles of his shoes. He wasn’t really dressed for this sort of expedition. Ahead of him, Kowalski, despite his lumbering frame, was making good headway. After about fifteen minutes, the group finally emerged into a clearing. The scene looked posed, like a film set. The slim body of a young girl lay on the ground on a plastic body-bag. Her blond hair, entangled with twigs and leaves, spilled over the blue-white skin of her bare shoulder. Kneeling beside her, a woman with a shock of brown hair tied back stared at the body, motionless. A few paces away, an old man sat on a tree stump, hands folded on his knees, head bowed. A small dog lay at his feet. Farther away, as though behind the camera, silent figures in white moved about, taking photographs, making notes. The scenes of crime officers had almost finished their work. A twig snapped, someone cleared their throat and the splayed body was just a corpse again. The woman with the auburn hair got to her feet and came over to them. She greeted the commissioner with a smile and turned to Simon. “Commander Dreemer,” Kowalski made the formal introduction, “He’s come down from Paris … to support the team.”

Aline Kiner

The Game of Hangman

Bertrand de La Peine

Soundtrack

Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Translation: Ros Schwartz schwartz@btinternet.com

Biography

Publications

Publisher: Éd. de Minuit

Kowalski’s faint hesitation was not lost on Simon. “Good to have you with us,” the woman held out her hand, “Jeanne Modover.” She was about thirty, her face unlined, her eyes blue or green, or perhaps both and a little too big. Pretty enough, though unremarkable except when she smiled. Lieutenant Modover filled them in on what she had gleaned so far. The dead girl was Nathalie Caspar. Seventeen years old. Lived in Varange. The body had been discovered shortly before 9am by the local priest, Louis Sugères, who had identified the girl after forensics extricated the body from the crevasse. “A couple branches had been thrown over the body in a crude attempt to hide it,” Modover explained, “The body was face down, wedged in the crevasse about five feet down—though it’s looks pretty wide, the crevasse narrows. The evidence suggests the murderer pushed her down as far as possible.” “What evidence?” Kowalski asked. “There were traces of soil on her back indicating someone used their feet to try and ram the body down.” The commissioner turned slowly and looked at the supine figure lying on the stretcher. “Any sign of sexual assault?” Jeanne shook her head. “Too early to tell. She wasn’t undressed. The clothes are torn at the neck and shoulder, but that might just be from having caught on something a branch in the crevasse. There are abrasions to the skin.” “Cause of death?” The woman hesitated a moment and frowned as she answered. “There was a ligature. A hemp rope …” Kowalski’s face tensed. “She was hanged?” Jeanne shook her head. “Strangulation marks aren’t very deep. Besides, the rope wasn’t just tied round her neck, it was intricately wound around the whole body—chest, wrists, ankles … The commissioner half-closed his eyes. “Cause of death?” Kowalski insisted. Again, Jeanne hesitated. The M.E. says that the rope was used to stage the body. That Nathalie Caspar was probably asphyxiated. He thinks …” She bowed her head and seemed suddenly distraught.” “He believes someone pushed her face into the mud and held it there. For a long time. Like they were trying to drown her.

Bertrand de La Peine was born in 1962 in Avignon. Soundtrack is his second novel. Les Hémisphères de Magdebourg, Éditions de Minuit, 2009.

Sven Langhens is preparing for an exhibition in the Luberon that will feature some of the biggest names in experimental sound art. Back in Paris, where his wife has just walked out on him, the Danish artist comes across an ancient volume on “singing stones” by a certain Rudolf Erich Raspe, while rummaging through an old trunk. He follows Raspe’s trail to Ireland, turning up at the elderly Mrs Scott’s estate as the first

barrel of perry is being celebrated. During his stay, Sven follows the clues given by Raspe— an eminent geologist, author of The Adventures of Baron von Münchhausen and a great 18th-century hoaxer—and finally discovers the thing he was unconsciously seeking, blowing in the wind.

Sven washes a lettuce leaf. The lovely cos leaf jiggles dripping wet under the cold running water. Sven turns the leaf over and rubs the veins until every last speck of earth has been rinsed off. He feels the wind blowing directly onto his face through the little open window above the sink. His long sandy hair tumbles around his ears onto his heavy, bare shoulders as tanned as those of a wine-grower. He turns off the tap and carefully dries the cos leaf using a clean dishcloth. He brought the lettuce back from the market. Each week, he walks the five kilometres down from the plateau to the village, crossing the fields belonging to the Aiguades farm to reach the minor road that takes him into Cheval-Blanc. And every single Saturday, someone stops their vehicle to offer him a lift. Sven Langhens is well-known in these parts. He moved to this remote corner of the Lubéron nearly ten years ago now. Cupping the lettuce leaf in his hand like a dead insect, Sven goes into a sealed room. The door he closes behind him muffles all sound. The room is in deep shadow, no natural light filters in. A halogen standard lamp shines its beam on the Perspex box standing on the floor. There are Lilliputian microphones attached to each side of the box, facing the centre where the bright, grass-green lettuce leaf will sit. Pinching his cos leaf between thumb and forefinger, Sven’s movements are as delicate as those of a Pick-Up-Sticks player as he tries to position it bang in the centre of the box, regardless of its capricious, intrinsically leafy curves that doom his efforts to failure. But no, he seems satisfied, and smiles at the green leaf lying askew under the guard of the four mini-mics.

Sven goes over to a corner of the vast room where a silvery trail betrays the presence of a snail, and picks it up by the shell. It’s a common garden snail, the most ordinary snail there is, but it’ll do. The potential danger triggers a selfdefence reflex and the snail draws in its little horns. And yet nothing happens. It should find the contact with a lettuce leaf reassuring. Crisp and crunchy from its meticulous rinsing, the leaf might even whet the snail’s appetite. The threat seemingly averted, the snail’s little horns emerge again. While the garden snail settles itself, Sven solemnly observes the set-up. After checking the positions of the four microphones attached to the box, he gently moves the box out of the direct glare of the halogen lamp. Then he glues his nose to the glass, keeping his eyes on the lettuce leaf. The snail makes a tour of inspection around its domain. Sven then heads over to a long table on which there’s a jumble of tangled cables. He sits down on a stool on casters, and glides over to a huge piece of nickel-plated equipment. He pushes several buttons, switching on a Fostex mr8 mkii eight-track digital recorder. Two control screens open their phosphorescent eyes to display the variations in sound levels. With a confident hand, Sven activates a long cursor, while with the other he inserts a blank disk into a slot in the base of the machine. Then, from the table he grabs a cable that has a jack at one end and at the other splits into four wires that run along the wall and across the floor, connecting the four microphones on the box. The jack goes into a socket on the side of the recorder. Another jack goes into another socket. Sven adjusts a set of Sennheiser hd25 headphones on his ears. All he needs now is for the snail, which is exploring its Perspex cube, to be so good as to take an interest in the lettuce leaf. There’s a crackling sound: the snail is climbing up one of the mics. Sven jumps up and removes the gastropod from the high-precision instrument. Puts it back down on the lettuce leaf. Carefully cleans the mic with a tissue which he then uses to wipe his forehead. The silence in the room is palpable. Palpable but not in a heavy way, like ominous silences, the silences before a storm. This silence is in tune with nature, outwardly relaxed, a welcome silence. The slightest human sound that dared to break it would be flicked away to the primordial void. Besides, a long time ago Sven learned, during his solitary spells in the Vaucluse, to tame this silence, to make it the trusted companion of his hermit-like existence. But this morning, Sven cannot sense it. With the headphones jammed on his head, he’s listening to the pulsing of his jugular vein. An inward-looking silence. A sudden noise. Sven jumps, even though all his attention has been focused on the production of this noise. Admittedly, hearing the sound of a snail munching on a lettuce amplified more than three hundred times takes you by surprise. On an adjacent screen, Sven follows the sound modulations displayed as purple bars that swell and subside as the garden snail chomps. After half an

Bertrand de La Peine

Soundtrack

hour, he switches off the mics, unplugs the jack and leaves the snail to finish its meal. This creature turns out to be voracious. On the disk he has just ejected, Sven writes in black felt tip: (Snail/lettuce 4 July 2009). He labels the box too and puts the disk inside. Another recording for the animal series that Sven Langhens has been working on for several months. To whalesong, he preferred to record the commotion of a colony of termites boring into an oak beam. To the gallop of horses’ hooves, the proboscis of a butterfly sucking up nectar. To the purring of a cat, the teeth of baby field mice chattering inside their mother’s womb. To the tweeting of a sparrow, a grass snake sloughing off its skin. This Danish artist had gradually made a name for himself in the contemporary art world by creating installations made up of microsounds that are inaudible to the human ear. And when he received a commission from the Ircam … Shit, his mobile starts ringing. What an idiot Sven was! If it had rung five minutes earlier, the wretched thing would have ruined the whole operation. His fished a Blackberry out from the depths of a pocket and on the pale screen Gerda’s name was displayed. Gerda is the very person who, after quashing all Sven’s arguments against these gadgets that seriously damage your hearing and, worse, can lead to addiction, had given him this state-of-the-art mobile for his birthday. Gerda, his wife. “No, of course you’re not waking me. No, I’m working and … Yes, go on, I’m listening … What? When? … Next weekend? No, no way … You know, Gerda, I have to finish my animal sounds … Yes, again! And on top of that, this week I had an offer from Franck Castans for … Yes, Castans, the couturier. He’s just bought an abbey that he wants to convert to a centre for … But yes … I know … It’s important for me too … Can’t you wait a bit … I don’t know, a month or two? … No, Gerda, I … Wait … I …”

On leaving, Sven the budding artist had crammed his paraphernalia into the boot of the car. Throughout years of studies at Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, he’d single-mindedly pursued a sole aim: as soon as he had his degree under his belt, he wanted to go and discover the light of the south, as his illustrious predecessor had done a century earlier. And now he has found that light; the sky overhead, bleached almost white from being so blue, bathed them in the fragrance of the garrigue and the smell of silt from the river whose course they were following, to the soft rustle of the reeds, their heavy heads swaying in the wind. The road shimmered ahead of them, hazy in the same scorching air. At the wheel of the Volvo, Gerda hummed a Carole King song, a number from the Seventies that drove her wild. Beside her, Sven was catching up on the sleep he’d foregone by driving through part of the night after leaving Paris. Suddenly, he woke with a jolt. A loud grating sound had woken him. Fearing a mechanical problem, he asked his wife to turn off the engine. With this heat, the radiator must be completely dry! When he got out of the car and opened the bonnet, the racket seemed to grow louder and even more deafening. They found themselves in the very midst of an insane chirring. What on earth was it? Probably insects of some sort … Sven stood stock still in the middle of the road for a long time, mesmerised, profoundly stirred by the sound. He was later to learn that it was the cicadas, rubbing together their wing cases in the blazing heat of an afternoon in Provence. Their stay in Arles began under the best of auspices. The windows of their little hotel looked out onto the Allée des Alyscamps, and Madame Guichard’s beef casserole had, for them, a unique exotic flavour, the kind of taste whose gustative virtues brought couples close, making them believe that they are the only ones to have rediscovered the sensuality of traditional dishes.

Bertrand de la Peine

Soundtrack

* It was the dawn of the third millennium and an azure Volvo was cruising along the banks of the Durance. It had crossed the Dutch border the previous day, and the French border in the small hours. Sven was thirty-two. Gerda, twentyfive. A stop in Paris had allowed them the luxury of taking in a Mondrian exhibition followed by dinner in a Russian restaurant. They were both fond of that painter and of vodka. But now they were following in the footsteps of another Dutchman as they headed for the Rhône delta. Arles was their destination. Arles and its famous hothead: Vincent Van Gogh.

Dany Laferrière

The World Trembles Around Me

On 12th January 2010, Dany Laferrière is in Haiti for the literary festival Étonnants Voyageurs. Like so many others, he is caught in the earthquake. Unlike many, he escapes the catastrophe unscathed. A year later, in Tout bouge autour de moi (The World Trembles Around Me), he writes of what he saw that day and then some weeks later, when he returned to Haiti. Sights that speak of horror but also

Publisher: Grasset & Fasquelle Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke hwarneke@grasset.fr Translation: Sophie Lewis sophie_l@fastmail.fm

of the Haitians’ remarkable sang-froid. Laferrière retells the story of the quake through his own impressions and view of the events. He counters the sensationalism and melodrama of occidental television coverage with a sober, powerful account of this crisis whose repercussions continue to be felt worldwide. Tout bouge autour de moi is not merely a piece of testimony; it is a work of true literature.

The minute

Biography

Born in 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Dany Laferrière first made his mark in 1985 with How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer). He has since published a number of novels in France (among them four by Editions Grasset) as well as in Quebec, where he now lives. Publications His latest novels with Éditions Grasset include: L’Énigme du retour (‘The Enigma of Returning’), 2009 (Médicis Prize) (mass-market edition LGF, “Le Livre de poche” coll., 2011); Je suis un écrivain japonais (‘I’m a Japanese Writer’), 2008; Vers le sud (‘Heading South’), 2006 (adapted for film by Laurent Cantet, with Charlotte Rampling in the principal role).

There I am in the restaurant of Hotel Karibe with my friend Rodney SaintEloi, publisher of Mémoire d’encrier (Memory of an Inkpot), who has just come in from Montreal. Leaning against our table-legs were two fat suitcases filled with his latest books. I was waiting for my crayfish (on the menu it said lobster) and Saint-Eloi for a salt-baked sole. I had already started on the bread when I heard a terrible explosion. At first I thought it was a machine-gun (others will say a train), right behind me. Seeing the cooks fly past us, I thought that a boiler had just exploded. All this took less than a minute. We had eight to ten seconds in which to make a decision. Get out of the place or stay. Those who split swiftly were very few. Even the sharpest lost three or four precious seconds before they realised what was happening. I was in the hotel restaurant with friends, the publisher Rodney Saint-Eloi and the critic Thomas Spear. Spear lost three precious seconds because he wanted to finish his beer. We don’t all react alike. In any case, no-one can foresee when death will be waiting for them. All three of us found ourselves flat on the floor, in the middle of the courtyard. Under the trees. The ground began to undulate like a slip of paper carried off in the wind. The thudding sounds of buildings falling to their knees. They don’t explode. They implode, imprisoning people in their bellies. Suddenly, we see a cloud of dust rise up into the afternoon sky. As if a professional dynamiter had received the express command to destroy the whole city without blocking the streets, to give the cranes easy access.

Life already

The ladder

Life had seemed to be returning to normal after decades of turbulence. Girls would stroll in the streets laughing, late into the evening. Primitive painters chatted to the mango- and avocado-sellers on the corners of dusty streets. Banditry seemed to be on the way out. In the rougher parts of town, such as Bel-Air, crime was no longer tolerated by the worn-out population, which had seen it all in the last half-century: hereditary dictatorships, military coups d’état, cyclone after cyclone, devastating floods and random kidnappings. I was coming for this literary festival that was meant to bring writers to Port-au-Prince from all around the world. It promised to be exciting since, for the first time, literature seemed to have become the hot topic in town, more popular even than politics. Writers were being invited to speak on television more frequently than the MPs: a pretty rare thing in this highly politicised country. Literature was reclaiming its rightful place here. As early as 1929, Paul Morand noted in his perceptive essay Hiver caraïbe (Caribbean Winter) that in Haiti everything ends with a collection of poetry. Later on, during his last trip to Port-au-Prince in 1975, Malraux would talk about a population of painters. We are still trying to understand how such a concentration of artists could emerge in such a limited space. Haiti only takes up half of an island, which it shares with the Dominican Republic, in the Caribbean Sea.

We pick ourselves up slowly, like zombies in a B-movie. There are shouts in the hotel courtyard. The buildings to the back and right have crumbled. These are the apartments rented on an annual basis by foreign families, mostly French. Two teenage girls are panicking on a second-floor balcony. Very quickly, people start working out how to help them down. There are three of them there in front of the building. Two hold a ladder. The sharp young man who has had the presence of mind to go and look for the ladder in the garden is climbing up it. The older of the girls manages to climb over the balcony’s edge. She reaches the ground. Everyone crowds around her. The young man climbs back up to get the younger one, who refuses to leave the place. She insists that they wait for her mother. This is the first we hear of a third person stuck up there. The rescuers work on in sweaty silence. They need to act fast, for the block, which is barely standing, could collapse with the slightest vibration. The teenager screams that her mother is inside. While looking for a stairway to get out by, the mother had got herself locked in somewhere. Weeping, the girl points to the spot where her mother is stuck. Standing in the hotel garden, we all have our eyes riveted on this teenager who believes that if she comes down we will forget her mother. There is enormous tension in the air, for the earth has only just finished shaking. Eventually, the mother frees herself by breaking a window. She rushes to her daughter who still refuses to come down before her. Only when her mother has reached the ground will she agree to come down the ladder.

