Short Stories in French Read online

  Edited and Translated by Richard Coward

  SHORT STORIES IN FRENCH

  New Penguin Parallel Texts

  Contents

  Introduction

  Learning How to Live

  FRÉDÉRIC FAJARDIE (l947– )

  All Lights Off

  FRÉDÉRIC FAJARDIE

  David

  JEAN-MARIE-GUSTAVE LE CLÉZIO (1940– )

  The Occupation of the Ground

  JEAN ÉCHENOZ (1947– )

  The Third-rate Film

  SYLVIE MASSICOTTE (1959– )

  The Objet d’Art

  JEAN-PAUL DAOUST (1946– )

  The Hunters’ Café

  DANIEL BOULANGER (1922– )

  Accursed Notebooks (an extract from La Déconvenue)

  LOUISE COTNOIR (1948– )

  Héloïse

  SYLVIE GERMAIN (1954– )

  The Character

  GLORIA ESCOMEL (1941– )

  Self-destruction

  RENÉ BELLETTO (1945– )

  You Never Die

  ALAIN GERBER (1950– )

  Notes on French Texts

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  New Penguin Parallel Texts: Short Stories in French

  Richard Coward was born in 1955 in Barrow-in-Furness and educated at Lancaster Royal Grammar School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he read French and Spanish. He taught at Bishop’s Stortford College and Sherborne School before moving to Eton, where he is now a Housemaster. He is married to Anne and they have three sons, James, Edward and Matthew.

  Introduction

  This collection of twelve short stories, representing the work of eleven different authors, is an eclectic choice on my part. No collection of this length could ever hope to be representative of the work that is being published, so it seemed to me pointless even to try to distil the essence of the modern short story being written in French. In the broadest of terms, it was my intention to select stories that had literary value but were accessible to as broad a panoply of readers as possible. As their translator, at all times I remained as faithful to the French text as possible, though considerations of English style and the difficulty of translating idiom had to be taken into account. The first volume of stories, edited by Pamela Lyon and first published in 1966, contained work emanating only from France. Its sequel, edited by Simon Lee and published six years later, contained two stories from Switzerland and one from Belgium, but the remaining five again emanated from France. The main emphasis of my brief was to produce a collection of short stories that had been published after 1970, and very early in the course of my researches it became clear to me that the country that is the birthplace of the language is no longer the main source of the genre. The decision not to include Belgian or Swiss authors was made on the undoubtedly dubious basis that work from these countries had been included in a previous volume. The stories in this edition appear in order of increasing linguistic difficulty, which may not necessarily reflect the difficulty in literary interpretation the reader may experience.

  Reference to the two previous editions of parallel texts reveals a broad range of authors, but none is thought of specifically as a short-story writer, and the same is true for many of the authors included in the present volume. When one thinks of the French conte one’s mind immediately goes back to the nineteenth century and to the Naturalist work of Maupassant (1850–93). He was the undoubted master of his craft at that time, writing short, sardonic narratives in which one always looks for the sting in the tail. In ‘La Parure’, for example, the already impoverished Mme Loisel works in drudgery for ten years, thereby sacrificing her youth and beauty, to repay the loan of 36,000 francs she was forced to take out to replace a diamond necklace that she once borrowed and lost. Maupassant reveals in only the last two lines of the story that the original was a fake and worth only 500 francs. Further back in time one thinks of Voltaire (1694–1778) and his contes philosophiques of the mid-eighteenth century. Yet because Voltaire’s intentions were to overtly satirize aspects of contemporary society, comparison with modern fiction cannot be made. Indeed, the almost surreal nature of Voltaire’s narrative invites a cerebral rather than an emotive reaction to his writing. Even further back, in the seventeenth century, is the work of Charles Perrault (1628–1703), famous for his Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, usually known simply as the Contes, which defended and praised contemporary culture. These drew heavily upon the tradition of oral story-telling, though their narrative style was greatly adapted to meet the polite tastes of Perrault’s society, dictated by the bienséances that so greatly influenced literature in the latter part of the seventeenth century.

