The Birthday Party, by Laurent Mauvignier

9781945492655

Transit Books, 2023

originally published 2020 as Histoires de la nuit 

translated by  Daniel Levin Becker

439 pp

I've described this book to friends as a demanding novel due to its style, but once you get used to the way it is written, it becomes unputdownable. It's also a story that eventually began to  fry my nerves until the last page, and I have to admit that more than once I was beyond tempted to just take a peek to make sure everything came out okay.  I didn't, of course, but I really, REALLY wanted to.  

There are three houses in the small hamlet of La Bassée, two of which are occupied and one of which is empty and on the market waiting to be sold.  In one of these houses is the family Bergogne, consisting of Patrice, Marion and their daughter Ida; in the other is their older neighbor, Christine, who lives alone with her dog.  Patrice has carried on the same life he grew up with and had kept the family farm  "in the hands of Bergogne, as his father had wanted."  Marion works in a print shop in the nearby town and Christine is an artist, having left behind "the Parisian life" to able to "do some real work."   

The relationship between Marion and Patrice is somewhat strained; he is overweight, a meek and mild sort of man,  holding in check the violence that he knows is inside of him, the same that he witnessed in his father.  She is younger and more energetic, impulsive; she likes to go out dancing often with her friends,  which makes him feel as though she "prefers their company to his." He never asks about her outings, while she never volunteers anything about them or much else, really.   He does "everything in his power to be pleasant" with her, always worrying about things, especially that she could "leave on a whim" if he did say something.  It's a lonely existence for the two, relieved mainly by the presence of Ida, whom they both love very much and who stays at Christine's house after school while her parents are working.   Marion and Christine don't get along very well, with Christine making sarcastic digs at Marion which Marion answers with silence.   But it's Marion's 40th birthday, and Christine, Ida, and Patrice are preparing for a party he's giving her. While Patrice's invitation to her two work friends is a surprise that Marion knows nothing about, what transpires that evening will be completely unexpected by everyone.

The story covers two days in the lives of these people; in the first, the author allows his characters to go about their business of every day life while allowing the reader a glimpse into the tensions that exist among them,  while in the second he moves them into full-on crisis mode.    The action is slow and very controlled, with the narrative moving from character to character without wrecking the reading flow as the pressure intensifies from moment to moment.  The back blurb notes that the story is a "deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves," which it is in part, but I see it more as an intense character study examining lives that are already on the edge as they become pushed into a situation well beyond their control.  

Labeled as a "gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present,"  it's easy to understand why this book has been described by so many readers as a thriller -- it is definitely a nailbiter, and I have to say that the author does a fine job of leaving the answer to the key question of "why" all of this is happening until almost the very end, a factor that keeps the pages turning.  The Birthday Party may be frustrating for some people who like swift action, or who don't particularly care for long, streaming paragraphs, but as I noted earlier, once I got the reading rhythm under my belt I did not want to put it down.  I do think though, for reasons I won't get into here, that whoever decided on the title should have used the translated original, as it makes so much more sense and adds another layer of depth to the story as a whole. 

Recommended, for sure. 

The Mystery of Henri Pick, by David Foenkinos

9781782275824
Pushkin, 2020
originally published as La Mystere Henri Pick, 2016
translated by Sam Taylor
270 pp

paperback

"This novel changed lives." 

My curiosity was more than aroused by the idea that Pushkin Press would be partnering with Walter Presents "for a series of timeless novels with strong international appeal."   The books chosen have been "handpicked" by Walter Iuzzolino himself, whose long-running Walter Presents has been a tv staple in my house for several years, even before the move to PBS in 2018, so there was no doubt that I would be buying this novel.  I've also preordered Walter's second Pushkin pick, The Second Life of Inspector Canessa, due out here in the US January of 2021. 

I admit to being a bit surprised as I started reading this book, as most of the time Walter tends to lean toward international crime.  The Mystery of Henri Pick, as I discovered, is much more on the lighter side than I'd expected.  At first it was a bit discombobulating not having the full-fledged crime/mystery novel I thought I'd bought, so I had to regroup, let go of my original expectations and move on.  Once I relaxed, the book became a fun read, albeit with a slightly serious edge.

In the small town of Crozon in Brittany, librarian Jean-Pierre Gourvec had set aside a space at the municipal library "for the world's homeless manuscripts," inspired by his reading of The Abortion by American writer Richard Brautigan.   After placing ads in trade magazines "inviting all authors" to bring their rejected books to his library,  writers throughout the country came to

"rid themselves of the fruits of their failure. It was a sort of literary pilgrimage. There was a symbolic value in travelling hundreds of miles to put an end to the frustrations of not being published."

Meanwhile, in Paris, Delphine Despero has gone to work for Grasset, hired as a junior editor for this publishing firm. It was in this context that she met and fell for a young, aspiring writer by the name of Frédriéc Koskas who later accompanied her on a trip to the home of her parents in the village of Morgat, near Crozon.  Delphine is curious after hearing about the library of rejected books, and after  the pair make couple of visits, Delphine takes one of the manuscripts, The Last Hours of a Love Affair away with her and becomes throroughly enchanted with it, ultimately deciding that it absolutely had to be published.  The book's author is one Henri Pick, now deceased, but who used to run a pizzeria in Crozon.  As the dustjacket blurb  informs, "The book is an immediate sensation, prompting fevered interest in the identity of its author."  Curiosity grows about Henri Pick, not just for the journalist who wonders how this pizza chef could write such a novel, but also for his family, who'd never even seen him pick up a book, let alone spend time writing.   The publication of Pick's work also sets off a number of "unforeseen consequences" which make up the bulk of The Mystery of Henri Pick, as it is definitely a novel that "changed lives." 