The silence I always keep two things with me when I travel: my passport (in a little bag hanging from my neck) and a black notebook in which I note down everything that crosses my field of vision or comes into my head. While I was lying on the ground, I was thinking about disaster movies, wondering if the earth was going to open and swallow us all. This was my childhood nightmare. We had retreated to the hotel’s tennis court. I was expecting to hear cries, people screaming. We say in Haiti that as long as there’s no screaming, there’s no death. Someone shouted that it wasn’t safe to stay under the trees. In fact they were wrong, for not a branch, not a flower shifted in spite of the forty-three seismic shocks of that first night. I can still hear that silence. Projectiles A shock of magnitude 7.3 is not so bad. You can still run away. Concrete was the real killer. People had gone to town with their concrete these last fifty years. Little fortresses. Being suppler, the houses made of wood and sheet metal had taken the stress. In the frequently tiny hotel bedrooms, the television became the enemy. We always sit down right in front of it. And it falls straight onto us. Lots of people had it fall on their heads.

Dany Laferrière

The World Trembles Around Me

A small party A woman walks about with a crying baby. I take him in my arms and try to soothe him. He devours me with the black eyes of a frightened mouse. A gaze so sustained that he ends up intimidating me. The woman explains that she’s his nurse. His parents are at work. She had just given him a bath when the room started to rock. Thrown about all over the room, she never lets go of the baby. She tries to leave the building by the stairs. Blocked. She returns to the bedroom and this time manages to balance the baby on the window-ledge, before lowering herself onto the balcony on the next floor down. Then she climbs on a chair to pick up the infant who, miraculously, hasn’t moved, as if he understands the gravity of the situation. As soon as she had him in her arms again, he began to cry, as though he were being skinned alive, for the next two hours. Then his parents rushed in. I hardly dare to imagine their anguish during the journey. They left the car, doors wide, in the middle of the road. The nurse gave them the baby and they danced, with savage joy, holding him tightly between them. Another tremor interrupted the little party.

Michèle Lesbre

A Huge White Lake

The hotel employees Always perfectly turned out in their uniforms, the hotel employees never lost their cool. If there was a certain amount of disorder at first, it emanated mainly from their guests, who ran in all directions. Some had to be fetched, being unable to leave their rooms. They were found pacing round and round or sitting on their bed, eyes glazed. For a while I watch the employees work hard to carry out their assigned roles. It may be the fact of having a role to fulfil that allows them to walk straight while their guests totter. As soon as we are hungry they turn up, in single file, carrying canapés to lay out on a big table. A reception had been planned for the large meeting room, near the restaurant. The food had already been prepared. Now we take advantage of their organisation. The security guards stand close to the narrow barrier at the entry to the tennis court, where we have taken refuge. They do their best to reassure the guests. I say guests rather than tourists, for the latter are rare in Haiti. Only members of the many ngos that have been festering in the country for the last few decades tend to be found here; tanned newspaper correspondents who can’t get away from the island, foreign businessmen muttering together over breakfast with Haitian politicians who are already sweating. We see the hotel owner go by in the garden, doing his tour of inspection. Pacing slowly, with a worried expression, he appears lost in his thoughts. I would give a lot to know what is going through his mind just then. The destruction is not only material. Some are seeing a lifetime’s hard work vanish in the space of a minute. That cloud in the sky a moment ago was the dust that remained of their dreams.

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: April 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton jguitton@swediteur.com Translation: Vineet Lal vineet_lal@hotmail.com

I imagine the fright of those who were in the bathroom at the moment the quake’s first shocks struck. We were all taken by surprise, but those who were in the shower must have lived through a moment of pure panic. We always feel more vulnerable when we are naked, especially covered in soapy water. In their hurry, a fair number of these people left without remembering to turn off the tap. Things The enemy is not time but all those things we accumulate from day to day. As soon as we pick up a thing, we can’t stop. For one thing demands another. It’s the cohesion of a life. We would find bodies near the door. A suitcase beside them.

The bathroom

Biography

Michèle Lesbre lives in Paris. She began writing books with a powerful, haunting quality some fifteen years ago following a career acting in regional theatre and working as a schoolteacher. After penning some thrillers, she reached a wider readership with Nina par hasard, originally published by Éditions du Seuil in 2001 (re-published by Sabine Wespieser in 2010). Publications Among her most recent works, all published by Sabine Wespieser, are: Sur le sable, 2009; Le Canapé rouge, 2007 (winner of the Prix Pierre Mac Orlan and the Prix Millepages 2007); and La Petite Trotteuse, 2005 (winner of the Prix des libraires Initiales Automne 2005, the Prix Printemps du roman 2006 and the Prix de la ville de Saint-Louis 2006). These titles have been re-published by Gallimard as part of the “Folio” collection.

One morning, the narrator sets out to meet a man she doesn’t know: she feels compelled to engage in a deeper conversation with this stranger, who talks tirelessly about Ferrara every Wednesday at the Café Lunaire near the Jardin des Plantes. But the man fails to arrive. From this moment on, past and present start to blur, the city begins to fade and other places gradually take centre stage. As she daydreams, an image from her past rises up, the “huge white lake”, submerged beneath the snow of the Aubrac region, where Édith Arnaud fell in love for the first time and had her first taste of political activism. She has never seen Antoine again, the angry young man so desperate to change the world back then. But he casts

a long shadow over the narrative, a shadow that will soon also fall on the Italian from the Po Delta whose mists haunt the narrator’s mental landscape. It matters little that time passes, illusions are shattered and appointments broken. Surrounded by the silence and dazzling whiteness of this unusual day, the solitary Édith shows no sign of wishing to give up. Her zany conversations with a crow in the Jardin des Plantes are quite in tune with the bittersweet nature of her existence. Once again, Michèle Lesbre tightens the cord running through the minutiae of life in words that reveal, with heartbreaking precision, its true meaning.

His hands. Hands that are wrinkled before their time, the fingers a little swollen, the skin dry and blotchy, the nails outlined in black. He holds his cup in his left hand, tracing circles on the counter with his right. He wonders what I do for a living, asking the question with a breezy, impulsive audacity that matches his youth. I say nothing. We’re alone in the tiny bar, leaning on the counter. Music plays quietly in the background, accompanying the waiter who appears to be moving in synch with its brisk, snappy tempo. I don’t reply, having no desire to open up any kind of conversation. I’ve come in to get warm and think about how I’m going to fill a day that’s started off so bizarrely. Besides, I wouldn’t know what to say, I can’t just talk about some man who wasn’t on the 8.15 train, or some feathered friend that might be watching out for me, it’s all too personal, too sketchy, and I’m not sure of anything, so what’s the sense in giving an answer? I catch a brief glimpse of his face in the mirror, behind the glasses and bottles, I ask myself whether the rest of his body is as disfigured as his hands, and it pains me to think it might be. He’s really so very young, which makes his question seem all the more misplaced. How could my life possibly be of interest? He’s grinning at me in a funny kind of way, does he think I look ridiculous? Probably the hat, yes, it must be the hat, I’ve always got it on in winter, it was a present. If I removed it, would my white hair put him off? I’m tempted to make a joke about my quirky habits, to show that I can’t be fooled, that his smirk speaks volumes about what he thinks of me and that frankly I couldn’t care less. Except I’m not convinced of this either.

Two men walk into the bar and join us at the counter, they look like construction workers. I’m hoping they’ll offer a distraction, but my neighbour’s nothing if not persistent. I have no wish to be unpleasant, or to have to begin explaining why I’m so quiet. The presence of the two men prompts me to abandon my little game. I cave in and instantly regret it, My routine’s been upset this morning, so I’m trying to adjust. He bursts out laughing, We all have our little routines, the truth is you don’t want to answer. I smile. All of a sudden I’m watching myself as the drama unfolds, and I’m not impressed. The two men pretend to ignore us, the music stops, a freezeframe that makes me long for our encounter to end. We all have our little routines he repeats, leaning towards me. He smells of earth and I look at his hands. I feel like asking what got them into such a state, I settle instead for drinking my coffee and paying. The music starts up once more and I seize my chance to leave. Just as I walk through the door I hear, one last time, Routines … The word is said emphatically, I imagine my back caught in the glare of youthful insolence, I think of hands tortured by hard labour and tender bodies that life sometimes grinds to dust. I hesitate over whether to turn round to smile at him again, then decide not to. The pavement’s frozen. A few steps further on, I’m back in front of the entrance to the Jardin des Plantes, maybe the keepers have decided to open the gates. The snow begins falling once more, huge flakes that collide against my cheeks. I’ve left my gloves somewhere, on the bus or the café counter, but I’ve no intention of going to look for them. This is the first and last time I’m setting foot here, because I never walk down this street. I glance back occasionally, on the off chance that someone’s trying to catch me up and give them back. But the pavement’s deserted, all you can see are my footprints about to vanish under the snow. It’s almost that time in the morning when I’d be getting to my office. I picture the others, who’re all down the same corridor, caught up in the morning hubbub that I just can’t stand. What’s the point of pretending otherwise? I can practically hear that slip of a secretary in her heels clacking to and fro between the coffee machine and the different floors, the scent of lily of the valley lingering after her, she must be, what, twenty at the very most and leaves a trail of chaos in her wake throughout the offices upstairs. The garden gates are still firmly shut. A keeper approaches and, seeing my surprise, explains it’s because of the snow and the risk of accidents. Neither of us believes a word of this. I turn into Rue Buffon without really knowing where I’m going, since everything’s now completely hidden. The forbidden garden makes my blood boil. I walk across it every morning and to be barred from entering is more than I can bear, even though I’m not going to the office today. I turn round to gaze at it once more behind the railings, rather than just fuming in vain.

Michèle Lesbre

A Huge White Lake

The pale sky mirrors the pristine whiteness. Trees float in a pearly mist suspended by the snow. In the distance, seen from behind, Buffon is sailing on his plinth as if on a makeshift raft. Something from my childhood surges over me, something quite muddled but soothing too, although I want to ignore it for no particular reason. Behind me, the city’s starting to blur, consumed by a mass of white spreading over it. And then some words ring out in my memory, along with the voice that spoke them decades ago: A huge white lake! A huge white lake! I can see Antoine again, his slim figure rolling around in the snow like a mad dog. The three of us watched him without daring to join in, it was just so beautiful. That was a whole different world, in a different time. Perhaps it was even a dream. Remembering Antoine, who was so radiant back when we used to sing the praises of the class struggle, deep in the silence of the countryside, suddenly brings tears to my eyes. We were hardly more than teenagers. The car was weighed down with pamphlets and brochures that we used to distribute liberally as we travelled, through lifeless villages and towns numb with cold. We would hold forth on our beliefs whenever even a modest audience was ready to listen. Antoine was the oldest among us, he used to drive the car, being the only one with a licence, he was also the driver on the expedition that ended at the huge white lake. The 2cv hadn’t been able to cope with the storm and had given up the ghost. I try to conjure up a clearer picture of what Lise, Jean and Antoine looked like, but they remain as hazy as the garden behind its frosty veil. All I can hear is Antoine’s voice receding into the distance, reflected back at me by an imaginary echo like a cry for help. I wonder what’s happened to Lise and Jean, what’s become of us all without Antoine. Then everything becomes fuzzy, that far-off time seems to break away and fade out on the blank screen of the elusive garden. I find myself rambling between a temporary present and eternal whiteness. * Last night it snowed in my dreams and I thought I could hear the Italian’s voice saying to me in that accent I love, Come and see, everything’s white … It was impossible for him to be there but I got up all the same and went to the window. The street had become a pale-coloured gash, so it really had been snowing after all. A city in black and white huddling below a sky that looked as if it wasn’t even there. The Italian hasn’t ever been to my place, I don’t actually know him—you can’t call bumping into each other in a café, without exchanging so much as a word, knowing someone—and yet I’d decided to go and wait for the 8.15 train this morning, so I could approach him when he arrived. I’d taken the day off work.

There I was, last night, standing motionless in front of my bedroom window, gazing at the snow glistening in the cold light of the street lamps. Daybreak was still some way off. I felt slightly dizzy watching that endless whirl plummeting and breaking up on the ground. You’d have been excused for thinking it was snowing inside as well, with the shadows of the flakes sliding down my walls. The insistent sound of a machine was throbbing somewhere, most probably in the kitchen. Normally, these tiny, familiar noises lull me to sleep, suddenly they were no more than a troublesome rumbling. And then I felt cold, I went back to bed thinking there was no doubt about it, this man took up a lot of room, too much in fact. I no longer knew whether or not I really should go to the station and surprise him, or indeed what I would say to justify being there on the platform. I try to recall the exact words I thought I heard in my sleep, Come, Are you coming … I can’t remember anymore. I know so very little about him: his voice, his somewhat weary, subdued appearance, and those brief moments every Wednesday at the Café Lunaire, where I stop off each morning before crossing the Jardin des Plantes and where he speaks to the waiter in his mother tongue, about everything and nothing, about their home town, Ferrara. It means a lot to me, Ferrara. It feels as if I’m right back there every Wednesday morning when he arrives at the Café Lunaire. I come across some strange people in bars of a morning. I like the customers with their dazed, wild-eyed look. I’ve always loved bars, that contrived air of intimacy. What I find pleasing is the obvious spirit of collusion, enough to see you through the trials and tribulations of a day that’s about to begin and which you know nothing of as yet. When I was very young, I’d spend long periods drinking coffee, analysing the faces of men who used to come and sit down with a drink, they were silent, almost meditative, often lost in their daydreams. I’d wait for them to notice I was there, until someone looked in my direction. I’d keep this up for a few seconds and then I’d leave. Something about these fleeting images fascinated me, the prospect of them fading into oblivion, I think, filling me with vague and visceral despair. I’d arrive late for school and try to pin them down in my mind, along with everything that might link them to my father, and to the memories I had of him. Nowadays, I sometimes forget what makes me invisible in men’s eyes, I forget I’m growing old. We no longer exchange glances but I’m still in the habit of going for a coffee in the mornings, that compulsory transition from the lethargy of night to the frenzy of day. I still love chance encounters, changes of scene, and the play of light and shade that brings them to life.

Michèle Lesbre

A Huge White Lake

Marcus Malte

Harmonics

A car drives through the night, jazz playing on the radio. On board are Mister, a black jazz musician crazy about John Coltrane and Lady Day, and his friend and sidekick Bob, a former philosophy teacher turned taxi driver, who reveres the Greek classics and Schopenhauer even more than Thelonius Monk and Stan Getz. The two men are on their way to Paris, driven by Mister’s obsession: Vera, a young woman he recently met, has been found dead, burned alive. The culprits have already been arrested, but Mister doesn’t believe the official version and decides to carry out his own investigation,

Publisher: Gallimard Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Howard Curtis curtis9@talktalk.net

an investigation that will lead the two men to rub shoulders with some very disreputable characters and to lift the veil on a story that might have been better kept secret. Mister and Bob find themselves deep inside a vast conspiracy, involving a journey to the Yugoslav front and reaching a climax full of violence and horror … Harmonics is an incredible novel, dark, violent, and melancholy, not so much noir as chiaroscuro. A heartrending song of lament, combining politics, passion, protest and sex. Like all classic blues …

Biography

Marcus Malte was born in 1967 in La Seyne-sur-Mer, where he has lived ever since. He studied cinema and worked as a rock and jazz musician before becoming a writer for both adults—specialising in crime novels—and children. In just a few years, he has unquestionably become one of the most innovative and highly regarded crime writers in France. Publications Among his most recent novels and stories, all published by Zulma: Toute la nuit devant nous, 2008; Garden of Love, 2007 (reissued Gallimard, Folio Policier, 2009); Intérieur nord, 2005; La Part des chiens, 2003 (reissued Gallimard, Folio Policier, 2008); Et tous les autres crèveront, 2001.

During the nights that followed, Mister slept even less and even more badly than usual. His restless sleep would regularly end in his waking with a start, forehead bathed in sweat, heart pounding, a big vein swollen with blood throbbing in his throat. Although he had no clear memory of the nightmares that sent him back unceremoniously across the white line of sleep, he was convinced they were born and nurtured beneath an evil raven’s wing. The black bird was in him, he believed. It had stuck its claws in the soft matter of his brain and would not rest until it had eaten it whole. Just as it had done with Vera Nad. Just as it might be doing right now with Josef Kristi. The circle was expanding. Increasingly, sliding down the slippery slope of empathy, Mister felt that he was part of it. He, too, was joining the dance of death, where a place had been kept for him. Holding Vera Nad by one hand, Joseph Kristi by the other. What did they have in common apart from the fact that they were over-sensitive? A carrion bird always starts with the tenderest morsels. Vera had been the first to succumb. Whenever Mister emerged sweating from the cesspool of his bad dreams, the first image that imposed itself on his distraught mind was Vera’s face. Her swanlike neck. Her pale complexion.

