Belgian literature

Marie – Madeleine Bourdouxhe (1943 trans. Faith Evans 1997) 141 pages

The striking cover of Marie and the fact that it is published by Daunt Books was enough to convince me to pick up this novella, and I’m so glad I did. I’m not familiar with Belgian writer Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s work but the afterword explained she was a friend of Simone de Beauvoir and Victor Serge, among others, and she was part of the resistance during the war, so I’m glad to have finally discovered her.

Marie was published in 1943 and details the sexual awakening of a young married housewife (the original title was A La Recherche de Marie, maybe it was felt Anglophone readers wouldn’t get the reference to Proust?) It has an elegiac tone at times – not only for Marie but for everyone she encounters and for the city of Paris – and I felt the spectre of war was certainly present.

It begins with Marie and her husband Jean on holiday in the south of France, away from their Parisian home:

“It wasn’t as hot as earlier on, but as the afternoon came to an end, everything remained steeped in torpor, retaining the heat of the whole day. There is something ineffable around Marie that was making her happy. Jean was next to her, serving her coffee, giving her a cigarette: and intimate little scene, on the balcony of a hotel, overlooking the sea.”

Marie seems very devoted to her husband, but the authorial voice – which shifts between tenses – suggests he not entirely worthy:

“There was definitely strength in his character – or rather, there were bouts of strength. Jean had a way of claiming his due, or more than his due: a somewhat egotistical way of deciding, of drinking, of eating, of sitting, of occupying his place.”

During this holiday Marie finds herself strongly sexually attracted to a man around ten years younger than her. Their affair continues beyond the holiday season and Bourdouxhe is wonderful at minutely analysing unspoken moments between people:

“They mutually accept this great silence, and the richness, the sincerity that lies within it. They also know that in that moment they are seeing everything from the same point of view and that, for both of them, that red sail on the sea stands out as clearly, as harshly, as cruelly, as the thing that is deep inside them.”

There is a lot to this seemingly straightforward tale. The lover remains nameless and none of the characters are as fully drawn as Marie. She is absolutely Bourdouxhe’s focus, through which she explores the roles of women, sexuality, agency, choice.

The war also creates a sense of foreboding for everyone the story touches. Having googled, I know the town that Marie and Jean find themselves in at one point was 90% destroyed in 1940.

Marie is a woman with a rich inner life and a sensual response to her surroundings. As she starts to externalise some of this, Bourdouxhe shows how unknown people can be even to those closest to them, the pressure of societal forces for women, and the challenge in making an inner and outer life congruous with one another.

Marie is a powerful novella and I’m looking forward to exploring this author further.

“She weeps the strange, bitter tears of an exhausted woman who is gradually letting herself be worn out by a symbol.”

The Bathroom – Jean-Philippe Toussaint (1985, trans. Nancy Amphoux & Paul De Angelis 1990) 102 pages

A young man decides he’s going to stay in his bathtub. Thankfully, his long-suffering girlfriend Edmondsson is happy to fund this indolent lifestyle. He leaves on occasion to talk to his decorators (who aren’t decorating as Edmondsson is vacillating between white and beige paint) and sit in the kitchen. Otherwise, he’s back in the bath:

“A friend of my parents was passing through Paris and came to see me. From him I learned it was raining. Stretching out an arm toward the washbasin, I suggested he take a towel […] I didn’t know what he wanted from me. When the silence had begun to seem permanent, he began to tell me about his latest professional activities, explaining that the difficulties he had to contend with were insurmountable since they were linked to incompatibilities of temperament among persons at the same hierarchical level.”

The novella is in three sections, each paragraph numbered. This unusual structure isn’t as irritating as it should be. It somehow emphasises the banality of his existence without becoming banal itself.

In the middle section, the narrator heads to Venice. In this beautiful and historic city, he mainly stays in his hotel room, taking up darts:

“When I played darts I was calm and relaxed. Little by little, emptiness would creep over me and I would steep myself in it”

We’ve seen that he can be socially awkward, guiding people into the toilet when showing them round the flat, mildly insulting the previous tenants, but later in the novella it seems this behaviour could be deliberate:

“I left the hotel and, in the street, asked a running man the way to the Post Office. I’ve always enjoyed asking people in a hurry for information.”

In the third section he heads back to Paris although I lived in hope Edmondsson was finally sick of him.

Apparently Touissaint is a fan of Beckett and The Bathroom definitely has the feel of Beckett: nihilistic, unreal verging on surreal, contained environments, experimental forms. It echoes itself and takes the reader in disorienting circles.

“Immobility is not absence of movement but absence of any prospect of movement.”

Not a novel for when you want a ripping yarn, but an interesting quick read.

“I would ask her to console me. Softly, she would ask, Console you for what? Console me, I would say”