  There are no such restrictions upon literature today, but in seeking out modern writers of short-story fiction in French one comes to the conclusion that the genre has lost for the modern French reader much of the appeal that brought so much success to Maupassant and his predecessors. By contrast, there has always been a strong tradition of short-story writing in English, both in Britain and America, and this may be the reason why the genre is enjoying something of a renaissance in French-speaking Canada. However much they seek political and cultural autonomy, the French-speaking Canadians cannot avoid the influences and attitudes that bombard them from outside their boundaries, be they in newspapers, on the television or the radio.

  The stories in this collection were all written by authors from Quebec or France and the majority were published after 1990. I would have liked to include some of the Creole literature from the Caribbean but the tradition of story-telling there remains principally an oral one, with a strong emphasis on moral tales, often using animals as characters, very much in the style of Aesop or La Fontaine. The simplicity of the language means that they can be read easily by anyone with a basic knowledge of French, and the themes with which they deal are so markedly different from those of the stories I have chosen that it seemed inappropriate to include them. The same may be said for Francophone African literature, which also reflects a mainly oral tradition.

  The subtitle of this volume, Short Stories in French, seeks to emphasize that literature written in French is more global than would be conveyed by the pithier ‘French Short Stories’. In French we have the terms récit, conte and nouvelle, which are all translatable by the English ‘short story’, yet what is a short story as opposed to a short novel? One is tempted to write that, if there is a distinction, it is one of length, but reference books are not clear on the point and it is beyond the scope of this introduction to take the matter further. Nevertheless, it is immediately apparent from this collection not only that short stories can vary greatly in length but that they do have a common element, which is justifiably where the short story, however long, cannot be thought of as a short novel. All short stories focus upon a small number of characters, in some cases only one, and the author allows us to know only those traits of personality that are pertinent to the tale being told. All the stories focus on specific incidents in the characters’ lives, and the sheer concentration of that focus is at times redolent of the Unities of Time, Place and Action that conditioned the neo-classical tragedies of the seventeenth century. There is no room for lengthy development of setting or of character relationships à la Balzac, and extraneous detail would only detract from the author’s specific intention. An exception to this may possibly be J.-M.-G. Le Clézio’s ‘David’, which I included precisely because some may consider that it sits on the fence between short story and (very) short novel. However, there is no doubting the narrowness of the story, which is marked by an absence of any subplot and an all-pervading sense of obsession in the main character’s search for his brothe
r, Édouard.

  It could perhaps be argued that obsession is a notion common to all the stories, thus binding them into a thematic whole. It is certainly the case that in all the stories the characters focus on a single target or are held trapped within a specific place, but this is surely inevitable, given the conciseness with which the author is forced to observe his or her characters. This is true of Louise Gotnoir in ‘Accursed Notebooks’ (‘Les Cahiers maudits’), in which an anonymous woman scribbles endlessly away in an attempt to make sense of a horrific moment during the Second World War. Without the detail that gives a three-dimensional feel to a character, and because of the need to limit the range of activity due to the length of the genre, it is inevitable that the characters will seem to lack any sense of peripheral vision. In order to appreciate the stories more fully it is necessary to look beneath the obvious and to question the motives of the characters. In ‘The Third-rate Film’ (‘Le Navet’), it is loneliness that prompts the central figure to go to the cinema in an attempt to escape the sense of isolation that has led her, almost obsessively, to use the plural pronoun when referring to herself. In ‘Self-destruction’ (‘Autodestruction’), the man is sucked into a spiral of terror that destroys him as he hallucinates because of the solitude that he fears so much. There are echoes of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Double’, or even a Dickensian ghost story, as he picks up a book and begins to read a text that appears to be about himself. Terror and panic take over until eventually he reads that he is going to die in the black waters of the river. The story succeeds precisely because it is so concise, offering no hope of escape to its protagonist because René Belletto has focused exclusively upon the fear of being alone.