Her dark amber irises. And that wasn’t all: even in a waking state, he often thought he glimpsed that slender figure he believed he could recognize anywhere. Here or there, amid the crowd in the metro, on a platform or a boulevard, by the light of a street lamp or caught in headlights, not to mention all the times she had come to him at night in the smoky atmosphere of the Green Dolphin, appearing suddenly, haloed by a noxious mist, returning to him like a dead bride once unjustly condemned to limbo and now at last released. Unable to leave his piano or the stage, Mister would watch her approach. At such moments only his fingers would keep to the tempo, his pulse beating so fast it defied any known bar lines. But it wasn’t her, of course. Just a reflection, false airs, a rough copy. After Vera’s face, the second image that struck Mister on waking was … Vera’s face as painted by Josef Kristi. The series of twelve paintings he had seen in the gallery remained engraved on his memory. He could run through them in his mind, one by one, contemplate them over and over again in the smallest detail. He did so constantly, and both the distress and the insidious, aching sense of dread that this experiment distilled in him kept growing. It wasn’t so much that the likeness was remarkable, as that the painter had seen deep into Vera’s soul. Beyond appearances, beyond surfaces, even beyond flesh and blood, he had somehow expressed a naked truth that Mister had merely skimmed, a truth that now seemed to him absolutely terrifying. The painter had seen right through the secret of Vera Nad. What had seeped into his canvases was the essence of evil. So yes, she had succumbed but the dance continued. If not in body, then at least in spirit, Vera was still alive. And would stay alive as long as she was supported by their hands, the pianist’s and the painter’s. If for no other reason than that, Mister needed Josef Kristi. He wondered if Kristi, too, wasn’t on the verge of letting go. Judging by his work, it was a legitimate fear. Mister didn’t want to be left alone. He dreaded the thought of bearing the weight of the dead by himself. He wasn’t sure he’d be strong enough. The black bird scared him. Whether he was opening his eyes, the blinds or the lid of his piano, he had the impression that every gesture he made was accompanied by a sinister rustle of wings. He had to see the painter at all costs before it was too late. But the decision wasn’t up to him. The days were passing and he hadn’t heard from the Rankin Gallery. The telephone had stopped ringing. These days and nights were slow and difficult. Meanwhile, in his corner, Bob was sticking in tacks. In a virtual sense, of course—the only time in his life he had held a hammer, he had lost both the nail on his little finger and his youthful blind faith in the doctrine of the common ownership of the means of production. The tacks that Bob was hammering into his skull were only there to fix the various elements of the case:

information, questions, deductions, hypotheses, and so on. An abundance of hastily scribbled sheets of paper that soon covered the walls of his brain in all directions. Anyone entering that lair would have thought they were in some old community centre, looking at the cork notice board. Bob called it: getting his thoughts together. That very first evening, after they’d been to the gallery, he’d come back and collapsed into his huge leather armchair. He’d needed to withdraw. Reflect. Think it through. Keith Jarrett on a loop on the tape deck. That was how Betty had found him when she, too, returned from her wanderings through the fanlight in the kitchen. She had taken her place at the foot of the armchair and serenaded him with her song of starvation, misery, pity, then seduction, then indignation, but all to no avail. Her master was miles away. If she couldn’t have flaked tuna, she had resigned herself to looking for a little warmth in his lap. Nestling. Fur against corduroy. Languidly, she had closed her green eyes. This private conversation had gone on for three whole hours. Bob was pinning up his famous notes. He considered it an advantage that, unlike Mister, he hadn’t known Vera Nad, or hardly at all. He’d met her three or four times, and had kept the memory of, yes, an angelic face, a well-behaved, reserved young woman. A girl young enough to have been his daughter … His mind had wandered for a few moments around that last thought. It was a bitter-sweet thought. One that weighed slightly on his chest. Bob didn’t have any children. He’d had Flint, he’d had Casanova, he’d had La Goulue and the near-twins Stan and Laurel, he’d had Lady Chattelaide. Now he had Betty. (His hand had left the threadbare armrest and his fingers had sunk into the cat’s fur, mechanically.) When it had become more bitter than sweet, he had tightened a few screws—still virtually. Mister might work by emotion and instinct, but that made it all the more essential for Bob to remain rigorous and pragmatic. Like a metronome. Without any possible deviation or slackening of the tempo. No bird of ill omen was going to scare him off. Facts. Data. What did they have so far? Vera Nad, twenty-six, born in what was still sometimes called the former Yugoslavia. Where exactly? What region? (To be checked.) Arrived in France when she was about twenty. No known family in the country. No boyfriend either (to be checked). Spent most of her time studying drama. Attended Madeleine Stein’s classes at the Lazare Workshop. Small parts in fringe productions—a makeshift stage and off you went, no budget, not much income either, but it was experience. Apart from that, whatever parts she could get. Commercials, TV, films. Mostly as an extra, a face glimpsed fleetingly in the crowd, somewhere in the background, sometimes even off-camera. No actual lines. Lousy fees. Various casual jobs to tide her over the bad times, of which

Marcus Malte

Harmonics

Bernard Marc & Maryse Rivière

When Men Clash

there were still plenty. Babysitting, cleaning, telesales, for less than the minimum wage. What else? An artists’ model. Maybe just one artist’s model. She meets Josef Kristi. Where? When? How? (To be checked.) She poses for him. She strips off for him. What else? Drugs. She hadn’t looked as if she had anything to do with drugs, but her killers claimed she’d been dealing and had tried to con them. The accounts she presented weren’t correct, so they’d settled them in their own way. It was only meant to be a warning, but things had got out of hand. That was their story, anyway. Dirty little bastards. It was their word against her silence (to be checked, of course, but that was the crux of it). Finally, Vera Nad had been doused in petrol then burned alive. What was left of her body had been found in a disused warehouse over towards Montreuil. What else? The cat had been asleep for a while now. Curled up in a ball on Bob’s knees, warm and alive. He hadn’t had the heart to wake her, which made for an excellent excuse not to move. He was raking the animal’s fur with his fingertips. His eyes were starting to smart. His thoughts were fraying. He wouldn’t get much more from the data before sunrise. Bob had stretched his legs and laid his head back in the armchair. He, too, had closed his eyes. Keith Jarrett was playing in the dark now. Flying. Part one. Part two. Keith was gliding, borne aloft by his two partners, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette. A lunar trio. They had taken off, and were moving now in their own imaginary country, and Bob had finally dozed off, entertaining the hope that he could go there with them.

Publisher: Calmann-Lévy Date of Publication: February 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Patricia Roussel proussel@calmann-levy.fr

Translation: Sophie Leighton s.leighton@clara.co.uk

Biography

Bernard Marc grew up in Belleville. As a historian of science, most of his works concern the French Armies Medical Service in 1914–1918. A hospital doctor, he is an expert at the Court of Appeal and the head of forensic medicine at the hospital centre in Compiègne. He is the author of Profession: médecin legiste, le quotidien d’un médecin des violences [Forensic pathologist: the everyday life of a doctor dealing with acts of violence], published in 2009 by Demos editions, and he is co-author of several historical works on combatants in the Great War. Maryse Rivière has spent a long time travelling across the world; nowadays she relates her experiences. An eclectic author, she navigates between genres, alternating between historical monographs, detective novels and short stories. Publications Bernard Marc: Aviateurs de la Grande Guerre [Aviators of the Great War], with Pierre Robin, published by Bernard Giovanangeli, 2005; Profession: médecin légiste, le quotidien d’un médecin des violences [Forensic pathologist: the everyday life of a doctor dealing with acts of violence], Demos, 2009. Maryse Rivière: Le Roman de Gournay [The story of Gournay], Liv’Éditions, 2008; Sous le signe de la souris [Under the sign of the mouse], Liv’Éditions, 2008.

In 1909, Louis Tréhen moves to Paris to study medicine and he embarks on discovering the capital and its two faces: its radiance and the destitute existence of its social outcasts. Over the course of these pre-war years, he carves out his own path, forming friendships and associations and, above all, confirming his vocation as a doctor. Then in 1919, Louis is confined in a zinc carapace at the coastal hospital of Berck-sur-Mer. Having left for the front to treat soldiers, he is already well acquainted with men’s suffering. After being struck in his turn during a bombardment, he waits for the pain to pass and his condition

to improve. As a doctor, it is hard to ignore his own symptoms: as a means of distracting himself, he sets about writing and reading the story of his finest years to his fellows in adversity—the time when it would have been better for life to have ended. In this co-authored coming-of-age novel, Maryse Rivière and Bernard Marc interweave the story of these two Louis figures: the first, young and happy; the second, crushed by the war. They lead us into the colourful Paris of Apollinaire and the Bonnot gang, giving us insight into the unlucky fate of those who perished at the dawn of the 20th century.

At night, it feels as if I am not sleeping or am in a dazed slumber. I dream that I am walking in the wood where our field hospital was hidden behind some quarries, north of Compiègne. I am walking up the long road strewn with dead leaves and twigs that give way under my feet with a dry snap. The cannons have fallen silent; the guns have stopped firing. All is quiet; I am walking alone and fearlessly. At the top of the road, in a clearing, the deserted quarry spreads out. I am walking forward among blocks of stone and entering the excavated rock, which forms deep caves that serve as natural shelters for our settlement. We had stopped up the holes and converted the spaces into two storeys with wooden floors. Everything is untouched, empty and silent. I am wandering around the galleries, stroking the stone that is permeated with our suffering and pierced by the mysterious and distant echo of our speech. I think I can hear the voice of Morel, the head doctor, or Plantey, the pharmacist, or maybe it is Dutreuil, the medical orderly, calling me over to a casualty’s bedside. Every corner is familiar: these altar-shaped blocks were our emergency operating tables; around this darkened hearth the men would sit to get warm; this broader, better-ventilated cave housed the casualties from Ypres; here we set up a dormitory, over there a hospice … The rock has its memories … so does the forest, forcing its roots down through the stones and mingling its living branches with the melancholy, silent mineral. I walk on a little further and I find the sculptures that were hollowed out in the limestone by some soldiers. A legionnaire portrayed a woman’s head springing out of the rock face:

her open, twisted mouth is uttering a mute cry. In one corner is a statue of Joan of Arc, which the sculptor made as proud and majestic as the victory in prospect, then there are some images of chubby women in corsets and lace bloomers, faces of regular soldiers and Crosses of Lorraine. Far inside a dark cave, the chaplain stretcher-bearer would celebrate mass or the Office of the Dead by candlelight. I am walking in the quarries of Chauffours, at night, to the brink of exhaustion, like a damned soul; I am a ghost, a sleepwalker who must not be awoken for fear he will fall.

Bernard Marc & Maryse Rivière

When Men Clash

I close the newspaper that is full of nothing but frontiers, responsibilities, reparations and the League of Nations. I am thinking about those who will not return … I am thinking of nothing else … ‘The fact of the war can never be forgotten’, said Clemenceau. I hope his words will be heeded! Not long ago I was a First-Class Assistant-Major in an ambulance, one of those surgical units that moved from one end of the front to the other, according to the progress of the fighting. We would walk for hours, sometimes through fields, to reach our area, leaving the main roads to the labouring artillery convoys. In the early days, our ambulance looked rather like a circus travelling from one village to the next with its horse-drawn wagons. As the months went by, we were equipped with small trucks so that we could advance along the roads. In spring 1918, our unit was called into the Compiègne region, where the Kaiser was conducting a terrifyingly powerful offensive. We did not yet know that this was the violence of the last chance. Like a dying man shaken by a spasm that heralds imminent death, Wilhelm’s army was battling furiously. The rural hospital where we had been operating for the past two months stood inside some vast quarries that had been converted by the territorial units, near Chauffours. It was a curious place. I found the height and nobility of the stone, the strangeness of the setting and the rusticity of our settlement gave these quarries a Dantesque aspect. This effect was only intensified by the indifferent presence of nature. Our unit had reached its maximum efficiency: the officers, junior officers, medical orderlies and supply-train soldiers were scarcely sleeping any more. We were struggling with all kinds of casualties, including a disturbing number of gas victims. As in the worst times of the war, supplies were no longer getting through to us; the extreme tension and fatigue were having an impact on our organisation. Every day we more or less managed to form a convoy of medical wagons to take the wounded away towards the hospitals behind the lines, keeping on site only those who had minor injuries or could not be moved. When the thunder of the explosions stopped, the air was full of groans and coughing. Our organisation was becoming catastrophic. The head doctor ordered me to take a short rest but, as I was finding it impossible to get to sleep, I lent

a hand to Dutreuil, my medical sergeant, who was evacuating a group of gas casualties. This operation was supposed to take no more than an hour and posed no particular risk. Dutreuil had directed the stretcher-bearers and we had loaded six men into the medical vehicle before driving to the railway line at Ressons-sur-Matz, where we found a train and some Red Cross nurses waiting in the open countryside. In the distance we heard continuous shelling. In the nearby beetroot field, a white sheet with its huge red cross had been unfurled— a symbol that was no longer protecting anyone. We were just transferring our third gas casualty when the noise of an engine reverberated over the clouds. Two German Fokkers dived down towards the railway line just as I was turning to look up. I heard the sharp rattle of the machine-guns; then I felt a violent jolt in my hip and thigh. That is all I remember. I fell without ever having fought. When I awoke at the dressing station, realising what had happened, I asked: ‘How many survivors?’ Evading my question, a nurse replied that I had been very lucky. A few days later, I discovered that Dutreuil was dead, as well as our six casualties … A light in me went out that day. I spent six months in a field hospital in Compiègne, where the surgeons treated my wounds with Dakin’s solutions, wondering whether or not they should amputate. Opting for the second solution, they operated several times on my leg. I learnt to perceive the world on my back and to confront a bedridden man’s twin enemies: boredom and bedsores. A few days after the Armistice, I was transferred to Val-de-Grâce, where I spent three months with my leg jammed in a zinc splint. Given the lack of energy that my bone marrow was showing for any recovery, the head doctor at Val-de-Grâce sent me on to the coastal hospital of Berck-sur-Mer, which specialised in bone diseases. By the time I arrived here, I had made my own diagnosis: my femur and pelvis fractures presented all the symptoms of osteomyelitis. For complications of this type, there is only one remedy, apart from curettage and disinfection: an extremely long immobilisation. I was picturing the cataclysm in my bone tissues, the internal warfare, and the organic matter actively striving towards healing. Everything that I had found to admire about the bodies of other people, this defensive system organised against disease, I was now experiencing from inside, in my own flesh. No sooner had I arrived at Berck than I was raised on to a gallows so that they could make me a plaster shell that begins at my back and extends into a zinc splint that encloses my sickly leg. There are two openings for drainage. I am no longer in fear of amputation or paralysis, but I saw my leg when they plastered it, and it is now about five centimetres shorter. I will always be lame.

It is a sunlit room, with windows to the sky and its frayed clouds that indicate the presence of the sea. There are four iron beds facing each other, occupied by war casualties with bone complications. I am the only one never to have wielded any weapon but the scalpel. My knowledge of warfare is limited to the damage it can do to men. And on this subject I can say a great deal. The top floor is reserved for officers and the others for ordinary soldiers, but hierarchical notions are blurred by suffering. The men mix, get on well, play cards and smoke together. Having shared the same mud in the trenches has gone some way towards overturning the established order. One day follows the next without novelty. My companions and I have become resigned with all the solemnity of those who adopt a religion. Some men have brief fits of rage but few now rebel. When they do, they rail against life and God, who allowed that to happen. They get angry with the war leaders, the officers and the general staff, but as they do not know their names, they prefer to rail against God. The worst afflicted sob in their beds at night. Others have a rather strange and remote expression. One of the beds facing mine is occupied by Lieutenant Jacques Mougin, the son of a lieutenant-colonel in the cavalry. He threw himself into the war at the age of twenty like a true believer and has served in every branch: the cavalry, the infantry and finally the air force. He is a fanatic, an ardent Catholic, descended from a family of country squires. He personifies the fallen world of the old provincial nobility, attached to his principles of duty and a sense of sacrifice. I sometimes feel like pointing out to him that the king is dead, but I hold back to avoid offending him. His passion for flying proved fatal to him. We call him ‘the aviator’. Mougin was wounded for the first time during a photographic reconnaissance flight. On the second occasion, he was almost burnt to death in his Farman because of engine failure. The third time was the successful strike: hit by German gunfire that destroyed his plane, he switched off the engine and glided for a while before crashing to the ground just at the edge of the enemy lines. He was carried on someone’s back to the first dressing station. His legs and pelvis were broken. He was transferred from one hospital to another before ending up at Berck, opposite me. He has been straitjacketed from his feet to his armpits for over a year. We share the same doubts and sufferings, but I sense that he has more mental resistance. We communicate a great deal through our eyes; I am lucky to have him in my field of vision. When I lose the thread, he looks at me in a way that orders me not to feel disheartened, and I comply; when it is his turn to feel low, I give him the same kind of gaze, and he smiles back at me.

