Femme Fatales of the world, unite! Read French author Jean-Patrick Manchette’s ninety-page coolest of the cool noir novel Fatale to have a sense of what it would really be like to take control of your life.
The author gets right to the point, as in prose as sharp as a well-tempered stainless steel knife. And speaking of knives, here is the slim, athletic, fetching thirty-year-old main character Aimée Joubert on the topic of killing, reflecting back on how she plunged a knife into the liver of her first victim -- her abusive husband: “It was a genuine revelation, you see,” said Aimée to the baron. “They can be killed. The real assholes can be killed. Anyway, I needed money but I didn’t want to work.”
Aimée, you’re such a sweetie. I love you, babe.
As we learn very quickly, the real assholes of the world are those mustachioed, potbellied, moneygrubbing capitalists forever reading their newspapers, sloshing down their beer and cheating everyone in sight. In this respect, nothing much has changed in nearly 100 years: refined aesthete Des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1884 novel Against Nature is similarly nauseated by all those mutton-chopped bourgeoisie.
But Aimée's response to these odious bastions of mediocrity is entirely opposite to Des Esseintes – rather than retreating in isolation, she infiltrates their social circles; rather than becoming progressively weaker, she uses martial arts and exercise equipment to become progressively stronger; instead of reading Baudelaire’s poetry, she reads crime novels (I imagine her reading Jean-Patrick Manchette crime novels!); and, most dramatically, instead of wishing her enemies dead, she shoots them dead.
This is noir crime fiction but none of that pandering to macho male readers, thank you. Any sensuality is not sexual or even in the presence of men. More to the point, Aimée is most sensual when she is by herself. For example, here’s our hero (or anti-hero) in her own compartment on a train, “She went on eating and drinking and progressively lost control of herself. She leaned over, still chewing, and opened the briefcase and pulled out fistfuls of banknotes and rubbed them against her sweat-streaked belly and against her breasts and her armpits and between her legs and behind her knees. Tears rolled down her cheeks even as she shook with silent laughter and kept masticating.”
Make no mistake, action drives plot; there is very little delving below the surface, after all, who has time for in-depth self-examination when you are, like Aimée, forever recording the patterns and habits of your future victims and calculating your next move. In this respect, Fatale is only one notch removed from cinema, cinema as in Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill, that is. Even relaxing in her bathroom, Aimée primes herself for action: “Lying in her hot bath, she opened the crime novel she has bought. She read ten pages. It took her six or seven minutes. She put the book down, masturbated, washed, and got out of the water. For a moment, in the bathroom mirror, she looked at her slim, seductive body. She dressed carefully; she aimed to please.”
Although Fatale has the hard-boiled flavor of such American noir crime fiction as Hammitt’s The Maltese Falcon and Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, there is also a decidedly political dimension. Recall how Jean-Patrick Manchette was an active Marxist in Paris but became frustrated when the revolution in the late sixties stalled out. On one level his novel is a cool, supercharged critique of corroded capitalism. With searing irony, the enamel plaque KEEP YOUR TOWN CLEAN! appears again and again in the story’s small French town.
Since this is such a jazzy-cool novel, one last action from our sweet Aimée, this from the opening chapter, where she walks up to a fat pharmacist who is out hunting with his fat bourgeois buddies and has sauntered off by himself to take a rest under a tree. “He declared himself greatly astonished to see her here – first because she never went shooting and secondly because she had said her goodbyes to everyone the previous afternoon and taken a taxi to the station. “As surprises go, this beats all. And such a pleasant one too,” he exclaimed, and she unslung her 16-gauge shotgun, turned it on him, and before he had finished smiling emptied both barrels into his gut.”
Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) - French novelist of hyper-cool crime fiction with political overtones
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