Images, Feelings, Words
Laurent Mauvignier, trans. Daniel Levin Becker, The Birthday Party
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 504pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781804270226
reviewed by Lucy Thynne
Of his need to write, the reclusive Australian writer Gerald Murnane is direct. The compulsion is not always there, he says, but ‘time and again the need has come back — the need to put into words some complex pattern of feelings and imagery. They comprise my Holy Trinity: images, feelings, words. Those three are the basic components of my universe, the sub-atomic particles of all that matters — images, feelings, words.’ Reading Laurent Mauvignier’s latest novel, The Birthday Party, one senses a trinity similar to Murnane’s. The book, though billed as a psychological thriller, often rests on such small, affective moments. A character is so comforted by his wife’s ‘hand on his’ that ‘he wishes the whole universe could boil down to this image and this feeling.’ To do as such would be impossible, given the psychodrama’s larger demands of plot. But still, much of Mauvignier’s novel comes back to such moments: to images, feelings, words.
Fitzcarraldo Editions have a knack for spotting good material on the foreign publishing market, and The Birthday Party is no exception. Out of Mauvignier’s 12 novels, only two have previously been published in English: In the Crowd (2008), which depicted events from the Brussels Heysel stadium disaster, and The Wound (2015), which was set against the backdrop of the Algerian war. The Birthday Party is similar in its tense, twisting prose, but this time plays out deep in the countryside of Mauvignier’s native France. In an isolated hamlet forebodingly named the Three Lone Girls, Patrice Bergogne, a farmer, prepares for his wife Marion’s 40th birthday party. Ida, their daughter, is making a cake with their neighbour Christine. Marion herself is on her way home from work. Neither the reader nor the characters expect the sudden murder of the Bergogne family’s dog, a gruesome omen of the men who are about to intrude.
The men are from Marion’s past. It’s tricky to reveal much else about them without spoiling Mauvignier’s story. Mauvignier himself reveals little by little, only gesturing towards the secrets of different characters before delving into them whole chapters later. Marion is from Paris, is despised for this in the hamlet’s rural community. Down her back runs a curious tattoo which she never explains: a rose, caught in a ribbon of barbed wire. To her husband, she is ‘a stranger, with the density of a life he knew nothing about.’ Patrice seems ‘sweet and thoughtful’, until a trip into town for party supplies diverges to an appointment with a prostitute. Christine, a retired painter, claims that her identity can be found in her canvases, but the threatening letters she receives indicate otherwise. As for the ten-year-old Ida, her secret lies in how much she knows about the secrets of the adults around her: behind the ‘fog of a child’s perception’, she dreads the idea that her parents might separate. ‘She’s not stupid, she sees what goes on, the impatience between them sometimes.’
Much of Mauvignier’s project can be found, then, in the book’s epigraph from David Foster Wallace: ‘there are secrets within secrets, though, always.’ The novel’s excavation of these secrets, Russian doll-like, plays out agonisingly over the next 24 hours. Time starts to distort. With the arrival of the intruders, characters begin to complain of having lost their ‘grip on the true duration of things.’ In one of the best examples of Mauvignier’s image-writing, a flash of domestic bliss lasts no ‘longer than it takes for a champagne bubble to rise to the surface of a crystal flute.’ It’s a deft description of a singular moment over 24 hours and will make comparisons to Joyce and Woolf inevitable. But where Mauvignier differs is in his ability to smuggle a day’s worth of mundanity into the structure of a pacy, psychological thriller. When the Bergogne family is taken hostage, time can be as long as several pages of a character’s interior monologue. And a paragraph later, it can be as fleeting as a champagne bubble, a pistol arriving on the scene within a sentence.
It's that marriage of the two — character-based study and thriller plot — that makes Mauvignier’s book excel. Of course, the two have always leant on each other; Mauvignier just makes that trust exercise more obvious. This is because The Birthday Party is particularly good at exploring the way people think in their own separate spheres, and then asking what happens when those spheres converge. Interior monologues succeed each other, back-to-back. Patrice cannot believe that his dog has been killed. But is this disbelief in the horror unfolding, or in ‘his daughter’s word, or at least the way reality appeared to her, perhaps distorted by her age, by her fear?’ When the intruders begin to reveal more about his wife, Patrice is at first curious, then reflects that:
Spheres, converging: here is Mauvignier’s self-professed technique of writing without a main character, ‘horizontally and democratically.’ And none of that horizontality would be possible without what is marketed as Mauvignier’s ‘rhythmic, propulsive prose’, which does much of the book’s plumbing work, building to the novel’s conclusion while burrowing deep into the subconscious of its characters. Even though the novel’s cast are confined to the house, the winding style ensures that they are never far away from the ‘damp of the stone on the farm, the river flowing down below . . . the almost sticky thickness of a petrol blue night.’ All spheres converging. It’s worth noting here that the translator Daniel Levin Becker has a particular interest in the experimental Oulipo movement, making The Birthday Party a more than ideal collaboration.
The flexibility of Mauvignier’s language, twisting, jumping, paying off, is impressive to watch. But words, notably, do not hold the same power for all of the characters. For the painter Christine, who thinks in images and colours, the imposing letters cannot scare her because words are ‘only copies of words whose originals have been sentences undone, emptied of their substance by dint of repetition.’ Whereas for one of the intruders, who is working-class, Christine’s paintings are ‘threatening’, because ‘not getting them hurts him, it’s like an insult meant for him.’ The pictures of Christine, the violent feelings that underrun the book’s subtle class divisions, the language that is bent to encase them: we return to Murnane’s sub-atomic particles, to images, feelings, words. That trinity becomes Mauvignier’s universe here. For the brief period reading The Birthday Party, it becomes ours, too.