  Revenge and the desire for recognition are the driving forces in ‘The Hunters’ Café’ (‘Le Café des Chasseurs’), as the patriotic old soldiers seek retribution upon the Scandinavian who cooked himself an egg on the flame of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe. Daniel Boulanger, possibly the best known of all the authors in this collection, treats his subjects with a lightness of touch that allows him to paint a comic picture of the old soldiers in their wheelchairs, holding up the traffic in the Champs-Élysées. The subject matter is serious, and the soldiers’ sense of outrage is never devalued, but the author’s sense of the comic allows him to engage his reader without ever mocking his characters. There is a similar sense of the unreal in ‘The Occupation of the Ground’ (‘L’Occupation des sols’), in which Jean Échenoz brings together a father and son in their attempt to preserve for ever the large mural painting of a dead wife and mother. The writing is tense and economical but at the same time descriptive and the reader should be alive to Échenoz’s use of neologisms to appreciate fully the humour in the writing. In ‘You Never Die’ (‘On ne meurt jamais’), it is the preservation of memory and sensations evoked by a particular place that is the subject chosen by Alain Gerber. Of all the stories in the collection this is arguably the most moving, for its brevity and conciseness force the author into poetic evocation rather than description.

  The feeling of emptiness that follows the end of a twelve-year romantic affair is the driving force in ‘The Object d’ Art’ (‘L’Objet d’art’). Here the young woman transfers her affection for a lost lover on to a work of art, sacrificing by its purchase a sabbatical trip to the West Indies. Heady from the effects of alcohol, she walks home late at night, after the private view, and has to battle with the elements in the sub-zero temperatures of Montreal. On a first reading, one wonders where the story is going. Is it merely an evocation of obsession with an object? This proves hardly to be the case as we examine the power of art to evoke within us powerful emotions and reactions that, in this case, appear to take the character to the edge of insanity. The story could succeed on this level alone but Jean-Paul Daoust takes his art one stage further and the final paragraph adds a grim twist, which is satisfying both on the level of plot and in forcing us to reflect on the power of suggestion. The introspection of the woman finds a parallel in the obsessive search for a former lover that drives on Pierre in ‘The Character’ (‘Le Personnage’). To the end, we are never totally sure if the object of his search is a real person or a fictional character, and it is this interplay between the real and the imagined that takes us into Pierre’s mind in such an engagingly fascinating, and yet haunting, manner.

  ‘Héloïse’ is a moving account that begins by evoking the tenderness shown to a she-donkey by a woman unable to bear the child to whom she wants to give the name Héloïse. There are elements of black humour in the subject matter, but Sylvie Germain treats it with great sensitivity and prevents it from descending into melodrama. Marthe, the woman in the story, is killed by lightning when attending to the donkey and her husband blames the animal for her death. Cruelty follows and it is only when it is too late that he realizes the significance of the donkey to him.

  The stories of Frédéric Fajardie and Sylvie Massicotte come closest to the sardonic twist of the typical Maupassant story, though neither author employs the terseness of expression of their nineteenth-century predecessor, who at times appeared to have worked with the same economy of expression as the Impressionist painters, of whose work he greatly approved. Yet the stories do focus on brief moments of time in the lives of their characters and suggest much about specific feelings and emotions, whilst leaving us breathlessly expectant for more. Irony plays an important part in their success, for it forces us to think back over the story, or even to reread it, in order to discover those hints which could only be glossed over at a first reading. In ‘The Third-rate Film’ (‘Le Navet’), for example, it is not until the man appears outside the cinema that we realize why he had to change seats using only his arms. And it is only then that we fully appreciate the woman’s repugnance at what she has seen on the cinema screen. In ‘All Lights Off’ (‘Tous feux éteints’), Joachim can only give meaning to his life by killing himself; in ‘Learning How to Live’ (‘Apprendre à vivre’) two characters come briefly together before one is killed. The young boy has his new roller-skates and in a naively adolescent way wants to avoid an encounter with a girl with whom he is desperate to go out; the man in his thirties has an old Renault 4 and is cursing the fact that his wife has been having an affair. Two diametrically opposed experiences collide and, ironically, it is despair that kills hope, thus leaving us wondering at the relevance of the title and the outcry of the car driver.