Bernard Marc & Maryse Rivière

When Men Clash

Gaëlle Obiégly

The Museum of Sentimental Values

During a society dinner given at Le Luxe in honour of the sculptor Pierre Weiss, people press around the director’s table. Soon the party veers beyond the bounds of polite society. The unexpected disappearance of the artist, a sign of mischievous rebellion, provokes a series of incidents, until the night ends in total catastrophe. Not only has the artist disappeared, but so has the main attraction of the evening, his sculpture Bild und Porzellan II, the missing piece from the exhibition as well as from all conversations. In this labyrinthine novel, destinies cross paths, sometimes without realising it. The motifs of love, disappearance and art

Publisher: Verticales Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Paul Buck & Catherine Petit paul@paulbuck.co.uk

are embodied in an incredible intrigue as they unveil a funny and fanciful fantasy. The sheer madness of some characters, the insane naivety of others, the reversibility of hierarchical values and the doubling of personalities preside over that community of paltry heroes caught up in an extravagant and witty narrative rule: the last word of each sentence becomes the first of the next. This game of stringing sentences together asserts itself not so much as a purely formal constraint than as the force of an imaginary drive. It reveals Gaëlle Obiégly as an incomparable storyteller, and invites the reader to lapse into a second childhood, for her novel appears as a child’s game.

1 On the 10th August 2012 an exhibition opens, a retrospective of the artist Pierre Weiss. He deserts the party given in his honour in Le Luxe.

His sculpture Bild und Porzellan II is in the Museum of sentimental values, an annex of Le Luxe. Twelve Polish men have transported it on their shoulders, an act which won’t make them famous. Those men have now become servants at Le Luxe. One of them, Brunon Tixe, discovers a woman in the underground passages of Le Luxe; she has lost her way during the evening after going in search of Weiss. This companion of the deserter artist, the wery old person, had previously left the party and discovered another bohemian world that has no regard for hierarchy.

Biography

Born in 1971 in Chartres, Gaëlle Obiégly studied Art then Russian before publishing her first novel in 2000. Since then she has published four other novels. She is also the author of Petit éloge de la jalousie (Gallimard, coll. “Folio”, 2007) and, for children, Le Coyotte et la Fée (Le baron perché, 2007). Gaëlle Obiégly joins Verticales Editions with her sixth fiction. Publications With Gallimard, coll. “L’Arpenteur”: La Nature, 2007; Faune, 2005; Gens de Beauce, 2003; Le Vingt-et-un août, 2002; Petite figurine en biscuit qui tourne sur elle-même dans sa boîte à musique, 2000.

A person In the distance a square of white light grows larger and reveals a dark mess, cluttered with office furniture, amongst which are some threadbare armchairs, one sheltering the wery old person who is asked her name and what she is doing there—my name is Brunon Tixe, says the man questioning her and holding the light. The light blinds the wery old person. The wery old person looks down, her clothes are filthy. Filth, she doesn’t know how long she has been covered in it, a white filth that needs to be scrapped away with a knife.

Knives and other instruments of war have accumulated in a metal cupboard and arrows are stuck in cushions of ochre velvet whose colour has faded with the dust. Dust perhaps is that white filth that covers the wery old person, or else, frost. Frost, then, which means she would have been there that long, she would have survived—would have been forgotten? Forgetfulness has spared the forearms that she can feel strong beneath the clothes covered in filth. That white filth observed by her eyes as they avoid the dazzling light, the wery old person has no idea either when or how it happened. As it happened—is it the product of time, solitude, or frictional wear?— a desert is now stuck to her in the darkness, she knows what she doesn’t know. Not knowing lets her know. She knows, now, that she has bumped into various things, and that she has even remained stretched out on the floor or huddled up on a step, before sitting in that black armchair whose colour, until the arrival of the man with the light, she didn’t know—a chair with monstrous arms. The arms of the chair have closed in on the wery old person, she has fought in vain to get free. Free you? Of course, says the man who holds the light, adding: you must identify yourself, it would be easier for me, what is your name? Her name, the wery old person cannot or doesn’t want to pronounce, she seems gagged, tied up, but she is not, she turns her head to right and left several times, as if to convey a refusal. A refusal it is not, but she wants to know where she is, and with whom she is, before stating her name. Your name, please, the man insists, and waits. He waits, and waits, and waits, and becomes impatient, and then he exclaims: give me your initials, all right? All right, Brunon Tixe says, since you don’t want to tell me your name, I’m going to give you a name, let me think. To think, Brunon needs tobacco; he lights a cigar whose smoke gathers before the light; he thinks. He thinks that the wery old person could have the name of something he himself has worn, the name of a perfume would be good, but none occurs to him, he thinks he could give the wery old person his own name, that he was undoubtedly given by someone else, but that would complicate everything for him, and for the wery old person and his friends— suddenly he has an idea. He has the idea of calling the wery old person Bild und Porzellan, simply. It’s simple, he says to the wery old person, I’ll call you Bild und Porzellan.

Bild und Porzellan Bild und Porzellan, the wery old person, has spent an incalculable amount of time in that place, the underground passage, since her last meal. That last meal, Bild und Porzellan remembers, that’s what brought about the whole affair, she remembers the guests, that she didn’t like them, that they didn’t want her to smoke, that she tried to escape discreetly. Discreetly, she left the dining room, taking her packet of cigarettes, her jacket thrown over her shoulders. Her jacket thrown over her shoulders, the wery old person left the room where they were dining and chatting, a petition was circulating, or rather the guest book, a rumour was spreading, cats were lazing around, the wery old person stepped on a tail and caused a yelp, then she moved away. She moves away, and the more she does, the more the sound of the people becomes quieter then, passing by a candelabrum, she takes a candle, it will be useful, once she has found the place to light up, for she realises she has left her lighter on the table and going back into that small coterie would pain her. Going back into that small coterie would pain her, so she’s not bothering with it, she moves slowly along the corridor of the first floor and, going carefully down the stairs, to make sure the candle doesn’t drip on her hand, the wery old person has the idea to wrap her fist with a tissue, then, as she walks past furniture and paintings taken down from the walls, she realises that it was not a question of leaving the table and the company but the need for solitude. Solitude has guided her steps towards a little door, almost hidden, like the door to a broom cupboard; she opened the little door and she was on the top step of a very dark staircase, luckily she had the candle. Yes, but the candle went out straight away, because the door slammed; and that provisional Bild und Porzellan fell from the top to the bottom of the stairs, where she remained for a while without moving, on the first step. The step to follow would have been to go back up by feeling the steps, on her knees. Her knees are grazed beneath the trousers, but her head, that her hands have managed to protect, pours with blood. The blood produces a faint glimmer that the wery old person barely takes advantage of since she has fainted. Fainted, meaning missing in action, meaning lost in the wilderness. In the wilderness a person, any person, male or female, has a really good time, in the wilderness a person belongs to himself or herself, in the wilderness a person is, in the wilderness a person is free in their movements and in the movement of their soul too, in the wilderness a person is allowed any form of outburst, in the wilderness a person is the first person, in the wilderness a person has a really good time, is enriched and engenders himself or herself, in the wilderness a person is glorious, in the wilderness a person says I am.

Gaëlle Obiégly

The Museum of Sentimental Values

I am the wery old person, currently called Bild und Porzellan by the man who discovered me in the underground passage, the one named Brunon Tixe. Brunon Tixe walked slowly towards her, he stopped at each exhalation, he remained, just before reaching her, empty and motionless for a time.

On the roof rack are tied two crates of wine on which a man keeps an eye, a man who’s lost in the uniform of a servant. That servant shouts in vain the name of the artist from the roof, three times he invites him to take his place, for the last ride, in the lead minibus.

Time is necessary for us to adopt its rhythm and the wery old person to adopt her name. The name, Bild und Porzellan, is that of an artwork which is located there. There where, before she escaped into the wilderness, disappeared, fainted, poured blood, fell down the stairs, wandered in the castle, left the table, the wery old person was dining in luxury.

The lead minibus leaves without the artist.

Le Luxe Le Luxe needs a walk of four days to go around. Around the castle stretches an English-style park with statues, old trees of course, shrubs, a lake. The lake cannot be seen from the art museum, but from the Museum of sentimental values, it can be seen. It can be seen also from the high windows of the castle where the children were born, the children of the director. The director is called Sir by his servants, Mister Director by his assistants, while some others call the director by the name of his family.

Gaëlle Obiégly

The artist has remained in the art museum, he has his back to a wall, facing a white wall with white printed letters that shine. They shine, those letters, like teeth. Teeth are missing in that man’s mouth, it’s barely visible, except when he laughs. He laughs as he urinates on his shoes behind a tree in the garden of the art museum; he is called once, twice, three times; he can’t manage to finish, then he can’t seem to find his way round to the front. In front of the others, he would have looked a right fool, with the fly he has forgotten to button up; they have left without him, so much the better. So much the better, says the honoured artist to himself when he notices that the courtyard is empty, I didn’t really feel like a communal sing-song, I’m going to walk to the castle; and there he is, in the wilderness.

The Museum of Sentimental Values

My little family, the director said, showing his children to the guests, who uttered exclamations, some wanted to touch, grab a hair; not one fails to be moved by such noble blood. Blood moves them to tears; blood and culture, that’s how they recognise one another—they are the guests of the director of the art museum. From the art museum to Le Luxe, the road is not long but it’s in a poor state; tonight, as the director is entertaining with great pomp, from 6 p.m. onwards, minibuses operate a shuttle. The shuttle, as its doors open, plays a melody composed by an anonymous trumpet player from the Sixties, one hazards, without it being possible to date the work precisely, and it accompanies the voice of a porter who calls for the passengers of the three numbered minibuses and after the passengers have been ticked off on a list by another, smaller porter, they both jump on the rear bumper of the first bus when the engines start; for the whole journey they are carefully watched and commented upon by the director’s guests, who look at them through the window; as for the servants, they remain impassive. Impassive and quasi-motionless, balancing on the edges of their boots, they hold on tight to the lateral handles fixed there with them in mind, and at the bends, they use their other hand to hold onto the arm of their friend or onto the roof rack.

Pierre Pelot

Maria

The Vosges Mountains in France, during the German occupation. Maria is a primary school teacher. Strikingly beautiful, she enjoys a carefree life with Jean, the owner of the local bistro. When, in front of her pupils at the school, the maquis come to get her, they promise they’ll bring her back soon and that everything will be all right … That’s how Maria’s ordeal begins. An ordeal that will last for the rest of her life. Because there’s a problem: Jean is a traitor, a collaborator, and many have died as a result of his treachery. Because she is in love with him, Maria will be beaten, tortured and raped. For ever after she will bear the scars of the cruelty and shame inflicted upon her by those whom France will soon elevate to the rank

Publisher: Héloïse d’Ormesson Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Sarah Hirsch sarah@editions-heloisedormesson.com

Translation: John Fletcher j.w.j.fletcher@kent.ac.uk

Biography

Born in 1945, Pierre Pelot has written more than a hundred books, including detective fiction, comic-strip books and SF. He is best known as the author of L’Été en pente douce and C’est ainsi que les hommes vivent. Publications Recent publications include: La Montagne des bœufs sauvages (Hoëbeke, 2010); L’Ange étrange et Marie-McDo (Fayard, 2010); Les Promeneuses sur le bord du chemin (Phébus, 2009, paperback ed. Le Livre de poche, 2011); Les Normales saisonnières (Héloïse d’Ormesson, 2007); L’Ombre des voyageuses (Héloïse d’Ormesson, 2006, paperback ed. Pocket, 2009).

of heroes. She vows never to speak to anyone about it. Fifty years later, a young man arrives one night in her valley. It’s snowing. He’s visiting one of the residents in the old people’s home. On a local radio station the weary voice of a female presenter accompanies him as he walks around in the dark. She tells her listeners about the history of the area, where the Moselle sometimes freezes over. Ghosts from the past hover over her tale. As the snow turns to slush, the faces of resistance fighters and Nazis blur into each other. This is a novel that is halfdomestic tragedy and half-historical thriller, inspired by the snow-covered landscapes of Jean Giono’s novel Un roi sans divertissement.

She was hardly ever seen outside the house. On rare occasions she would go down to the village for essentials other than bread. That was brought to her by the itinerant baker … She went on foot, wearing a big grey cape with slits in front for her arms. Sometimes she rode on a woman’s bicycle with no crossbar. From January onwards the roundness of her belly was becoming visible. She went out less and less. Her pregnancy was less obvious under her cape, but she didn’t wear a cape behind the counter … Of course, this last lousy gift from Tobé before he was bumped off did not make anyone empathise with her or pity her: on the contrary, it usually made them laugh at her. The nicknames “Maria the kraut” and “Maria the whore” stuck to her, born of stories which people had dredged up from the murky postwar period and had breathed new life into. Those nasty names were bandied about at the same time as various rumours circulated about her alleged participation in her husband’s acts of treachery, and her supposed involvement with both the Germans and some members of the maquis, and her … Often several different versions of these stories straddled each other without raising any concerns about their authenticity or accuracy … One morning in spring she found swastikas daubed on the doors and walls of her house. She spent the whole day trying to efface the vile graffiti. She had to scrape away at the roughcast on the walls. As for the doors, the whitewash was so embedded in the grain of the wood that she had to redecorate them with

some blue paint she found in a pot in the shed. As time went on the paint peeled and the swastikas reappeared, like malevolent traces left by departed spirits … In what seemed like a kind of sick joke her child was born on the eve of Bastille Day … She’d called the ambulance at the last moment; the driver turned out to be kind and considerate, and looked after her until he got her to the local maternity hospital. She gave birth to a lusty baby boy. She called him Bastien, after her father, who’d passed away in 1942. Bastien grew into a tubby, placid lad who bore no resemblance whatever to Jean Tobé. He certainly wasn’t the “poisoned chalice” Tobé was supposed to have left his wife with. As time passed, people said he’d inherited his mother’s eyes and jet-black hair. He had a dark complexion, the look of an assassin, and a hooked nose. But she didn’t want, ever, to see any resemblance to any of the men she was trying so hard to forget. Bastien grew up in poverty. Within her limited means, Maria tried as far as possible to make it less shameful. She didn’t entirely succeed. Until it was closed because of falling numbers, he went to the same school at La Goutte du Rieu where she’d been a teacher for two short years. Then a major reorganisation of local provision led to the merger and regrouping of primary teaching within the two buildings for boys and girls in the village. After getting his vocational diploma Bastien left school and was apprenticed to a joiner. He was by now a tall, strapping lad, with long hair down to his shoulders, which he occasionally tied in a knot, making him look like a Red Indian … During part of his childhood Bastien had been the butt of gibes from other boys which he couldn’t understand at first. They soon enlightened him. Children barely ten were able to tell him the appalling things allegedly done by his “father” and mother with all the vindictive, moralising harshness of eyewitnesses to the actual events. He learned to use his fists early on, and to some effect. And for a while … Following one memorable fight in which the older of the two Aison boys lost an eye (which was passed off as the result of an accidental fall against a fence after the lad was threatened with the loss of the other eye, or worse, if he squealed) the accusations and sly gibes ceased, or at least were no longer made openly or in Bastien’s presence. He questioned Maria about it and she replied. Realising she’d one day have to say something, she’d given the matter a lot of thought. To her it seemed a more … rational choice, for the boy to be given a father, however abject, than none at all. He gritted his teeth and never spoke to Maria about it again. Neither about the events, nor about the father who’d died covered in shame, who’d been

liquidated, who had no grave, not even an unmarked one, to spit upon. During the next ten years or so Maria’s situation improved considerably thanks to the size of Bastien’s monthly pay-packet. He was a competent joiner, much in demand. But the bistro and shop did not flourish, and if the customers’ spiteful gibes and insults were now only muttered behind Maria’s back, they were no less weighty and threatening, like the rain in storm clouds, swelling and about to burst. An atmosphere of murderous rancour, always present outside, enveloped the house and its two occupants, mother and son, making it impossible to tell if the words and glances aimed at them, or just floating closely around them, were mendacious or not, and didn’t hide other words, other truths, undigested, always on the point of being regurgitated. Bastien failed his army medical. He couldn’t see in one eye and, with the Algerian War over, the military no longer had an urgent need for new blood. When he was twenty-four he met a gipsy girl at the village fete, a fairground worker with green eyes. Her relations—mother, father, uncle, aunt and cousins—ran a bumper-car attraction. At twenty-five he followed the family around France, going from one fair or fete to another. But he didn’t slip away like a thief in the night. Even so, he wouldn’t have passed up this opportunity to escape from a life entangled in a past he didn’t even own. He managed to persuade Maria to leave the house at La Goutte du Rieu in which she almost certainly wouldn’t be able to afford going on living without regular customers and her son’s pay-packet, and without claiming benefit from the local authority … something she didn’t asked for. The house was put on the market. Bastien found his mother a modest flat in the neighbouring village of Le Thillot, and resolved to pay the rent for as long as it took, and to send her a small monthly allowance until such time as she got a job. She found one the following month. She had no difficulty getting it, and for the first time in a long while she had the feeling that people looked upon her as a normal person, calling her by her name, Maria Lœwell, without thinking of any other. She was a charwoman—a “cleaning operative”—at Les Tilleuls, a cottage hospital and old people’s home. She told Bastien the news in a long letter addressed to the PO box of the fairground people, asking him to stop sending her money. She got a reply a month later from him, saying how pleased he was. He told her he was marrying Yenka, the gipsy girl. He enclosed a photo of himself and the young woman smiling at the camera, both with long black hair down to their shoulders, looking more Red Indian than ever … That was the last letter Bastien sent. She never heard anything further from

Pierre Pelot

Maria

Anne Plantagenet

Nation Pigalle

the runaway son she’d poached. He’d obviously severed all links with the past once he was sure she’d escaped from it too.

