Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, A Life on Paper, 2010

This first collection of twenty-two of Châteaureynaud’s short stories to appear in English is a very welcome addition to genre bookshelves. His stories may be bizarre and frequently disconcerting, but I’d still struggle to describe Châteaureynaud specifically as a genre writer, at least in the Anglo-Saxon sense of how we define that word: he specifically avoids invoking horror and fear in the reader, instead choosing a far more understated approach to getting across the essence of his surreal mysteries. He occasionally also employs science fictional tropes, although he never lapses into an over-reliance on them to purvey his sense of elusive, dreamy strangeness – he is far more subtle than that. I didn’t actually find the book’s description of Châteaureynaud as “France’s own Kurt Vonnegut” that helpful (apart from the obvious physical resemblance) as Châteaureynaud’s writing possesses an elegance that Vonnegut rarely achieved, but perhaps that’s partly down to the translations by Edward Gauvin, who frequently displays a knack for precision in finding that English mot juste wherever it’s needed – Châteaureynaud is actually more Kafkaesque in his leanings, perhaps with a dash of Calvino. Several stories stand out: ‘The Only Mortal’ is probably the liveliest (and funniest) story here, ‘Delaunay the Broker’ is masterful in the way it compounds its central mystery, but for sheer unique strangeness it’s hard to better the eponymous ‘A Life on Paper’ in this collection. If this ever gets a paperback edition – which it really deserves, and further collections would be very welcome too – then I expect it will sell very well, and Châteaureynaud deserves to become a much more familiar name to English language readers.  PY

•  Edward Gauvin’s translation of A Life on Paper won the Long Form Category of the first Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award in 2011.

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Philippe Grimbert, Secret, 2004

An unhealthy and introverted boy in post-war Paris imagines he has a rival elder brother, as strong and statuesque as his health-obsessed parents, but he soon learns about a real brother, no longer alive, that his parents have kept secret from him. This feels like a very private memoir, firstly because it’s filled with such personal and lifelong tragedy for all the characters, and secondly because the protagonist shares not only the surname of the author but also, as an adult, the same profession in psychoanalysis. These are just a couple of the crossover points that give away Secret as an ‘autofiction’, that identifiably French genre, and Grimbert also seems to be asking the reader if the relationship between fact and fiction is more like that of rivals, or long-lost brothers? He seems to be trying to reunite the two, and is deft at manipulating the reader to see the novel this way at the same time as telling a wrenching story, with its autobiographical tone making it insightful, compassionate and also very saddening. Secret was also made into a film in 2007.  PY

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Soazig Aaron, Refusal, 2002

Sometimes it seems that any new fiction centred on Auschwitz is required to offer up new horrors previously untouched upon and Soazig Aaron has certainly attempted to go down that route too, somewhat in the tracks of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. In this case I’m not sure it was necessary, but as the point of Refusal is to focus on some of the after-effects of the horror, perhaps you can’t really do that without the inclusion of a few graphic scenes as flashbacks. In Refusal much of the evil of Auschwitz happened to Klara Schwarz-Roth, a German-born Parisian Jew, separated from her daughter and sent there where she was forced to learn many of the darker aspects of survival, which also prevent her from properly rejoining the world upon her release. Klara is a fascinating and eloquent character, if also deeply scarred and deeply scary. Even though the story is told through the eyes of her pre-war friend Angélika, Klara takes centre stage throughout. This is one of those books that won’t let go and is, even with Klara’s self-imposed and self-limiting options for her future, defiantly difficult to argue with.  PY

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Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 1958

It would have helped to know a little more about the French nouveau roman movement before taking on Moderato Cantabile, however my rather back-to-front way of dealing with the book has still been an education, which ultimately is the whole point of my choosing to read diverse styles of fiction. This is one of the more famous pieces of nouveau roman, the manifesto for which Duras didn’t exactly align herself with even though a large middle segment of her work, beginning with this novel, is recognised as such. Unfortunately, I’ve always been a little wary of stories in which everyday characters are (for want of a better term) ‘overcome by symbolism’; such stories risk going way too far up their own postérieur beyond any legitimate experiment in style, resulting in the kind of artistic endeavour that years later usually ends up the subject of legitimate parody.

In a French coastal town, a woman whose unnamed and recalcitrant son is taking piano lessons overhears a murder in the street. The following day she meets a man in a café who also witnessed the murder, and their subsequent encounters are based purely on exploring ideas of how and why it happened. She finds herself drinking copious amounts of wine, and he has motives beyond mere conversation. Their speculations soon become the vector of emotion between them, something clearly more real and important to them than these two deliberately barely-sketched characters are to the reader. This set-up itself is interesting, however the execution and end result left things to be desired, at least for me; others will no doubt find it a satisfying read in its adherence to the nouveau roman credo: one of the movement’s aims was to subvert characterisation, bring other story elements to the fore and explore the tension in between. With that knowledge Moderato Cantabile becomes a far easier story to understand, because some of the elemental symbolism Duras employs is also of the kind more readily understood in the visual arts. I found its depersonalising aspects a little troublesome in terms of actually enjoying the book, but on reflection I can see how it holds up as an example of magnificent literary sleight of hand.  PY