Fitzcarraldo Editions have a knack for spotting good material on the foreign publishing market, and The Birthday Party is no exception. Out of Mauvignier’s 12 novels, only two have previously been published in English: In the Crowd (2008), which depicted events from the Brussels Heysel stadium disaster, and The Wound (2015), which was set against the backdrop of the Algerian war. The Birthday Party is similar in its tense, twisting prose, but this time plays out deep in the countryside of Mauvignier’s native France. In an isolated hamlet forebodingly named the Three Lone Girls, Patrice Bergogne, a farmer, prepares for his wife Marion’s 40th birthday party. Ida, their daughter, is making a cake with their neighbour Christine. Marion herself is on her way home from work. Neither the reader nor the characters expect the sudden murder of the Bergogne family’s dog, a gruesome omen of the men who are about to intrude.
The men are from Marion’s past. It’s tricky to reveal much else about them without spoiling Mauvignier’s story. Mauvignier himself reveals little by little, only gesturing towards the secrets of different characters before delving into them whole chapters later. Marion is from Paris, is despised for this in the hamlet’s rural community. Down her back runs a curious tattoo which she never explains: a rose, caught in a ribbon of barbed wire. To her husband, she is ‘a stranger, with the density of a life he knew nothing about.’ Patrice seems ‘sweet and thoughtful’, until a trip into town for party supplies diverges to an appointment with a prostitute. Christine, a retired painter, claims that her identity can be found in her canvases, but the threatening letters she receives indicate otherwise. As for the ten-year-old Ida, her secret lies in how much she knows about the secrets of the adults around her: behind the ‘fog of a child’s perception’, she dreads the idea that her parents might separate. ‘She’s not stupid, she sees what goes on, the impatience between them sometimes.’
Much of Mauvignier’s project can be found, then, in the book’s epigraph from David Foster Wallace: ‘there are secrets within secrets, though, always.’ The novel’s excavation of these secrets, Russian doll-like, plays out agonisingly over the next 24 hours. Time starts to distort. With the arrival of the intruders, characters begin to complain of having lost their ‘grip on the true duration of things.’ In one of the best examples of Mauvignier’s image-writing, a flash of domestic bliss lasts no ‘longer than it takes for a champagne bubble to rise to the surface of a crystal flute.’ It’s a deft description of a singular moment over 24 hours and will make comparisons to Joyce and Woolf inevitable. But where Mauvignier differs is in his ability to smuggle a day’s worth of mundanity into the structure of a pacy, psychological thriller. When the Bergogne family is taken hostage, time can be as long as several pages of a character’s interior monologue. And a paragraph later, it can be as fleeting as a champagne bubble, a pistol arriving on the scene within a sentence.
It's that marriage of the two — character-based study and thriller plot — that makes Mauvignier’s book excel. Of course, the two have always leant on each other; Mauvignier just makes that trust exercise more obvious. This is because The Birthday Party is particularly good at exploring the way people think in their own separate spheres, and then asking what happens when those spheres converge. Interior monologues succeed each other, back-to-back. Patrice cannot believe that his dog has been killed. But is this disbelief in the horror unfolding, or in ‘his daughter’s word, or at least the way reality appeared to her, perhaps distorted by her age, by her fear?’ When the intruders begin to reveal more about his wife, Patrice is at first curious, then reflects that:
He no longer cares at all, suddenly certain that he doesn’t want to know more, he who just a few minutes ago felt a desire to open up inside of him to know everything, as though, because it was within reach, he had to fill the void he’d so often imagined, invented, filled in out of the affectionate madness that tortured him for years with the pain of not knowing what Marion had been through but who she was, and that clearly lived in the folds of what she hid from him.
Spheres, converging: here is Mauvignier’s self-professed technique of writing without a main character, ‘horizontally and democratically.’ And none of that horizontality would be possible without what is marketed as Mauvignier’s ‘rhythmic, propulsive prose’, which does much of the book’s plumbing work, building to the novel’s conclusion while burrowing deep into the subconscious of its characters. Even though the novel’s cast are confined to the house, the winding style ensures that they are never far away from the ‘damp of the stone on the farm, the river flowing down below . . . the almost sticky thickness of a petrol blue night.’ All spheres converging. It’s worth noting here that the translator Daniel Levin Becker has a particular interest in the experimental Oulipo movement, making The Birthday Party a more than ideal collaboration.
The flexibility of Mauvignier’s language, twisting, jumping, paying off, is impressive to watch. But words, notably, do not hold the same power for all of the characters. For the painter Christine, who thinks in images and colours, the imposing letters cannot scare her because words are ‘only copies of words whose originals have been sentences undone, emptied of their substance by dint of repetition.’ Whereas for one of the intruders, who is working-class, Christine’s paintings are ‘threatening’, because ‘not getting them hurts him, it’s like an insult meant for him.’ The pictures of Christine, the violent feelings that underrun the book’s subtle class divisions, the language that is bent to encase them: we return to Murnane’s sub-atomic particles, to images, feelings, words. That trinity becomes Mauvignier’s universe here. For the brief period reading The Birthday Party, it becomes ours, too.