Date of Publication: April 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Fabienne Roussel froussel@editions-stock.fr Translation: Adriana Hunter adriana@hunterı57.freeserve.co.uk

Maria, Madame Maria, soon became popular with everyone in the institution, both staff and residents. She was a serious-looking woman, with dark eyes and hair which turned grey only gradually over time. Her rather sad gaze would however light up magnificently when something, or more often someone, brought an element of gaiety into her life. Her finely-delineated features were still largely free of wrinkles, recalling the beauty of her buried years. She was tall but not stout, and her movements and gestures had lost nothing of their lightness and grace. She didn’t only clean the bedrooms and other parts of the buildings, she didn’t only help out occasionally in the kitchens, she also got invited to assist the nursing staff, she visited the residents, not just the sick ones but those in good health too, she would chat with them and keep them company. She listened to them. Indeed she spent hours listening to them, hearing them go over and over again those events in their past that had marked them deeply, those snatches of memory which survived better than they had. She listened to the heartbeat, slower and slower and so very tranquil, of their preserved present, made up solely of fragments from the past. That no doubt inspired her to look again, seriously, into the history of a vaster past fed by many people, many, many individuals, well-known and unknown, so much so that their histories could not be viewed other than as a single History with a capital “H”. She listened to the stories of people who had only that to live for, and she told them another, about others. And people loved to hear her; they took it in turns to listen to her, and their existence, sitting in a wheelchair or in bed, become something different, something that for a moment stood tall once more. In 1986 Maria Lœwell retired. In 1990 she applied at reception for a single room. There were no vacancies. She waited five years. In 1995 she was accepted as a resident. She moved into room 223, at the end of the corridor on the third floor.

Publisher: Stock

Biography

Anne Plantagenet is the author of novels, short stories, biographies (Marilyn Monroe, Gallimard, “Folio biographies” collection, 2007) and numerous translations of Spanish and South American novels. Having lived in London and Seville, she now lives in Paris. Publications Among her more recent novels and short stories: Le Prisonnier, Stock, 2009 (republished by J’ai Lu, 2011); Pour les siècles des siècles, Stock, 2008 (republished by J’ai Lu, 2009); Seule au rendez-vous, Robert Laffont, 2005 (winner of the 2005 Récit biographique prize).

You are French because (tick relevant box) You were born in France and at least one of your parents was born in France You were born in France and at least one of your parents was born in a former French department or territory. You were born in France and at least one of your parents is French You were not born in France and at least one of your parents … Today, in the Pigalle neighbourhood of Paris, an old woman sets fire to her apartment. This desperate act turns the lives of countless people around her upside down, from other inhabitants in her building to her cleaner, via her only son who lives a few streets away, and the wife

he is about to leave for another woman. They all feel they have been set adrift and discover new, unexpected facets of themselves. Nation Pigalle roams from sex shops to supermarket dustbins, from nurseries to former brothels, waiting rooms to furiously expensive shops, meeting as many breathless middleclass shoppers as homeless dropouts, as well as children, teenagers, repatriated colonials, a Russian piano teacher, a Chinese seamstress, Romanian acrobats, an Icelandic volcano, a football World Cup, a Moulin Rouge or even a mad poet. It is a brutal x-ray of an ailing consumer society, of a France struggling to find its identity … and the truth may lie not in passports but in the spontaneous babble on its streets.

Louisa hurries up the rue d’Athènes In the sleety rain that has been falling continuously since early afternoon. On the spur of the moment, she invited the mother of one of Aurélien’s classmates for a cup of tea at four o’clock, Virginie Nathalie she can’t quite remember her name, Louisa doesn’t know her, her son isn’t really friends with this woman’s boy, but with all that smiling and saying hello and exchanging a few words outside school, she persuaded herself it would do her good to talk to someone new, a woman like herself, probably about the same age, who takes care of her seductive feminine appearance, there aren’t that many of them, you don’t bump into them on every street corner, these days people in smart restaurants or the bars of luxury hotels are dressed as if they were going to the local tip, even though, oddly, there have never been so many fashion magazines and shops. Louisa could have suggested the Paprika, the Hungarian restaurant and bar that she loves just downstairs from her apartment, where she feels so at home and where she arranges most of her meetings, but she made herself give her address, her entry code and her floor, it would make a change for her, force her to make an effort socially, to get over her fear of asking someone into the apartment again after what happened. It’s nearly the end of the year and the Christmas holidays, Louisa loves December, when the council hangs lights and ridiculous decorations above the streets; when they put hideous Christmas trees all over the place and set up free merry-go-rounds for the children, always the same ones in the same places,

getting more and more battered and chipped; when it starts getting properly cold and dark and grim the whole time; when people look even more desperate, more rushed; when not a day goes by without someone announcing, as if it was exclusive to them, that they loathe Christmas. Louisa adores all that […]. Louisa was born in Béziers, when she finished school she came to study at the Sorbonne, she lived abroad for a few years with her first husband before settling in Paris once and for all, complete with her short blond curls, chubby cheeks, curvaceous figure and six-inch heels, she became sophisticated, lost her southern accent. She is a Spanish translator and she lives on the corner of the rue des Martyrs and the avenue Trudaine, with her second husband, who is editor-in-chief of a cultural review that he set up himself, and her two sons aged nine and three. She likes Paris bullfighting rugby pelota claret shoes piano music fans green tea lemon tart. And Christmas. But this year it’s different, however hard she tries, Louisa can’t recapture her usual enthusiasm, can’t clap her hands like a little girl at the sight of the tree her boys have decorated, or get excited at the thought of the presents she has hidden for each of them around the apartment, the pots of foie gras waiting for them out in the country at her parents’ house. Her heart isn’t in it. “It’s not surprising, you’ve been through a shock, you all have,” her mother keeps telling her in her regular two phone calls a day. “You thought it didn’t affect you you played down the impact as usual you convinced yourself everything was fine that it wasn’t really that serious you’re paying the price now two months later.” The worst thing is the smell of burning. Louisa would never have guessed it would impregnate her life like this, still dogged, vivid, clinging, persistent all these weeks later, that it would be such an ordeal getting rid of it despite everything she has tried so relentlessly, with her legendary energy, cleaning her apartment from top to bottom, her clothes and the children’s and Vincent’s, the sofa the curtains the carpet the sheets everything, lighting dozens of scented candles, cooking fish in garlic with the kitchen door wide open, and those vegetables with really strong smells broccoli leeks lentils with stock cubes, to try and blot out traces of the horrible smoke that infiltrated every last corner of her home, until Vincent finally asked for mercy and said that with all this cabbage fennel salsify plus the asparagus turnips, I can’t cope any more please. Either way, it was pointless, even though their apartment is on the fourth floor, two floors above the one that burned, the old lady’s, but there’s nothing for it, the smell is still there like the first day and Louisa is starting to feel the first signs of inevitable despondency, something she has been valiantly battling since the day of the fire, perhaps there’s no point fighting, from now on there will always be a smell of fire in her life. The firemen unceremoniously slung the old lady’s ruined belongings into the building’s inner courtyard, and anything that wasn’t completely annihilated by the flames certainly was by the water hoses. Two

Anne Plantagenet

Nation Pigalle

months later it’s still there, a huge compact sinister heap, in amongst it you can vaguely make out clothes books half a mattress broken plates the remains of a life, in a great rotting heap for everyone to see in amongst the dustbins. It has rained, it even snowed copiously in mid-December to the children’s delight. The pile smoked for a long time. It has stopped smoking but it’s still there, Louisa can see it through the bull’s eye window in their kitchen overlooking the courtyard, the advantage with this time of year, she keeps telling herself comfortingly, is that we keep the windows closed, but the smell’s on the inside too, the beautiful bourgeois stairwell ravaged by both the fire and the firemen, the lift out of order, rubble everywhere, the paintwork the banister the carpet all ruined, the second floor all black, the cleaner so traumatised she never wants to set foot in the building again, off sick since half-term, the cleaner who’s already had her share of bad luck in life, she’d been working for the lady on the second floor for thirty years, she’s devastated, she cries all day. “It hurts too much, how to saying this, I keep waiting to feeling better,” she sobs in her heavy Portuguese accent with her grammatical mistakes, every time Louisa rings to see how she is. Louisa proved very understanding, displayed unprecedented patience. She feels great affection for Madalena who comes to her once a week, goes round with the Hoover the duster the mop on the tiled floor, wax on the parquet, scours the sinks and irons Vincent’s shirts, she is the same age as Louisa’s mother and she has confided in her about her bereavements and sorrows, regularly crying in front of her. Louisa is careful not to admit to Vincent that she often has to do more dusting after Madalena has left, and she once had to hide something she had burned with the iron, the cleaner sometimes smells of alcohol when she arrives, sweet wine, Louisa closes her eyes and asks how she is, knowing full well that the reply is likely to be gloomy and depressing, it is a duty she expects of herself, creating an opening for someone else, all these tiny individual lives going on alongside each other in a small space fascinate her, she and the cleaner live twenty metres from each other and their worlds are so distinct that it almost seems unreal. Paris, safety and asylum, thousands of people side by side, strangers to each other, Louisa finds it both captivating and appalling, she listens to her employee’s misfortunes and then goes back to her solid protected existence, where every problem finds its solution. For the last few days, though, Louisa doubts everything will sort itself out and get back to normal quickly, as she shouted out loudly the very evening of the drama, when the four of them, Vincent the two boys and herself, along with other people from the building, gathered in a hotel for the night, forcibly accommodated, expelled from their homes for safety reasons they did not fully understand at the time. […] Louisa took things well, they were so lucky […]. That evening, at the hotel, they celebrated the fact that they were safe and sound, their apartment unscathed, they would be back home the next day and it was half-term

in just over a week, they were all going to Venice together, there was nothing to moan about, it wasn’t in Louisa’s character, she couldn’t abide whinging. She even made the adventure fun, laughing wildly and bouncing on the beds with the boys in the family room they had been allocated, her boys whom she loved more than anything else, her boys, her life, you are the dancing queen/young and sweet/only seventeen … they started singing Abba at the top of their lungs with a terrible accent, Romeo mumbling unidentifiable onomatopoeic phrases, bent double laughing, and Louisa wiggling her arse on the carpet in her stilettos, you can dance/you can jive/having the time of your life. […] The day after the blaze they went home, they all climbed the steps to the building together, dazed by the scale of the disaster, the fire’s destructive power, not laughing now, they went up to the second floor in stunned silence, passing the black, broken down door to the woman’s apartment. They slotted back into their respective places, Aurélien at school, Romeo in the crèche, Vincent at the newspaper, Louisa with her translations, convinced that it was all a matter of days, when they came home from Venice everything would be back to normal, the stairwell repainted, the apartment on the second floor as good as new, the smells dispersed. Then, and Louisa can’t remember who she heard this from—a neighbour, perhaps the pharmacist, definitely not the guy on the fifth floor who she won’t speak to since he insulted her one day when she made him give way to her on the stairs, and probably none of the other tenants either, she hardly ever saw them and couldn’t even be sure she would recognise them in the street—they discovered that it hadn’t been an accident at all. And Louisa suddenly stopped laughing. It was as if her lovely apartment where she got away from it all, where nothing could touch her, no longer had the same soft enveloping texture, she felt profoundly shaken, even though she stubbornly forbade herself to acknowledge it, without really knowing why. The cause of the fire didn’t change the consequences at all, they were there, everything was fine, their lives weren’t affected but what if she had been at home, working on her computer? What if Aurélien, who was starting to come home from school on his own occasionally, had been in the apartment? And what if the whole place had blown up? Louisa couldn’t help thinking about it, going over and over grizzly thoughts in her head, seeing images of carnage and devastation spooling through her mind. They no longer had a lift and the building stank, she was frightened retrospectively, she wasn’t invulnerable any more.

Anne Plantagenet

Nation Pigalle

Jacqueline Raoul-Duval

Kafka, the Eternal Fiancé

Prague, its cobbled streets, its frosty winters, the mysterious Staré Meˇsto (Old Town) and the Charles Bridge, a route often followed by a strange man, civil servant by day, writer by night, gifted with a prodigious sensitivity for describing the soul and the understanding of what transpires between man and his world. That was Franz Kafka. Kafka has acquired the reputation for expressing nothing but despair, introversion, disaster. Yet on reading his correspondence with Max Brod, his letters to Felice Bauer and many passages from his Diary, one’s view alters. Kafka was a man full of humour yet

Publisher: Flammarion Date of Publication: March 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Patricia Stansfield pstansfield@flammarion.fr Translation: Josephine Bacon bacon@langservice.com

remoteness, frivolity yet passion. He loved women but was the incarnation of the impossibility of interacting with them. It is this strange combination that Jacqueline Raoul-Duval conveys so magnificently. Yes, Kafka’s women, his love for Felice Bauer, Grete Bloch, Julie Wohryzek, Milena Jesenska and Dora Diamant. How did he experience his five love affairs between 1912 and 1924? Kafka provides one answer himself: ‘She is inaccessible to me, I need to resign myself to that fact, and my powers are in such a state that they do so while emitting cries of joy’.

Prague, the meeting

Biography

Jacqueline Raoul-Duval is a translator and editor. Un amour amer [A Bitter Love], Michel Lafon, 2002; Le Charme discret de l’adultère [The Discreet Charm of Adultery], Albin Michel, 1999. Publications

On 13 August 1912, at that late hour when the story of these singular love affairs begins, a south wind was sweeping away the blanket of mist and squalls of rain that had been afflicting Prague throughout the day. The sky was now studded with stars, a true summer night. Deep in the Staré Meˇsto, the Old City, in the almost deserted Obstgasse, a young man in a light-coloured suit, without a waistcoat, and a straw hat, hurried along. In front of him, between the gaps in the cobblestones, puddles of water reflected the light of the lampposts. Like a runner in an obstacle race, he leaped, feet together, from one puddle to the next, from one reflection to the next. Here, there was an ornate gable, there an ogival window, a church lintel, the outstretched arm of an apostle, the flight of a pigeon. As he rushed along, fragments of the city were revealed at his feet. He could be heard whistling snatches of Collection de boutons au Louvre, a song that Léonie Frippon had been popularising for the last few days at the ‘Wienerstadt’ cabaret. This young man, a large red envelope tucked under his arm, was on his way, as he so often was in the evening, to visit his friend Max. Kafka had met Max Brod by accident at the university on 23 November 1903. Both young men were studying for a law degree, and were doing so with equal indifference. Max, a young student leader, had his own coterie and arranged lectures about literature and philosophy, his real passions. One evening, when delivering a talk about Schopenhauer, he described Nietzsche as

a charlatan. A discussion followed, most of those present applauded him. As the room began emptying, a young man approached him. No one could call Nietzsche a charlatan. This unknown young man developed his theme in a few well-chosen words; although his voice was firm, his attitude was one of timidity. Max stared hard at this dispenser of justice, who stood a whole head taller than himself. He was struck by the elegance of the young man’s appearance, the cravat and the wing collar, by the intensity of his expression, the smouldering black eyes. He was reminded of one of Dostoyevsky’s heroes. The skinniness and the air of distinction of this student with the high cheekbones disconcerted him, made him feel guilty about his excessive beer-drinking and indulgence in fatty foods, his dislike of sport. But before he could reply, the young man had disappeared. Whence had he come, this phantom? I’ve never seen him before, he hadn’t joined any group, he’d never contributed anything from the floor. Did he read the philosophers with greater attention than the rest of us? First thing next morning, Max received a letter from this unknown, offering his apologies but developing his critique. The arguments were finely honed, a style that was straight to the point. Max kept this letter, as well as the dozens more that followed it. Several of them were decorated with figurines, strange black marionettes suspended on invisible wires. The student pair became inseparable. They enthused over the same books and the same films, they were fascinated by cinematography. They could be seen leaving the city in the late afternoon to take long walks in the countryside. In the evening, they would go to watch the same performances, applauded and supported Yiddish theatre, frequented the same cafés; Max introduced Kafka to actors, young novelists, poets, he moved in literary circles, knew the performers and the most exciting cabarets and music-halls in the city. Max confided in Kafka that he also wrote, but was afraid to show him his stories. They came nowhere near the literary demands of his friend, a high standard that bothered him even more than Kafka’s asceticism. His friend didn’t drink alcohol, tea or coffee, he didn’t smoke, he would sleep with the window open in mid-winter, swim in icy rivers and barely ate. That was bad enough, but he could rip a passage to pieces, stripping it mercilessly to the bone. A metaphor would make him despair of literature, another sentence was somnolently boring, yet another struck a false note, the two rubbed each other up the wrong way, like a tongue catching on a broken tooth! He would repeat in a voice that sounded like a prayer: ‘Words must be extracted from a void!’ ‘What sort of void do you mean?’ Max asked. In reply, his friend would extol the virtues of banality, praising the use of detail. ‘The smell of damp stone in a hallway’, he would say, savouring every word, ‘that’s how you should write’.