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Franck Pavloff, brown, 2001

Two easy-going friends are living under a regime that is gradually tightening its grip. New laws are introduced stating that brown pets are healthier, stronger and eat less than other animals. So as not to upset the authorities they trade in their differently coloured pets for brown ones. Other colours start to disappear, first the cats, then the dogs, then the people...

brown is nothing less than a very succinct short story that first appeared in France as 'Matin Brun', published by a small press more famed for its poetry, and is now available in English with a small commentary about its origin and subsequently very colourful life. It was written by Pavloff (a psychologist and son of a Bulgarian anarchist) as a response to French local elections in 1998 when it was discovered that mainstream political parties had made secret alliances with the extreme right wing Front National. Through word of mouth it has since been used to debate totalitarianism with the FN’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, and has since sold at least 600,000 copies.  PY

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Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Mr. Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, 2001

A teenage Jew, Momo, may be stealing from Monsieur Ibrahim’s Paris shop but over time they form the kind of cross-cultural father-son relationship that both seem to have been seeking out. Ibrahim’s Sufi beliefs come across as a light-hearted and positive way of dealing with the world, while Momo seems to find them more useful than Judaism and all but converts to Islam. It has echoes of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist but is far more engagingly written, and Schmitt’s tale (the first in his four ‘Cycle of the Unseen’ books) has also been turned into a film which would be worth seeking out. An easily-digestible story well-served by good, fluid writing.  PY

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Joseph Roth, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1939

A short tale about the last days of a Paris down-and-out whose life is suddenly filled with small miracles, and Roth drank himself to death in similar fashion at the age of 45, a month after he finished writing it. It’s concise but enjoyable with a mature economy with words being very evident, and through it you get the sense of the last throes of an aimless life, a knot unravelling. Sad but potent.  PY

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Georges Simenon, The Yellow Dog, 1931

Of the seventy-five 'Maigret' novels that Georges Simenon wrote between 1931 and 1972 this is the fourth. Commissaire Maigret is called away from Paris to solve the crime of an almost-fatal shooting in the French harbour of Concarneau, which leaves the town in a state of panic as further attempts at murder ensue. And there is also the mystery to solve of the strange yellow dog that has been seen everywhere – does it provide a link to the most likely suspect? The unfolding of the plot is classically straightforward for a mystery novel, never taking any great leaps of deduction on the part of Maigret, who here remains a very taciturn and insular character. This is what differentiates The Yellow Dog from all other Maigret stories in that the reader is given no clues as to what is going on in Maigret’s mind, something that defines just about every other Maigret story. The plot twists are sometimes predictable, but best of all is that both the story and Maigret himself are such believable creations. Very enjoyable.  PY

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Guy Goffette, Forever Nude: A Fiction, 1998

This is the first of Goffette’s récits to be translated into English – short fictions in which he reimagines the lives of historical figures. This follows the life of the French artist Pierre Bonnard and his lifelong relationship with a woman he first met as a teenage farm girl, someone who’d reinvented herself as an Italian aristocrat and who under that guise became his model, muse, lifelong friend and wife over forty-nine years. The Belgian poet Goffette certainly leans towards the poetic and romantic in his writing and he’s therefore suitably aligned with Bonnard’s own style, and he provides a good reflection upon the artist’s life particularly with respect to his relationships with other artists, notably Pablo Picasso, and the onward lives of his paintings after his death. I’ve never taken to Bonnard’s style and probably never will, but this was such a useful and well-observed ‘insider’s guide’ that I’d be interested in seeing more of Goffette’s translations.  PY

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Patrick Süskind, The Pigeon, 1987

Fear and self-loathing in Paris. Jonathan Nöel is a non-person, a man who has preferred decades of complete anonymity to the messy business of actually living, but his unimaginative and ultra-organised world is thrown into complete turmoil by the random appearance of a pigeon on his apartment doorstep. Kafkaesque, certainly, looking closely at how near we can live to the stuff of our nightmares with only the horror of our own suppressed rage to stop us from going over the edge, but for me The Pigeon is a greater success in that, despite its present day setting, it has all the feel of a novel fifty years older than it actually is. Recommended.   PY

Paul Smaïl, Smile, 1997

Life as see through the eyes of a Parisian of Moroccan origin, though somehow filtered through Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. This was a big hit when first published in France, its heavily autobiographical content showing Smaïl continually trying to escape the perceived stereotype of the crooked North African immigrant. His string of McJobs takes him from being a nightwatchman in a Paris whorehouse to pizza delivery boy to a thoroughly patronised bookstore clerk, writing Smile as he goes, knowingly amateur but likeable all the way. Recommended.   PY

Marguerite Duras, The Lover, 1984

This is the briefer version of the same story covered in Marguerite Duras’s later alternate novel The North China Lover. It’s a book that seems to be universally popular, looking at a young French woman’s romantic encounter with a Chinese man in Saigon while exploring her own family’s less-than-straightforward internal relationships, and Duras never goes for the superficial when she can go several layers deeper. Within the first few pages it becomes a book that makes you suspend expectations and instead shows itself to be a small gem of unconventionally personal writing: you know it won’t end in any upbeat manner, and you can’t avoid the feeling that it’s also largely autobiographical because the emotional points of reference are all so vivid. A quietly memorable book for how Duras somehow takes you on an almost lifelong journey in so short a number of pages.   PY

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