French
crime noir, anyone? For fans of Georges Simenon and Jean-Patrick
Manchette, less well-known Pascal Garnier is your man, an author who
peppers his bleak existential yarns with daubs of black humor.
Many
comparisons have been made between Pascal Garnier's short novels and
Georges Simenon's romans durs. However, other than a similar use of
sharp, sparse language and creating tales tough and grueling on their
characters, further comparisons end abruptly. Pascal Garnier possesses
his own unique voice and distinctive style, separating him from not only
Simenon but all other authors.
Jean-Patrick Manchette also
comes to mind since, like Manchette, Pascal Garnier portrays the human
body with all its sweat, shit, piss, vomit, fevers, headaches and
hangovers as little more than a bag of filth. For both authors, fleshy,
stinking humans are forever craving food, drink, drugs and that most
allusive, fleeting state - happiness. Pascal Garnier adds an emotional
dimension mostly absent in Manchette - the love one person can have for
another.
Count me in as a new Pascal Garnier fan. So far I've listened to the audio books and completed a careful reading of The Islanders and The Panda Theory. A dozen of the author's noir novels have been translated into English. Thank you, Gallic Books. I'll be posting reviews of all twelve in the upcoming weeks.
Turning to The Islanders, we first meet forty-year-old Olivier
traveling in freezing late December on the high-speed TGV from Nice to
Paris to deal with his mother's funeral arrangements in Versailles.
Olivier reflects back on his younger days as a two-bit hack journalist,
his stint in a rehab center for his alcoholism, the past couple of years
running a perfume shop with his wife Odile.
Olivier is a
brooding, complex man who is scared of words. Even when speaking, he
uses words as sparingly as possible. After his time in rehab, Olivier
contemplated writing a novel but only got as far as potential titles
such as The Chronicle of Serious Burns or Father and Father Away.
We're then introduced, in turn, to the novel's three other main players:
Roland,
a homeless, luckless tramp fired on his first day as Father Christmas
for getting in a bloody turf brawl with another Santa (quite the sight
for all the children on the sidewalk!). Roland is a mere twenty-two
years-old but acknowledges his twenty-two years alive is twenty-two
years too many.
Blind, obese Rodolphe never reconciled himself
to his world of darkness and can not bear solitude; he continually
harasses and attempts to bully others, especially his older sister
Jeanne, his caretaker with whom he shares an apartment.
Like
Olivier, skinny sister Jeanne is age forty and complex. Jeanne spent
twenty years as a teacher and has a ferocious cynical streak, citing
nowadays plagiarism serves as the ultimate art form and illusion has
become the universal religion. Jeanne takes pride in resembling Cruella
De Vil and identifying herself with the bad guys from films and novels.
Damn, those self-proclaimed, fresh-faced heroes. Not her - she's one of
the baddies but without being in any way cruel.
The story snaps
into emotional overdrive by way of an improbable meeting: upon arriving
at his mother's now vacant apartment, Olivier needs some help. He knocks
on his neighbor's door across the hallway. Jeanne answers. Olivier can
hardly believe his eyes; Jeanne can hardly believe her eyes. Olivier and
Jeanne were madly in love with each other as teenage and haven't seen
each other in twenty-five years.
Not a word more on plot. I'll make a quick shift to a trio of Pascal Garnier themes:
Dreary
Existence - "One by one the passengers awoke from their trance, lowing
like cows at milking time. Those who have been dying of boredom fifteen
minutes earlier were now marveling at the phenomenal speed of the TGV."
As prototypical existential hero (or antihero), Olivier is in a
continual rebellion against the humdrum, the predictable, the mechanical
routine of modern urban life.
Life at the Extremes - December's
bitter ice cold has its effect - Olivier gives in to the inner warmth
that comes from a good, stiff drink. Why not, after all, he hasn't
touched a drop in years? "Right from the first mouthful, the brandy had
got the pump going again. The lava was flowing deliciously through his
veins, spreading from his heart to the tips of his fingers and toes and
into every follicle, even the tiniest nasal hair. Olivier felt as if he
were coming home after a long, long time away." Did I say life at the
extremes? Soon after Olivier's return to the bottle, intensity and drama
aplenty. It's not for nothing this Pascal Garnier novel finds its place
on the shelf with other thrillers and crime fiction.
Inevitable
Crumbling of Those Happy Moments - "The child was still intact in both
of them, dazzling like a pure diamond. Time had stood still and they
were holding their breath as if underwater." Both Olivier and Jeanne
realize the high points of life vanish so quickly. Oh, if there was only
a way to hold on without slipping or falling, life could begin to
measure up to our dreams.
Final point: The Islanders is a
fine work of literature worth multiple reads, a story expressed in
elegant, beautiful language, as per this snippet when Olivier and Jeanne
reflect on their past: "The island was everywhere: under the
dining-room table or the tree in the yard, in the patch behind Madame
Stasi's corner shop, at the line B bus stop. They carried it with them
wherever they went; they were the island, a mound of sand with a palm
tree and Jeanne and Olivier standing under it like the model bride and
groom on a wedding cake."
Rodolphe
and Roland visit the Neptune Fountain at the Palace of Versailles, all
covered over with ice and snow in subzero December. The two men view
"the occasional outstretched arm, a hint of knee, shoulder or buttock.
In the middle of the mirror, Neptune and his chariot appeared set to
take off for the heavens. Such beauty was painful to behold."
French novelist Pascal Garnier, 1949-2010
“He
had instinctively fled to Gare Saint-Lazare because he had nowhere to
go, and people with nowhere to go always end up at stations.”
― Pascal Garnier, The Islanders
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