On this 13 August 1912, at the late hour when this extraordinary love story begins, the young man in the light-coloured suit who had dashed after reflections in the old city, rang the bell of his friend’s home. ‘Have you seen the time?’ Max protested indignantly, barely opening the door. ‘He’s always late’, came a voice from the next room. ‘As long as he insists in setting his watch back an hour and a half, he’ll be late for everyone. What a ridiculous idea, setting your watch back an hour and a half!’ The young man began to laugh. He left his boater in the hall and entered the dining-room that extended into a library and a little music room. Otto, Max’s brother, was seated at the piano, playing Liszt’s Sonata in G Minor. Their mother was on the telephone, Mr Brod was looking for a book on the shelves. They waved a greeting to their evening visitor. In the dining-room, a young girl in a white blouse was dining alone. Upon seeing her, the young man hesitated for a moment, then went straight towards her, extended his hand and introduced himself: ‘Franz Kafka’. He sat down in front of her and watched her with such a intense expression that the young girl cast her eyes down and hesitated before replying: ‘Felice Bauer’. ‘You are not from Prague. Where are you from? Are you travelling alone? How many days will you be here? How do you know the Brod family? Do you work?’ Felice Bauer relaxed and replied in the same staccato tone: ‘I live in Berlin. I’m single. I have family ties with the Brods. Yes, I work. I run the dictaphone service for the Carl Lindström company. And I’m leaving tomorrow. Is that enough for you?’ ‘Forgive me, I always ask too many questions. May I keep you company while I wait for Max?’ Without waiting for the reply that never came, Franz Kafka took out the red envelope and opened it, emptying a wallet containing photographs on to the table. ‘May I show you these photographs, Miss Bauer? We took them, Max and I, in Weimar where we spent a few days together. Why are you eating alone at this big table? ‘ I came home late. I was at the theatre. No one waited for me’. She smiled awkwardly at Max who had come to sit beside her. Franz presented her with a photograph: ‘First of all, this is Goethe’s house, with its fourteen windows overlooking the street and …’ ‘Did you count them?’ asked Max. ‘I love everything connected with Goethe, absolutely everything. His drawing-room. His study, this staircase, carved by a galley-slave out of a giant

Jacqueline Raoul-Duval

Kafka, the Eternal Fiancé

oak and containing not one single nail, his Chinese porcelain, the bust sculpted by David d’Angers, his open-air theatre with two rows of audience seating, even the laurel wreath placed on top of his coffin as a tribute from the German women of Prague. He selected other photos: ‘By bribing the custodian, we were even able to take photographs of the bedroom with its tester bed. Would you like to see them?’ Felice looked attentively at each print. She pushed away her full plate. ‘Your meat’s getting cold’, said Max. ‘Nothing is more odious than people who can’t stop eating’. A servant informed Mr Brod, who was reading in the library, that he was wanted on the telephone. He rose and left the room. ‘And for me there is nothing more odious than the telephone ringing’, lamented Max. Felice told the story of the first scene of the operetta, Das Autoliebchen (The Car-loving Girl), that she had seen at the Residenz Theatre: ‘The telephone rings 15 times. Someone, using the same formula, telephones each of the fifteen people on stage, one after the other’. ‘Lucky there aren’t that many of us’, quipped Max. Felice continued to study the photos for which Franz provided a running commentary: ‘This is Liszt’s house. Apparently he only worked between five and eight in the morning. Then he went to church, went back to bed and from eleven o’clock he received visitors. This photo shows Schiller’s house. The antechamber, the drawing-room, the study, the alcoves. How well laid out it is for a writer’s home’. Max seized a photo that Franz was attempting to hide. ‘Well, look at Franz swimming. It’s absolute hell travelling with him. At every stage, we have to find, even if it means wandering about for hours, a hotel without any other guests, without any roaming dogs, without a sound and, what’s more, it has to be close to a vegetarian restaurant and an open-air swimming pool. If he doesn’t swim, if he doesn’t go boating, if he doesn’t take a walk every day, he’s impossible to live with’. ‘Do you often travel together?’ ‘Yes, we went to Italy. We were in Brescia to see the aeroplanes, Milan, Riva, Lugano, Zurich. And twice to Paris. Otto was with us. He helped me bear the extravagances of our naturist friend’. — ‘You’re a naturist?’ exclaimed Felice. — ‘Not really … I’m the man in the bathing trunks. It’s true that this summer, at the Jungborn community, I felt slightly sick at seeing people

completely naked, lacking modesty. If they run around that doesn’t solve anything. Nor do I like seeing these old gentlemen jumping on haystacks’. All three of them laughed. ‘So why do you go?’ ‘They are peaceful people who live close to nature. I love sleeping under the stars, walking barefoot in the grass in the early morning. Max shows Felice another photo: ‘Look at Franz in front of Werther’s garden with Grete; they are eating cherries’. ‘Who is Grete?’ ‘The custodian’s beautiful daughter. Franz followed her night and day. Admit it, you were in love with her. You gave her chocolates, carnations, a little heart, a chain, and who knows what else? You would have asked her to marry you if she had responded to your advances’.

Jacqueline Raoul-Duval

Kafka, the Eternal Fiancé

Jean-François Rouzières

Lacan’s Revolver

Gabriel leaves for Afghanistan, in a crack corps, sent into the very heart of a conflict that is about to blow up in his face, just like so many previous attempts. He fights and does his bit, he enjoys military life and, more than anything, his comrades in arms, Nadja, The Giant, Capa. He emerges from this war broken, unable to speak: Nadja had been killed in the course of an operation that turned out badly. His mother, to whom he had been very close, has recently died. A wandering ghost, he buries himself in silence. Then he meets the mysterious Monte-Cristo. A shaman?

Publisher: Le Seuil Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat mheissat@seuil.com

Translation: Amanda Hopkinson amandahopkinson@hotmail.com

Biography

Jean-Francois Rouzières, born in 1964, is a psychoanalyst. Lacan’s Revolver is his first novel.

A psychoanalyst? A genial soul-doctor or a perverse polymorph? Monte-Cristo is also the lucky owner of a revolver that may have belonged to Jacques Lacan. Thanks to him, Gabriel will gradually relearn how to live. But another conflict is brewing in the background, a love story between him and Mathilde, the woman of his dreams, simultaneously present and inaccessible. Gabriel has confronted the worst possible war situations: faced with Mathilde, he finds himself resourceless and incapacitated. Ultimately, she will save his life. But what will be the cost?

Pharaonic poses. The look of a shaman. You would think he were the captain of a luxury three-masted schooner, and it was as if by according you a session on his couch, he was bestowing on you the honour of addressing your torments before departing once more to scour the far seas, leaving you in your wretched isolation. Not, of course, without demanding a tidy sum from you—the crew must have been greedy. I can well remember that first time. It was in the course of a long walk, in the middle of winter. Paris. La Goutted’Or, Châtelet, Montparnasse, returning towards the Luxembourg Gardens—I always paused in those gardens. Night was about to fall. The streets were cold and misty. Without knowing why, I was drawn to the oeil-de-boeuf window of a smart apartment, a woman’s silhouette was furtively escaping from a shower, which aroused me. On coming closer, I observed that there was a small garden sheltered from prying eyes. I pushed open the wrought iron gate. On the corner of the wall I came upon a brass plate: Monte-Cristo, Psychoanalyst. I couldn’t believe it. There was a psychoanalyst who was called Monte-Cristo … I read and re-read the plaque: Monte-Cristo, Psychoanalyst … Hell and damnation … my mouth was dry, but I was sweating, despite the cold. I removed one of my gloves, in order to run my hand over the plaque. Cold metal, letters in the form of a cross: MonteCristo, Psychoanalyst … I crossed the garden and its trees standing stiffly in the cold. A wooden door at street level, a door straight out of the Middle Ages,

and under the bell, in tiny ill-written hand- writing: Monte-Cristo. I rang and the door opened. I found myself in another garden, this time an internal one, a winter garden. I heard a voice on the telephone. A sharp and cutting voice. The place smelt of coffee and cigarettes, and the voice halted. I watched the approach of that incredible head and that somewhat rigid body. It had to be him. “Yes?” The voice had risen sharply. “You have not made an appointment, I do not know you, I was not expecting anyone and I have a dinner to go to. Perhaps you have made some mistake? Or are you looking for someone else? This is the home of Monte-Cristo, the psychoanalyst. And you are?” I stared at him speechless. Stock-still. “Have you lost your tongue?” I nodded. “Are you mute? Aphasic? So I see. Let us make an appointment”. I shook my head. “What do you mean, no? I now have a dinner”. I made a gesture with my hand, a kind of salute, to indicate I couldn’t care less about his dinner. He looked at me for a moment, lit a cigarette, and smiled. “You have had a stroke of luck … Well now … Do you know how to draw?” I shook my head again. “Come back early tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock would be perfect, I like sessions first thing in the morning, they have the scent of the battlefield about them …” He smiled. I shook my head. “I have a dinner, I tell you. A patient has to make an appointment!” He liked the scent of the battlefield, so I would give him some. Just like a good soldier, I took the initiative, went into his consulting-room, vast and book-lined, and I sat down on an old armchair. Settled into a sofa hollowed out by generations of patients, I began looking around the room and happened upon a headless statue, part-man and partwoman. It was a clay bust. It was impossible to tell whether it had breasts or not, or thighs or not. I found that unbearable. I got up. “What do you do?” I stopped in front of the sculpture: it was shapeless, the clay made it look fat and plaintive, emphasised by a faintly faded greyish-beige colour. It lacked legs, the statue was an amputee, resting on its heavy arse, and there was no way of

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knowing whether the sculptor had wanted to represent gender, for that remained undefined, a protuberance that was not really one, a feminine triangle that ended in a rectangle, and the breasts, oh God, the breasts, looking tortured, beaten, what a hopeless surgeon and what a massacre! “Does this fascinate you? What do you think of it? I made a great many sculptures in my youth, but I destroyed the whole production. I only retained this one example”. He’d done the right thing, as far as the production went, it was worthless. I assumed a circumstantial expression, an intentional air of affliction and a mischievous look. I held the sculpture in my arms, as if about to start a slow dance, looking the whole time at Monte-Cristo, who smiled back at me, rolling his eyes. Lifting my arms heavenwards, as high as I could, I felt a rush of words that could have returned the power of speech to me. The statue hit a small metal light pendant, travelled across the consulting room, describing a full, circular arc, and shattered on the polished parquet. It made a clatter worthy of a firework, covering the parquet floor in a thousand fragments; a real initiatory course for an old fool desperate for recognition. “You’re mad!” yelled Monte-Cristo. He got up, sat down again, drank a glass of water, lit a cigarette, got up again, considered the damage, sat down once more without intending to move, put his head in his hands, and stammered: “I’m listening to you …” I stretched myself out and said nothing for half an hour, and with good reason. He didn’t ask me to pay—it was the first session.

Jean-François Rouzières

Lacan’s Revolver

* Mathilde. She had agreed to see me again. She had made love with another man. In order to provoke me. She had done it and she regretted it. She was suffering as a result. She had done it without any form of protection. I hadn’t used any protection either. Then there was the motorcycle. The swish of traffic. I wanted to return to the fighting. See the Giant again. And Capa. Swallowing up the kilometres of asphalt, I called out Nadja’s name. I sought her presence. I sought the disaster areas. I remembered an army psychiatrist who only had a single phrase in his mouth. He kept on repeating: disaster areas, in a penetrating manner. He was sincere: “you are looking for disaster areas, I liked that phrase, it sounded right, and from the moment I revved up my motorbike, or I slept with a woman without taking precautions, the phrase went round and round in my head, “You’re looking for disaster areas.”

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Dominique Sylvain

Dirty War

Publisher: Viviane Hamy Date of Publication: January 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Julie Galante julie.galante@viviane-hamy.fr Translation: Ian Monk ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

Monte-Cristo came back into my life. Every day a little bit more so. His presence was that of a vengeful knight. His acceptance of what I was. His feigned calm. His desire to know everything. His insistence on seeing me. Twice. Three times, four times a week. His hysteria complemented mine. His madness. His money. All of it seemed suspect to me. Too good. And above all there was something false about it. Only his loathing for women rang true. With a truth lacking the voice of a master. A truth I provoked in him. I was still not speaking. I came to our sessions with a little letter, usually just a few words, or a sketch. I scribbled rapidly in the garden. A battle plan. Words my mother spoke. My rank in the army. Words spoken by Mathilde. Or by her children. After the birth of the second one, each time we had made love, I found like tiny skin peelings in my bed. It took us a while to figure out what it was—the epidermis of her belly distended, developed folds and peeled … We laughed. And yet I hated her. As she did. For having betrayed her. Cheated on her. And even though she lived with her husband, she considered I owed her total fidelity. I loved her beauty that oscillated between grande dame and little girl. She was afraid of everything. She murmured as much as she curled up on the bed: I’m afraid of everything, I am incapable of loving you, I’m afraid, everywhere, all the time … She showered and went off to pick up her children. I always accompanied her back to her car. She always felt bad when she left. Bad about leaving me. And since not another word came from my lips, she became even more agonised. She told me that the only thing that interested me was fucking, and that I’d continue cheating on her. I had written her a little letter that explained in the nicest possible way that it was just a masculine trait to shag other chicks, that it had nothing to do with the love I felt for her, that Monte-Cristo himself had told me as much. I had given her the letter as she got into her car; she read and threw it away, looking long into my eyes before revving up at full speed, and dumping me like a gob of spittle: so I am a creep then! In that respect there was little difference between Nadja and her.

Biography

Dominique Sylvain was born on 30 September 1957 in Thionville, in the Lorraine. She worked for twelve years in Paris, first as a journalist, then as head of internal communications and sponsorship for Usinor. Then, for six years, she lived with her family in Asia. As a result, Tokyo, where she spent three years, inspired her first novel Baka! (1995). She is now living again in Tokyo where she works as a full time writer. Her nine novels have all been published in the “Chemins nocturnes” collection of Éditions Viviane Hamy. Publications With Éditions Viviane Hamy, in the “Chemins nocturnes” collection, some of her more recent novels include: La Nuit de Géronimo, 2009; L’ Absence de l’ogre, 2007 (paperback Points, 2009); Baka!, 2007 (new edition) (paperback 2009); Manta Corridor, 2006 (paperback Points, 2011); La Fille du Samouraï, 2005 (paperback Points, 2010); Passage du désir, 2004 (paperback Points, 2009).

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Florian Vidal, a lawyer specialised in weapons deals and Franco-African relations, has been murdered horribly: burnt alive beside a swimming pool, handcuffed, with a burning tyre around his neck. Five years before, Toussaint Kidjo, the Franco-Congolese assistant of Lola Jost, who was at the time the police commissioner of the 10th arrondissement in Paris, had been murdered in the same way. It was this murder, which remained unsolved, that had pushed Lola into taking early retirement. For her, there is an obvious connection between the two cases. So she picks up the investigation once again, but in so doing she treads on the toes of Sacha Duguin, the commandant in charge

of the case, but also a former lover of her friend Ingrid Diesel, an American with a mind-blowing physique, who is masseuse by day and stripper by night in Pigalle, with whom the commandant continues to have a stormy relationship … Lola soon has to admit that she will get nowhere on her own, and the enemy is far more powerful than she first thought. In this delicate context, what role can our duo possibly play? Dominique Sylvain has gone back to the improbable pair of Passage du Désir and has made a powerful comeback with a perfectly orchestrated novel. One twist leads to another, while the dialogue sparkles, as Dirty War advances at a relentless pace.