  Frédéric Fajardie

  LEARNING HOW TO LIVE

  Apprendre à vivre

  Il venait d’avoir seize ans et sa seconde paire de patins à roulettes – un modèle très supérieur à la première – offerte par ses parents afin de récompenser une année scolaire particulièrement brillante.

  Il se prénommait Patrick. Les fils à papa du lycée disaient qu’il s’agissait là d’un «prénom de prolo»1 mais Agathe, avec laquelle il aurait flirté depuis longtemps s’il n’avait été si timide, Agathe trouvait ce prénom «sympa» et même «plutôt cool».

  Patrick ne savait pas très bien ce qu’il voulait. La période lui semblait brouillée: plus vraiment l’enfance et ces grandes peurs vite exorcisées par un câlin maternel ou la voix bourrue et tendre de son père.

  Pas encore l’âge adulte, cette horreur qu’il pressentait: le chômage, les inutiles diplômes, un patronat agressif, cupide et cynique, bref, le cauchemar. Mais peut-être aussi une vie merveilleuse …

  Il se trouvait dans un no man’s land de la vie, en quelque sorte. D’où les patins à roulettes, une manière de prolonger l’enfance, de tenir l’angoisse à distance.

  C’était ridicule et enfantin, il le savait, n’étant pas sa propre dupe mais il avait envie de se faire plaisir.

  Sauf que ce plaisir risquait de tourner à la confusion: n’était-ce pas Agathe qu’il apercevait, sortant du métro Arts-et-Métiers?2

  Antoine Lopez, au volant de sa fourgonnette 4 L, maudissait la terre entière. Il avait l’impression d’une vaste conspiration visant à son malheur. Desc
endant la rue de Belleville à toute allure, il faillit écraser un vieil Arabe qu’il injuria, une jeune Chinoise à qui il montra son index dressé, un chien efflanqué qui fit un saut de côté …

  Quoi, c’est vrai: rien ne marchait. D’abord, pourquoi était-il chauve à trente ans? Ensuite, pourquoi roulait-il en 4 L, avec son ancienneté, alors que des chauffeurs moins expérimentés avaient droit à des Golf tôlées? Et sa femme, de dix ans plus jeune, comment se payait-elle toutes ses fringues soi-disant en solde? Et les coupes de cheveux de chez Mod’s Hair? Et le parfum Dior? Et les bijoux? Avec ses 6 000 francs mensuels de secrétaire ou bien s’était-elle trouvé un amant fortuné?

  Et pourquoi inventait-elle des griefs contre lui – il n’y en a que pour tes parents, tu ne m’emmènes pas en voyage, tu passes trop d’heures au travail et d’autres choses encore, aussi insensées? Pourquoi sinon pour se donner bonne conscience lorsqu’elle le trompait? Pourquoi s’inventer des motifs, pourquoi toute cette ignoble lâcheté?

  Désespéré, il hurla «Salope!» en traversant la place de la République3 à toute vitesse, empruntant la direction Châtelet par Arts-et-Métiers.

  C’était Agathe, pas de doute! Et elle venait vers lui … Patrick hésita puis se souvint de ces types en patins à roulettes qui s’accrochent à l’arrière des camions.

  Il avait toujours trouvé cela dangereux et stupide mais, cette fois, cela semblait le moyen idéal pour s’éclipser avec discrétion et célé-rité. En l’absence de camion, il choisit une vieille 4 L fourgonnette arrêtée au feu rouge. Avec ce tas de boue, peu de chance que le chauffeur se prenne pour un pilote de formule 1.

  Il s’accrocha à la galerie.

  – Tu crois que je t’ai pas vu, p’tit connard? gronda Lopez qui démarrasur les chapeaux de roue en faisant hurler les pneus de sa 4 L.