After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents.
After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents. Trois femmes puissantes (Gallimard) was already established as a favourite with the reading public. One suspects that the majority of those readers are women, for we are in feminist territory here, and it feels a little old-fashioned.
The three powerful women of the title — Norah, Fanta, Khady Temba — rebel against the circumstances of their lives and are praised for doing so in a style that found favour with the jury, although it reads awkwardly and is deliberately abrupt. The first of the women, Norah, is encumbered with a dilapidated father and an idle lover who has moved into her apartment with this small daughter. There is also an alcoholic sister and a delinquent brother.
This, for some reason, was thought exemplary, as were the travails of the other two protagonists, Fanta and Khady Temba. Fanta is found powerful for ignoring her husband, whose mental debility is well described, while Khady Temby is obliged, after the death of her husband, to live with his family, her hopes of a child of her own gone for ever.
The main characteristic of these women is resilience in the face of their hard post-colonial lives. Admirable in intention, these stories do not entirely disguise the despair and resignation at their heart. Even the style, so much admired, seems febrile with suppressed frustration.
Much more accessible, though in a more obvious idiom is Frederic Beigbeder’s Un roman français (Grasset) which was awarded the Prix Renaudot. As the title suggests the author claims to speak for France, but also, overwhelmingly, for himself. Picked up by the police after a drugs bust, he has time in his cell to reflect on his past, which is not extensive since at the time of writing he is 42. He claims to have no memory of his childhood but manages to fill many pages with his reflections on this phenomenon.
But if he has no memory, he has plenty of associations, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, a brother whom he loves and resents. This is not exactly Proust’s madeleine, nor is the tone in any way discursive. It is, on the contrary, unashamedly solipsistic, with scant attention paid to what might turn out to be a shared experience. His recollections — of films, pop songs, sci-fi novels — are completely specific: only the urgent, excitable prose argues in his favour. His one discovery — that writing is akin to remembering, is in fact an act of memory —- is important but hardly original.
Finally one is won over by the sheer exuberance of the narrative, the euphoria of those not quite forgotten events, the dangerous attraction of living in the present. In his prison cell the narrator loses not one jot of his massive self-esteem. This, though not a classic account, has its virtues, not least of which is its combative attitude to what has been and no doubt to what is to come.
The Prix Médicis was awarded to Dany Laferriere for L’enigme du retour (Grasset). Born in Port-au-Prince but bought up in Quebec, the author dwells on exile, occasionally breaking into blank verse. This too is quirkily solipsistic. The Prix Femina went to Gwenaelle Aubry for Personne (Mercure de France) which describes at some length her father’s descent into psychosis.
These novels or memoirs — there is little to distinguish one genre from the other — seem to be part of a growing trend, no detail too personal, or rebarbative unworthily to be included. This is a far cry from the outstanding novels of recent years, and it is perhaps indicative that there was little publicity for, or analysis of, the prize-giving events. Many interviews (the writer as celebrity) but also a suspicion that such interviews fail to answer the writer’s purpose. Best practice demands that writers remain isolated and insulated, wordless except on the page.
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