This book fortuitously arrived at a point when I needed something mind-refreshing, something on the lighter side, and the author threw a few hours of happy reading my way.    Author David Foenkinos noted that his book is "a playful reflection of the literary world,"  as well as a "tribute to books and literature and to the writers that have long been heroes of mine," and I have to admit that I couldn't help feeling rather guilty every time he mentioned a title that has been sitting on my shelves, sadly neglected and sadly unread.  The story is definitely "playful," and while I loved the literary references as well as the great love for books and literature displayed throughout, for my taste it goes too much into the private lives/soul searching of all of the characters affected by the publication of Pick's book, making it drag a bit in the reading after a while and sometimes turning toward the "cutesy" side which is just not my cuppa.  I also want to say that the dustjacket makes a lot of the "obstinate journalist," but in reality, he takes up far less space than I would have thought from the book's description.    But then came the ending which  I can only describe as completely unexpected and which I greeted with mental applause and a silent shout of bravo in my head.  Now to watch the film.

Overall, it's fun, it's lighthearted, and we can all use some of that happening in our lives at the moment. 

Contemporary Interlude #2: The Festival of Insignificance, by Milan Kundera

9780062356895
Harper, 2015
128 pp
translated by Linda Asher
arc copy -- thank you!

"Insignificance...is the essence of existence. It is all around us, and everywhere and always. It is present even when no one wants to see it: in atrocities, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters...it is the key to wisdom, it is the key to a good mood."

*******

I'm probably among the few people reading this book who have never read another book by Milan Kundera.  I have some of them on my shelves -- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Slowness, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting -- but just haven't quite got to them. So I'm in no condition to judge whether or not this book is, as the cover blurb states, "a summation of his whole work."

The book is structured in seven short parts consisting of small little chapters, rather loosely connected to each other, all light in tone.  All of the main characters in this book are friends living in Paris, all are getting older, and we watch them not only in each other's company but among others in various situations as they contemplate how to achieve a "good mood."   Why?  Because, as Ramon notes, following Hegel's essay on the comical,

"True humor is inconceivable without an infinite good mood...Not teasing, not satire, not sarcasm. Only from the heights of an infinite good mood can you observe below you the eternal stupidity of men, and laugh over it."

So right up my alley.

Ramon also understands futility:

"We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush."

The way out ("one possible resistance"): "to not take it seriously," a very liberating concept.

 To me it seems  that even while focusing on and contemplating the value of insignificance, the author is actually making significant points about human beings and human nature in our modern world.   For example, even as the novel opens, the focus is on how our era finds beauty in sameness rather than in individuality, as seen through Alain's contemplation of the navel.  It's not his own -- he watches young women as he waxes about   "how to define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body, in the navel." After all, in different eras, it's been the uniqueness of  "thighs, buttocks and breasts" among women that's been sexy; now men seem to be much more focused on the navel that is generally the same among all women.  Then we meet Ramon, who really wants to go and see a Chagall exhibit at a museum in the Luxembourg Gardens, but has passed it by several times just knowing he couldn't stand the "people in line, their faces paralyzed by boredom," who once inside would ruin his experience with "their chatter." He'd much prefer to visit the statues of queens, "poets, painters, scientists," in the park, "the garden of geniuses," where "no one stopped to examine their faces or read the inscriptions on the pedestals."  There he can inhale the "indifference, like a soothing calm." Charles and Caliban, once actors and now  catering cocktail parties,  round out the group.  Caliban speaks French, but dons wigs, colors his skin and  pretends to speak only Pakistani.   One thing they all share is a "joke" about Stalin and twenty-four partridges that runs throughout the book, which is looked at, analyzed and in the end, recreated in a sort of artistic fashion.  But they're all friends, and friendship is "sacred," according to what I call a meta pop-in by the author; it's clearly the one thing that he sees as rising above and beyond all of the trivial, insignificant things in life.

This is a book that definitely needs a reread, which sadly, I did not do; I imagine if I went through it a second time I'd probably get way more out of it. I loved the writing in this book, although some readers may find Kundera's few meta pop-ins a little distracting.  Here, his characters are aware that they are governed by a "master" (the author), who "invented us" and made his characters study Hegel. What I enjoyed about this book are all of the philosophical ruminations, for example, about how people come to be divided into apologizers and their opposites, or about how conversational brilliance can be offputting and actually harmful, and the difference between generations and its relationship to communication:

"People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observatory standing in a different place in time." 

To offer two varying literary critiques: first, from Michael Dirda at the Washington Post who thought it was "very French," and an opposing view from The Guardian, whose author calls it a "stinker."  What most readers will probably miss is the lack of a cohesive story holding this book together, but for me, I was so taken with the philosophical observations and the writing that it worked, and worked well.

******

I read this book for TLC book tours (thanks!), and you can find the rest of the readers and their thoughts here.