The President’s Hat (2012 trans. Gallic Books 2013) 200 pages & The Readers’ Room (2020, trans. Gallic Books 2020) 172 pages – Antoine Laurain

Two novellas today, by Antoine Laurain, who I suspect writes of a France that doesn’t exist. Like Richard Curtis and the England he portrays, the stories evoke an undemanding version of a country, rather than the realities of life there. Still, Laurain provides some light, whimsical escapism which is very welcome at the right time.

In The President’s Hat, Francois Mitterand’s headwear changes the lives of everyone who comes into possession of it. The first is Daniel, who sits next to the President in a bistro:

“The important events in our lives are always the result of a sequence of tiny details. The thought made him feel slightly dizzy – or was it the fact that he’d drunk a whole bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé?”

When the statesman leaves his hat behind, Daniel takes it and finds wearing it gives him a new-found surety, particularly in work meetings:

“With unprecedented confidence, he watched himself negotiate the complex layers of diplomacy with the ease of a dolphin leaping through the waves.”

He is bereft when he leaves the hat behind and Fanny picks it up, subsequently finding herself able to break with her married lover Édouard for good:

“In the space of a few moments, the felt hat had emerged as the source of strength she had waited so long for.”

Perfumier Pierre recovers both himself and his olfactory flair:

“It was like bumping into an old friend he hadn’t seen for a long time. The mirror reflected back a well-known face, a man who looked like Pierre Aslan.”

And my favourite, Bernard, swops his morning read of Le Figaro to Libé and discovers an appreciation for street art:

“As he walked back under the archways of the Louvre, he could feel a profound change taking place within him. More than a change, a metamorphosis.”

Nice things happen to nice people, the less nice people suffer only marginally, and everything works out in the end. I really enjoyed the twist at the end too. A fun, witty read.

The Reader’s Room opens with book editor Violaine Lepage surrounded by the great and good of literature: Proust, Houellebecq, Perec, Woolf and Modiano. She’s been in a plane crash and lies unconscious in a coma. When she awakes the famous authors aren’t present but things remain unreal – she doesn’t recognise her own clothes, forgets that she smokes, and is entirely unaware that she used to steal compulsively.

On top of this disorientation, her publishers have had a novel nominated for the Prix Goncourt: Sugar Flowers by Camille Désencres. The problem with this is two-fold: no-one knows who Camille is, and the murders in the book are being enacted in real life, in a way that suggests a link to Violaine’s past:

“Camille, please be brave and reveal yourself. I don’t know who you are, but you know many things. Who on earth told you about sugar flowers.? What else do you know? How are you linked to Normandy?”

The Readers’ Room had a different tone to the other Laurain’s I have read. The murders are linked to a gang-rape in the past and there is a police procedural element running through the investigations of Rouen police officer Sophie Tanche, but overall the mystery element is pretty slight.

For me, the main enjoyment was the gently teasing portrayals of those in the book industry – the publishers, authors, editors and prize-givers.

“At twenty-four, Marie was the youngest member of the readers’ room. She was still at university and was doggedly writing her thesis on ‘The Written Word or the Inert Vectors of Narration’. Marie had decided to identify all the inanimate objects which have played an important part in works of fiction across the last millennium – such as the specimens in Yoko Ogawa’s Ring Finger, the madeleine in Proust or the little golden key in Bluebeard. She had classified them all by material: fabric, leather, glass, metal, wood…”

So, a bit of departure but still plenty there for those wanting a brief escape into Laurain’s slightly fantastical, comic world.