Chapter 11 Lola Jost was giving her old cupboard a real going over. She chucked around the cardboard boxes, rummaged through them then, having found nothing, started all over again with a groan. Sigmund watched all this from a safe distance, making the occasional questioning yap. The neighbourhood psychoanalyst’s Dalmatian was wondering what on earth its guardian was up to. — About time, my sodding wellies! She roared showing off her find. Just what we need for stormy weather. Ain’t that the truth, my lad? Another plaintive yap from the handsome creature, who now sensed that the unthinkable was about to happen. Lola was going to leave their cosy nest to venture out into the deluge, and no one was going to be able to talk her out of it. — We’ve been stuck here for ages. And Antoine will tell me off if you don’t get any exercise. Anyway, your spots won’t melt. Of course, I could improvise a raincoat for you from a plastic bag, but you wouldn’t like that, would you? She pulled on the old boots she had just found, the hat and coat that her friend Ingrid Diesel had given her for her birthday, put the leash on Sigmund, who put up a modicum of résistance, but nothing was going to stop her now. Then the two of them found themselves out on Rue de l’Échiquier being hit by diagonal salvos of rain. Lola headed in the direction of her favourite joint. As she went through the door of Belles de jour comme de nuit the landlordcum-cook was polishing some glasses. Lola gestured to him. — Perfect. A shot of house white is just what I need. Without a word, Maxime Duchamp placed two glasses on the bar, filled

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them with Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise, then picked up a towel to rub down Sigmund, who licked his hand in gratitude. — Your Muscat isn’t bad, and seeing a human face again is a real relief, said Lola, as she massaged the small of her back. — What’s up with you? — The same as for everyone in Paris. This endless, sodding monsoon. What’s more, Antoine Léger has gone off to sunnier climes with his family and has left me Sigmund to dog sit. I used only to have rheumatism, now I also have responsibilities. You couldn’t give me a bowl could you? — Of course. What for? — Sigmund’s a quadruped, but that’s no reason why his snout should be always stuck on the pavement. He needs spiritual uplift. Do you know what Théophile de Busarque had to say about the matter? — No, Maxime answered, with a smile. — Wine is a cloud of knowledge that rains only on lovers of existence. Now that’s what I call a thought which is both light and deep. And Lola poured a drop of Muscat into the bowl. The Dalmatian simply sniffed at it. — This creature will end up opening its doors of perception an inch or two before it goes back to its master. Otherwise, all is lost for the canine race. Just like it is for everything else. Talking about doors, Captain Jérôme Barthélemy pushed open the one leading into the bar. He seemed a touch put out. Even more so when he noticed Lola. — How nice. It looks like you’ve just bumped into your tax inspector. — Not at all, boss. I was actually looking for you. But, in the end, I don’t know if I’m that pleased I’ve found you. Lola Jost hadn’t been the neighbourhood police commissioner for years, but her former underlining still behaved as if nothing had changed. Was she going to be the boss until the bitter end? Apparently so. At the same time, the ex-commissioner had no idea what her ex assistant was on about. — Spare me the small talk, my lad, and get to the point. Barthélemy mouthed his speech silently to himself for a few seconds, before coming out with what he had to say. — We’ve discovered the body of a young Parisian lawyer. He’s been murdered. — Where? — In Colombes. By the Olympic swimming pool. — Drowned? — Burnt alive, with petrol, and … — And what? — He had a tyre … around his neck.

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Lola put down her glass. For an infinitely long second, the faces of Maxime and Barthélemy dilated. She flopped down onto the floor. If she was going to faint, she might as well do so horizontally. Her friends’voices penetrated a wall of filthy cotton wool just before she lost consciousness. They were calling out her name. * * * He had given his name over the intercom. She was now waiting for him on the landing, her lips quivering, in a pose of denial. She was a petite blonde, aged about thirty. With fine features, worn down by anxiety. — You’re not here about Florian are you? … Nothing has happened to him, has it? — We’ve found your husband in Colombes. — Is he … dead? — I’m afraid so. I’m sorry. She threw herself at him, hitting his chest. He grasped her hands, came out with some soothing words, then let her sob against him, while tightening his arm around her shoulders. In a daze, she went back into the flat, where he noticed a black suitcase in the hall. The living room stank of tobacco, but provided a magnificent view of the façades of the Senate and the Luxembourg gardens in the rain. Nadine Vidal’s figure now stood out in front of a high window; she was crying, her forehead pressed against the glass. The muffled sound of traffic filtered up, from five floors down. A miniature woman in a huge, deserted flat. He wondered if they had any children. How had her husband died? Sacha asked her to sit down, she refused, and then asked the same question again. He told her. Then what he had to say hit her, and she rushed into the kitchen to throw up in the sink. He wanted to comfort her, but was brushed off with a nudge of her shoulder. She got her breath back, then rinsed her face. She now agreed to sit down, and lit a quivering cigarette. He gently asked her questions. The day before, her husband had received a phone call. He had left at about half past seven in the evening without saying where he was going, but had promised to be back by eleven. The next morning, his car had still been missing from its parking place. — Do you know who called him? — Florian didn’t talk much about his work. — Really? — He was working for Richard Gratien. Sacha knew Gratien by name. He was a big fish in the world of Franco-African relations and on first name terms with all the big names in the ministries of foreign affairs and the defence. He was a lawyer with a background that

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was both opaque and crucial: he worked as a go-between, in the world of arms deals. — And your husband had an appointment with him this morning? — Yes. — Were things problematic between them? — I don’t think so. — Was Richard Gratien involved in a delicate case? — All cases are delicate. — And did you husband have a case about to come up in court? — Florian didn’t plead in court. All he did was draft contracts for commercial exchanges, so as to facilitate contacts. She took a long drag, then closed her eyes for a second. Her hands were still trembling. — Did he seem tense lately? — No. — Were there any other important phone calls? Or unusual meetings? Or a clash? She simply shook her head. He promised to do all he could to find the murderer. So long as she helped him. — You don’t seem to like Gratien. She didn’t answer. — Why is that? Sacha pressed the point. — Florian lived in his shadow. When we met at law school … Florian was already working for him. — What was he doing? — He was his assistant. I think he was already helping him to draft contracts. — What kind of relationship did they have outside of work? — Gratien paid for our marriage. — Didn’t your husband expect his own family to do that? — Florian had stopped speaking to his mother. — For how long? — For years. There was now anger in her eyes. He let her take all the time she needed to work it off. — I told him that he should get a grip on his life. And he was starting to listen to me. But it was a hard decision to made. It was tough to refuse all that money. And then … — And then what? — You can’t just walk away from someone like Gratien and turn over a new leaf. — Why not? — He sucks the very blood from you and your family. And so, you have to

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run … My idea was to start all over again from nothing … — What do you mean? — Moving abroad, with both of us getting jobs in an international law practice. — You’re a lawyer? — I’m a criminal lawyer in one of the best practices in Paris. And I’ve worked hard to get there, even giving up on the idea of having children … but this time, I was ready to resign. — Had your husband told Gratien about this idea? — No, it was just between him and me. I kept bringing it back up. I thought that with time … — I noticed that there’s a suitcase in the hall. Were you about to go away? — Yes. Right in the middle of the night. I’d left a dozen messages on Florian’s cell phone, I was beside myself … — Can you explain? — We had both been working like mad things, him with his life and me with mine. We hardly saw each other. It was all becoming absurd … — You wanted to teach him a lesson. — I just wanted to go away for a few days, to stay with one of my friends, I thought it would serve him right. How stupid I was … More tears. He grabbed a pack of tissues and handed it to her. Then noticed a crushed scrap of paper on the floor. He unfolded it: a nicotine patch. Just like the one in Vidal’s bag. — And you’re sure he didn’t come back last night? — That patch is mine. Florian didn’t come home, so I started smoking again … — Did your husband know Toussaint Kidjo, a police lieutenant who was born in Africa? — I don’t think so. — Kidjo died five years ago. — What does that have to do with my husband? She took some time to swallow the explanation. — So his name really means nothing to you? — No. — Lieutenant Sébastien Ménard is the investigating officer on my team. I’d like him to have access to your husband’s personal papers. I mean, to his office on Rue de Seine. — When? — As soon as possible. — So give your man a ring. And let’s get it over with. Sacha called Ménard and told him to join him on Rue de Vaugirard. — Has Richard Gratien contacted you since the missed appointment of this morning?

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— He hasn’t stopped. I ended up unplugging the phone. I couldn’t take anymore … — Could you give me his personal contact details? Vidal’s lair overlooked an inner courtyard bordered by ancient trees which soaked up the light. A set of African statuettes stood on the marble mantelpiece: warriors with seashell eyes and heads stuck with feathers, who seemed to be watching over the place. — Did your husband use email in his work? — Of course he did. — I don’t see a computer. Did he have one in his office? — He had a laptop. But he generally used his BlackBerry. Any bulky correspondence was dealt with by his secretary, Alice Bernier. Nadine Vidal composed the combination of the safe, removed a large leather notebook from it, then noted down an address and cell phone number, which she gave to Sacha. — Would you mind? He asked, pointing at the book. She handed it to him. It contained hundreds of names copied down in a fine hand. Kidjo wasn’t one of them.

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Cécile Vargaftig

The New New Mysteries of Paris

The novel’s protagonist, Frédérique, who previously appeared in Cécile Vargaftig’s first novel, shares certain similarities with her author: they are both screenwriters, have cats, and prefer women. Prone to grumbling about her destiny to be a character caught up in a succession of random, far-fetched and time-consuming goings-on, Frédérique sets off in search of a mysterious woman to whom she has to give a letter. In no time, and to her utter disbelief, she finds herself on the trail of a time travel machine, which, dutiful to a fault, she promptly puts to good use. Thus begins an amazing adventure which, as the plot twists and turns, leads to her materializing in Paris at different stages in its

Publisher: Au diable vauvert Date of Publication: March 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Marie Pacifique Zeltner rights@audiable.com

Translation: Will Hobson willhobson@hotmail.com

Biography

Cécile Vargaftig was born in 1965 in Lorraine. Since graduating in screenwriting from Femis, the state film school, she has written scripts for numerous French films, including Le Ciel de Paris by Michel Béna, Le Lait de la tendresse humaine by Dominique Cabrera, Stormy weather by Solveig Anspach, Barakat by Djamila Sarhaoui, La Femme invisible by Agathe Teyssier, and Oublier Cheyenne, by Valérie Minetto. She is a member of the Club des 13, a group of film professionals that came together in 2008 to comment on the state of French independent cinema, and she also writes novels. She lives in France, either in Paris or in a small village in the Lot, it depends. Publications Recent novels include: Fantômette Enters Into A Civil Union, Au diable vauvert, 2006; Leave To Simmer, Julliard, 1999. (For what follows, it is worth pointing out that Fantômette is a popular children’s book character in the Bibliothèque Rose series, a superhero alter ego of a 12-year-old girl, Françoise, who has been fighting crime in books, comics, cartoons and on TV since 1961.)

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history, and to Cécile Vargaftig, in a crisis of authorial conscience, intervening in the novel to feed her character’s cat, empty her bins and do her work. Finally abandoning the realms of highly autobiographical fiction to produce a suspenseful action novel written in the third person and the past tense with a host of cliffhanger moments, Cécile Vargaftig not only perfectly captures the spirit and technique of the great Eugène Sue, but also makes free with them to the reader’s great delight. Such playfulness is a joy from start to finish, but the plot is also intensely involving, and it’s no exaggeration to say the result is a genuinely compulsive thriller.

We’re in New Caledonia in the South Pacific, the place where people who want to leave it all behind go, slightly south of Jacques Brel’s Marquesas and due west of Stevenson’s Samoa, from where he wrote to his mother, ‘I was only happy once: that was at Hyères; it came to an end from a variety of reasons, decline of health, change of place, increase of money, age with his stealing steps: since then, as before then, I know not what it means. But I know pleasure still; pleasure with a thousand faces and none perfect, a thousand tongues all broken, a thousand hands and all of them with scratching nails. High among these I place this delight of weeding out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence of the high wood, broken by incongruous sounds of birds.’ January 2007 is hot. It’s nine in the evening, they go to bed early there, and Frédérique is reading Vincent’s script naked in bed. Wait, damn, I’ve forgotten to say what she does. I’ll keep it to a minimum. In 1994, she studied film, as I did a few years before her. And, in 2007, I think she’s a screenwriter, again like me. It suits her freedom-loving nature. Yes, of course she writes novels. That’s why she’s got a cat. And the reason she’s reading Vincent’s script in New Caledonia is because she’s running a screenwriting course for short films there, as I did a few years earlier. The modern way would be to put in Vincent’s script here, but I don’t really want to, it’ll slow everything down. Basically, Vincent’s story is about someone who has been chosen as a guinea pig by a professor and his female assistant for their time travel experiments. The time machine is a Henry II sideboard that resides in the back room of a dimly lit flat in Paris’ 11th arrondissement.

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One day on his travels, the man (this is what he calls his main character) falls in love with a woman (she doesn’t have a name either). This makes him happy. He wants to stay in the past with her. But the professor forces him to come back to the present. The man suffers agonies at being separated from the woman he loves. So one day he fires up the Henri II sideboard on his own and travels back to his beloved’s time. Only she’s no longer there. Various clues make it clear to him that she is a time traveller too. He sinks into despair. How will he find her? The end. Frédérique scratches her head, perplexed. Setting aside the time machine, the story strikes her as essentially very traditional, with its idea that love at first sight is the synchronization of two speeds, the sudden coincidence of two periods of time, and that for a love to last, it has to have a specific tempo. But what really bothers her—well, apart from the fact that the story doesn’t have an ending—is the Henri II sideboard. It’s so weird. Frédérique remembers Vincent’s answer when she asked him why he’d chosen it for the time machine. ‘Because the machine has been around since Henri II’s time. And, back then, the guy had put it in a sideboard.’ She hadn’t said anything, thinking there was a certain logic to the notion that a time machine doesn’t necessarily have to be from the period in which it’s used. (I don’t know how Stendhal managed, but I haven’t written for three days. People coming and going at home, needing to catch up on sleep, an important meeting for work. At this rate, I’d never have finished The Charterhouse of Parma by Christmas. But anyway, let’s go on …) So Frédérique is in the middle of reading this improbable script when, suddenly, there’s a knock at the door. Frédérique says, ‘Come in’. It’s Laurent, one of the student teachers, a tall, gangly character. He complains that Vincent is singing in the pool and stopping everyone getting to sleep. ‘What’s he singing?’ she asks. ‘Come and see,’ he replies. ‘And do something.’ Frédérique heads off. She’s not too keen on science-fiction, but she is fond of Vincent. He’s an odd one: in his fifties, white hair, grey eyes, kind of handsome, often sad, and, naturally, deeply mysterious, but who isn’t out here, given that every white person in the place treats their reasons for coming as a deadly secret. The others find his habit of not talking for hours unnerving, but not Frédérique, who’s always liked people who are slightly odd. In the pool, Vincent is singing that hit by Daniel Balavoine: Pleased to meet you, My name’s Henry, I want to make a success of my life, generally, And find love, whoah, oh, love. Frédérique laughs; he really is funny, this guy. And then, without a moment’s hesitation, she does something, which is to follow his lead and jump into the pool, fully clothed. Vincent stops singing and bursts out laughing. They chase each other around in the water like children. Sitting down on a white plastic chair by the side of the pool, Laurent watches them with a look of

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dismay. Frédérique gives him a professional glance, as if to say, I’ve got this in hand, you can go back to bed, which seems to convince him, because he stands up and goes back to his room. When they’re alone, Vincent comes up very close to her and asks, ‘Are you in love with anyone?’ ‘Yes,’ she says, thinking of Véronique. ‘What about you?’ ‘I don’t think in terms of love anymore.’ ‘What terms do you think in?’ ‘Intimacy. You’ve got too close somehow. There are some countries that put up walls around their borders. I can understand that.’ ‘You think Israel had a wall built around it because they were afraid of loving the Palestinians?’ ‘No, because they were afraid the Palestinians would love them. That would be awful, wouldn’t it? Imagine.’ Frédérique isn’t completely relaxed. It’s been a long time since she has slept with a man, and this one, it has to be said, does seem a bit screwy. Suddenly the thought crosses her mind that in fact he’s totally normal and that he’s only acted crazy to engineer this situation so he can get off with her. Having said that, comparing oneself to a country—one at war, what’s more—isn’t totally normal. ‘Come on, let’s get out, that’ll be nice,’ he says, taking her hand. They get out of the pool. Vincent has to help her, because she weighs a ton in her wet clothes. When she stands up, she becomes a drainpipe with a pool of water at her feet. She thinks of the Prévert poem about the snowman who sits on the stove to warm himself, and then disappears, just like that. She sizes up the situation. Vincent is a nice guy. She knows he is, and people don’t change just like that, like snowmen when they sit on stoves. But what if love warms him up and makes him disappear? she asks herself anxiously. Oh come on, ‘love’: don’t exaggerate, she answers. Well yes, love is the right word, she insists. Even holding his hand, as I’m doing now, has got something to do with love. I’ve got a big heart. What am I getting into? If I go ahead, will I be cheating on Véronique? Véronique hasn’t any qualms about sleeping with someone if she feels like it. Will I like it? Is he going to hurt me? What if I say no? Isn’t that going to drive him even crazier? Shit, he’s crying. When she takes him in her arms, he starts crying even harder. A breeze gets up. Frédérique takes Vincent into her bungalow, doesn’t turn on the light, gently lays the still-crying Vincent on her rumpled bed and hurries off to the shower to warm herself up. Yesterday, I started reading Cercle by Yannick Haenel. I like it a lot. Get away from here, said the voices, clear out: beauty opens somewhere else, time opens somewhere else, the heart opens somewhere else. He lives in literature and vice versa. As for dick, while we’re on the subject, he doesn’t hesitate to put in some sex scenes either (neither?). And that makes me think, seeing as I’m a paragraph away from one myself. My first two novels had sex scenes, which I was proud of. I loved writing

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them. They have to be sexy and a turn-on and yet still be literature. In the third one I didn’t want to write one at all, so I didn’t. I think I should have thought about it more first though, and really asked myself why I didn’t, rather than just listen to my internal misgivings. I think that if, towards the end of the book, Cécile Vargaftig (that’s the name of the narrator of Fantômette Enters Into A Civil Union) explained why there were no real sex scenes in her book (about halfway through, she sleeps with a girl, but it’s very mild), and linked it to the fact that Fantômette is and will always be a book for children, and added something about autobiographical fiction and the terrifying choice between modesty and sexual fatuousness facing anyone who writes and the fact that you can address your characters’ sexuality without having the obligatory scene, the novel would have worked really well. But anyway, it’s too late. As Yannick Haenel might say in one of his slow curling phrases: now’s the time to take up that piece of unfinished business. Yannick Haenel is a little rascal. Clarine moans and writhes, constantly giving me details, instructions: there … harder … go on … there, that’s good … Fuck me hard … And so, lifting her legs higher, gently at first and then like a beast, I fuck Clarine. She thinks she’s in a porn film, she wants porn, that’s how she sees herself, in the middle of the shot, one scene cutting to the next. Her fingers on my cock work faster etc. He tries to convince us he’s writing porn to please the girl because that’s what she wants. When I was at school, our joke would have been to call this meta-porn (meta, in this case, retaining its full flavour)—in other words porn that’s aware it’s porn. But I can’t seem to deal with it anymore. Oh, for goodness sake, what’s going on? I haven’t developed a puritan streak as I’ve got older, have I? When I was younger, I can assure you, I was always reading erotic and pornographic books. My favourite was Emmanuelle 4, The Hypothesis of Eros, published by Maspero. The public doesn’t expect anything, it has secret hopes, hope always springs anew for it (ok, I know, the extract I’ve chosen isn’t very erotic, although, if you think about it, maybe it is …) I found those books wonderfully free, liberated and liberating, and, of course, political too, as all self-respecting erotic writing should be.

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Foreign Rights

Des Horts Stéphanie

Énard Mathias

JC Lattès

Actes Sud

The Panther

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Bello Antoine

Cendrey Jean-Yves

Gallimard

Actes Sud

u Greek [Polis] u Italian [Fazi Editore] u Russian [Gelos]

Benchetrit Samuel

A Heart Outside Grasset & Fasquelle

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Abecassis Eliette

Sephardi

Albin Michel

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Unfavourable Winds Éd. de l’Olivier

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Arditi Metin

The Louganis Girl Actes Sud

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Astier Ingrid

Quai des Orfèvres Gallimard

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No One

Mercure de France

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Books, United States] u Italian [Barbès Editore] u Korean [Open Book] u Rumanian [Editura Univers]

[Shanghai 99 Readers] u Dutch [Arena ; Meulenhoff] u German [Aufbau Verlag] u Hebrew [Keter Publishing House] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] Berest Anne

Her Father’s Daughter Le Seuil

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[Alberdania] u German [Knaus/Random House] u Turkish [Dogan] Berton Benjamin

Alain Delon, Japanese Superstar Hachette

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Besson Philippe

The Accidental Man Julliard

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Verlag] u Korean [Woongjin] u Polish [Muza] Bizot Véronique

Prize Day Actes Sud

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Blas de Roblès Jean-Marie

The Midnight Mountain Zulma

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Honecker 21

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Chalandon Sorj

My Traitor

Grasset & Fasquelle

u Castilian [Alianza] u Chinese (complex

characters) [Ten Points] u English [The Lilliput Press, Ireland] u Italian [Mondadori] Constantine Barbara

Tom, Little Tom, Little, Little Man, Tom Calmann-Lévy

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Davrichewy Kéthévane

The Black Sea Sabine Wespieser

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Decoin Didier

Is This the Way Women Die? Grasset & Fasquelle

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Literatur Verlag] u Italian [Rizzoli] u Korean [Golden Bough Publishing] Delecroix Vincent

The Shoe on the Roof Gallimard

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Descott Régis

Fargues Nicolas

JC Lattès

P.O.L

Éd. de l’Olivier

The Pathfinders

u Castilian [Belacqva/La Otra Orilla,

and Commonwealth] u German [Droemer Knaur]

Desarthes Agnès

In the Black Night

Here are the titles presented in the previous issues of Fiction France whose foreign rights have since been sold abroad.

The Târ of My Father

Spain] u Catalan [Columna, Spain] u English [Open Letter, United States] u German [Berlin Verlag] u Greek [Ellinika Grammata] u Italian [Rizzoli] u Lebanese for the Arabic language [La Librairie Orientale] u Portuguese [Dom Quixote] u Serbian [Stylos Art]

u Italian [Piemme]

u English [Portobello, United Kingdom

Ghata Yasmine

Zone

Librairie Arthème Fayard

[De Arbeidespers] u German [Ammann Verlag] u Greek [Melani] u Italian [Feltrinelli] Giraud Brigitte

A Year Abroad Stock

u German [Fischer Verlag] u Italian

[Guanda] u Portuguese [Platano Editora]

You’ll See

Guenassia Jean-Michel

u Spanish

u Hebrew [Babel]

Albin Michel

Deville Patrick

Faye Éric

Caïn & Adèle

u Castilian [RBA Libros] u Catalan

Equatoria

The Man With No Prints

u Castilian [La Otra Orilla]

u Bulgarian [Pulsio] u Slovak [Ed. VSSS]

Diome Fatou

The Power Station

Flammarion

u German [Edition Nautilus]

Le Seuil

u Italian [Galaad]

Our Lives, Unfulfilled u German [Diogenes]

Dugain Marc

An Ordinary Execution Gallimard

u Bulgarian [Fakel Express] u Catalan

[Pages] u Dutch [De Geus] u Greek [Kedros] u Hebrew [Kinneret] u Italian [Bompiani] u Japanese [Kawade Shobo] u Polish [Sic !] u Portuguese [Ambav; Record, Brazil] u Rumanian [RAO] Énard Mathias

The Incurable Optimists’ Club

Stock

Filhol Elisabeth

P.O.L

u Italian [Fazi Editore]

[Edicions 62] u Croatian [Vukovic & Runjic] u Dutch [Van Gennep] u English [Atlantic Book Grove Atlantic] u German [Insel Verlag] u Greek [Polis] u Italian [Mauri Spagnol/Salani] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] u Norwegian [Forlaget Press] u Swedish [Norstedts Forlag] Guyotat Pierre

u Swedish [Elisabeth Grate Bokförlag]

Coma

Flipo Georges

u English [Semiotexte, United States]

The Commissaire Is Not a Poetry Fan Éd. de la Table Ronde

u Italian [Ponte Alle Grazie]

Garnier Pascal

Captive Moon in a Dead Eye Zulma

u German [BTB Verlag] u Italian

Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants

[Isbn Edizioni]

u Bulgarian [Prozoretz] u Castilian

The Panda Theory

Actes Sud

Garnier Pascal

[Mondadori] u Catalan [Columna] u Croatian [Profil] u Dutch [De Arbeidespers] u German [Berlin Verlag] u Italian [Rizzoli] u Portuguese [Dom Quixote, Portugal; Paz e Terra, Brazil] u Russian [Atticus] u Serbian [Geopoetika] u Turkish [Can]

Zulma

u English (worldwide rights)

[Gallic Books]

u German [BTB Verlag]

Germain Sylvie

The Unnoticed Albin Michel

u English [Dedalus Limited, United

Kingdom] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing]

Mercure de France

u Italian [Medusa] u Russian [Société

d’études céliniennes] Hesse Thierry

Demon

Éd. de l’Olivier

u Castilian [Duomo, Spain] u Italian [Fazi

Editore] u Norwegian [Agora] Joncour Serge

How Many Ways I Love You Flammarion

u Chinese [Phoenix Publishing] u Korean

[Wisdom House] u Russian [Riopl]

Khadra Yasmina

Olympus of the Unfortunate Julliard

u Finnish [WSOY] u Greek [Kastaniotis] u Italian [Marsilio Editori] u Portuguese

[Bizâncio] u Spanish [Ediciones Destino] Kiner Aline

The Game of Hangman Liana Levi

u German [Ullstein]

117

Lalumière Jean-Claude

Malte Marcus

Le Dilettante

Zulma

The Russian Front

u Castilian [Libros del Asteroide]

Lapeyre Patrick

Life is Short and Desire Neverending P.O.L

u Bulgarian [Altera/Delta Entertainment] u Castilian [Destino] u Catalan [Aleph/

Cinderella

u Italian [Piemme] u Polish [Albatros]

u English [Portobello, United Kingdom]

u Italian [Il Saggiatore] u Korean [Agora]

u Spanish [Paidos] u Turkish [Pupa]

u Vietnamese [Les Éditions littéraires

du Vietnam]

Mattern Jean

Milk and Honey Sabine Wespieser

u Greek [Hestia] u Italian [Giulio Einaudi]

Lê Linda

u French (for Algeria only) [Barzakh]

Christian Bourgois

u German [Amman]

Le Bris Michel

u Romanian [Polirom]

Mauvignier Laurent

Some Men Éd. de Minuit

u Chinese [Art et littérature du Hunan] u Danish [Arvids] u Dutch [De Geus] u German [Deutscher Taschenbuch

Verlag] u Italian [Feltrinelli] u Spanish [Anagrama] Minghini Giulio

The World’s Beauty

Fake

u Italian [Fazi Editore]

u Italian [Piemme]

Le Tellier Hervé

Monnery Romain

Grasset & Fasquelle

Allia

Enough About Love

Free, Lonesome and Drowsy

u English [The Other Press, United

u Dutch [Nijgh & Van Ditmar] u Spanish

JC Lattès

States of America] u German [Deutscher Taschenbuch u Verlag] u Greek [Opera] u Italian [Mondadori] u Japanese [Hayakawa] u Spanish [Grijalbo/Random House] Lindon Mathieu

My Heart Alone Is Not Enough P.O.L

u Dutch [Ailantus]

Luce Damien

Luxemburglar

Éd. Héloïse d’Ormesson

u German [Droemer Knaur]

Majdalani Charif

Caravanserail

Au diable vauvert

[Grijalbo, for both Castilian and Catalan] Monnier Alain

Our Second Life Flammarion

u German [Ullstein]

Nahapétian Naïri

Éd. de l’Olivier

u Italian [Minimum Fax]

Stock

u Korean [Mujintree]

Révay Theresa

Pagano Emmanuelle

Belfond

Childish Hands P.O.L

All the Dreams of the World u Czech [Euromedia] u German [Der

u Italian [Garzanti] u Korean [Yolimwom]

A Lion Hunter

u Romanian [Humanitas]

u Chinese (simplified characters)

u Portuguese [Rocco, Brazil]

Le Seuil

Pancol Katherine

[Shanghai 99 Readers] u German [Berlin Verlag] u Italian [Barbès] u Portuguese [Sextante]

Albin Michel

Rolin Jean

Esfera de los libros] u Catalan [Edicions 62] u Chinese (traditional characters) [Business weekly] u Chinese (simplified characters) [Thnkingdom] u Czech [Jota s.r.o] u Danish [Bazar Forlag] u Dutch [WPG Belgie NV] u Finnish [Bazar Kustannus Oy] u Italian [Baldini Castoldi Dalai Editore] u Japanese [Hayakawa Publishing] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] u Norwegian [Bazar Forlag] u Polish [Sonia Draga] u Portuguese [A esfera dos livros] u Russian [Astrel] u Swedish [Baza Forlag] u Turkish [Pegasus Yayinlari]

P.O.L

u Russian [Astrel/Ast] u Serbian [Nolit]

The Slow Tortoise Waltz u Bulgarian [Colibri] u Castilian [La

The Uncertainty Liana Levi

u Italian [Piemme]

Bambi Bar Éd. de Minuit

u Greek [Agra] u Romanian [Bastion

Editura]

Ravey Yves

Kidnapping with Ransom Éd. de Minuit

u German [Kunstmann Verlag]

u Chinese (simplified characters)

[Éd. d’Art et de littérature du Hunan]

[Aquarius, Taiwan] u Dutch [Prometheus/ Bert Bakker] u English [Dalkey Archive Press, United Kingdom] u Galician [Glaxia] u German [Frankfurter Verlaganstalt] u Italian [Barbes editora] u Spanish [Anagrama editorial] Varenne Antonin

u English [MacLehose Press, United

u Polish [Czarne] u Russian [Text]

Rosenthal Olivia

What Do Reindeer Do When Christmas Is Over? Verticales

Viviane Hamy

Kingdom] u German [Ullstein]

u Italian [Einaudi] u Turkish [Dog ˇ an

Kitap]

Viel Tanguy

Paris-Brest

u Italian [Nottetempo]

Éd. de Minuit

Roux Frédéric

u German [Wagenbach]

The Indian Winter Grasset & Fasquelle

u Chinese (complex characters) [Ye-ren,

Taiwan] u Greek [Papyros]

Gallimard

Ravey Yves

Éd. de Minuit

u German [Berlin Verlag]

u English [Whereabout Press, United

States] u Romanian [Nemira] u Spanish [Demipage]

Toussaint Jean-Philippe

The Truth About Marie

Fakirs

u Swedish [Sekwa] u Ukrainian

Ollagnier Virgnie

[Ripol] u Spanish [Ediciones Casus Belli]

A Dead Dog After Him

Sansal Boualem

[Knaus/Random] u Greek [Scripta]

u Korean [Hyundaemunhak] u Russian

u Chinese (traditional characters)

u English [Viking, United States]

Phébus

Le Seuil

u Hebrew [Hakibutz Hameucad]

Rolin Olivier

Perhaps a Love Affair

Beefsteak

Gallimard

u German [Karl Blessing Verlag]

u German [Thiele] u Greek [Patakis]

Page Martin

u Dutch [Querido] u Spanish [Alianza]

Three Strong Women

u Chinese [Shanghai 99 Readers]

Éd. de l’Olivier

u German [Verlag Klaus Wagenbach]

Liana Levi

NDiaye Marie

Flammarion

u Turkish [Can Yayinlari]

Who Killed Ayatollah Kanuni?

[ECM Media]

Seksik Laurent

The Last Days of Stefan Zweig

Club Bertelsmann; Goldmann Verlag] u Hungarian [Athenaeum] u Polish [Swiat Ksiazki] u Portuguese [Circulo de Leitores] u Russian [Family Leisure Club] u Serbian [Alnari] u Spanish [Circulo de Lectores; Plaza y Janés]

Provost Martin

2009 Goncourt Prize: 28 contracts signed worldwide

u Catalan [La Campana] u German

Reinhardt Éric

And My Transparent Heart

Empuries] u Chinese [Sichuan Literature and Art Press] u Czech [Euromedia] u English (worldwide rights) [Other Press] u German [Karl Blessing] u Italian [Ugo Guanda Editore] u Korean [Minumsa] u Russian [Azbooka/Atticus] u Serbian [Akademska Knjiga]

In Memoriam

Ovaldé Véronique

Garden of Love

The German’s Village

u Dutch [De Arbeiderspers] u Italian [Neri Pozza]

u Spanish [Acantilado]

Winckler Martin

The Women’s Chorus P.O.L

u Spanish [Akal]

u Bosnian [B.T.C Sahinpasic]

u Catalan [Columna] u Danish [Turbine]

u Dutch [De Geus] u English [Europe Editions, United States ; Bloomsbury, United Kingdom] u German [Merlin] u Greek [Polis] u Hebrew [Kinneret] u Italian [Einaudi] u Polish [Dialog] u Serbian [IPS Media II] u Spanish [El Aleph]

Schwartzbrod Alexandra

Farewell Jerusalem Stock

u Croatian [Hena Com] u Turkish [Can]

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