Fighting Instinct
Hélène Bessette, trans. Kate Briggs, Lili is Crying
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 192pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781804271674
reviewed by Rachel Dastgir
After her husband is arrested by the French Gestapo, the title character of Lili Is Crying walks into her local bar. The regulars watch her with measured curiosity. ‘Doesn’t misfortune make a person cry?’ they wonder; Lili is dry-eyed. She orders a glass of white wine before turning to the room and announcing, ‘Things never happen to me the way they do to other people. My life, it’s a whole novel’. She’s right – in a way.
First published in 1953 and now translated into English for the first time by Kate Briggs, Hélène Bessette’s novel follows Lili, a woman living under the care and rule of her mother, Charlotte. Set around the boarding house Charlotte runs, the story begins in the 1930s and unfolds across roughly a decade, although time, age and chronology all drift and distort.
At the boarding house, Lili befriends Élise and Marthe, and meets a figure known only as ‘the shepherd’. She is growing up and beginning to question her origins, a character at once tethered to the home and desperate to escape it. An early bid for freedom comes in the form of a lover, ‘the young man’, but Lili loses her nerve, breaks it off and returns to Charlotte.
This push and pull repeats throughout the narrative. In her forties, she marries a man referred to as ‘the Slav’, and their marriage quickly sours. The Second World War is beginning, and horror is in the air. The Slav is deported to Dachau, and Lili is left alone in their home. It is at this moment that she wanders into the bar to ask for a drink and announces that her life is unusual enough to resemble the plot of a novel.
Yet Lili’s life is a perfectly ordinary one, no different from the lives of her peers. Even if the three friends would all like to imagine themselves exceptional, they are cannily alike. Each wants to escape overbearing Arles and flee to Nîmes or Marseille, but all three remain. Marthe suffers the same romantic bad luck as Lili yet gasps in shock when Lili points out the obvious similarity. Élise, too, is eager to set herself apart, such as when Lili is in hospital following a botched abortion: Élise shrugs and says, ‘Women are crazy’. At one point, Charlotte wears a dress with horizontal pleats as supposed evidence that she is ‘not like other people’. After all, she says, her father had a ‘de’ name. But Charlotte also screams and shouts when Lili tries to leave the maternal fold. She cannot survive alone: she is fused to her overgrown, adult daughter.
We slowly realise that Lili’s life is not like a novel for its novelty, but for its exquisite ordinariness. It is so typical that there are certain narrative parallels with other novels published in mid-century France, for example The Easy Life by Marguerite Duras, which similarly follows a young woman biting against the metal of a repressive family. But Bessette also forges her own path. In contrast to Duras’s sculptural first-person, Bessette draws on a complex network of shifting narrative perspectives. Her fragmented, free indirect voice blends characters until they combine. This ambivalence is carefully preserved by Briggs, who has retained the dialogue’s original syntax, omitting English speech tags and quotation marks in favour of the French en-dash. Indeed, Bessette pushes the limits of narrative convention to breaking point, moving into verse in the final sections. The effect is overwhelming, discomfiting and sometimes dazzling.
Maybe it was Bessette’s unique ability to collapse ambivalent feeling into narrative that caught Duras’s attention. Duras championed the work early on, though it eventually slipped out of print by the century’s end. Now, it returns in translation, part of a wider revival of interest in French writing among English-language readers. There seems to be a particular interest in 20th-century writing by French-speaking women, for example Annie Ernaux and Duras, an interest in part driven by publishers like Fitzcarraldo Editions.
But although there are parallels, the authors are distinct. Where Ernaux addresses a collective history and Duras a history formed in self-mythology, Bessette seems most interested in the bloody present — and Bessette’s present is bloody indeed. When Lili runs into the shepherd after years apart, the writing reaches fever pitch. Bessette draws out a visceral reaction as pure and immediate as that of crying: something like unease, aversion or even revulsion.
This sense of recoil mounts towards the end of the novel. Lili’s mother gives a speech on the thankless task of parenting — ‘If anyone is going to cry here it’s me: I’ll cry because I have a criminal for a daughter.’ Lili doesn’t fight back. She closes the curtains when she is told for fear that the neighbours might ‘eavesdrop on our family’s shame’.
In her mother’s hands, Lili is pulped into animal submission, and we are too. Bessette pushes us into complicity with a vicious set of characters whose fighting instincts enthral. This is a novel of sobbing, fighting, retching, writhing and screaming. It is lying prone on the ground, turning in circles on knees and begging for more. Finally, in the closing scene, it is a novel of laughter. The three girlfriends are clustered around a game of cards and shuffle the decks, giggling.
In their laughter, Bessette captures the perverse pleasure of a savage social order that drives its participants into tight-knit and destructive relationships. Foolish is the girl who considers herself above it all; Bessette shows us that the rules always apply. And where they are not adopted, they are enforced. Bessette’s mark — exacting, passionate and complete — lingers long after it is first made.
First published in 1953 and now translated into English for the first time by Kate Briggs, Hélène Bessette’s novel follows Lili, a woman living under the care and rule of her mother, Charlotte. Set around the boarding house Charlotte runs, the story begins in the 1930s and unfolds across roughly a decade, although time, age and chronology all drift and distort.
At the boarding house, Lili befriends Élise and Marthe, and meets a figure known only as ‘the shepherd’. She is growing up and beginning to question her origins, a character at once tethered to the home and desperate to escape it. An early bid for freedom comes in the form of a lover, ‘the young man’, but Lili loses her nerve, breaks it off and returns to Charlotte.
This push and pull repeats throughout the narrative. In her forties, she marries a man referred to as ‘the Slav’, and their marriage quickly sours. The Second World War is beginning, and horror is in the air. The Slav is deported to Dachau, and Lili is left alone in their home. It is at this moment that she wanders into the bar to ask for a drink and announces that her life is unusual enough to resemble the plot of a novel.
Yet Lili’s life is a perfectly ordinary one, no different from the lives of her peers. Even if the three friends would all like to imagine themselves exceptional, they are cannily alike. Each wants to escape overbearing Arles and flee to Nîmes or Marseille, but all three remain. Marthe suffers the same romantic bad luck as Lili yet gasps in shock when Lili points out the obvious similarity. Élise, too, is eager to set herself apart, such as when Lili is in hospital following a botched abortion: Élise shrugs and says, ‘Women are crazy’. At one point, Charlotte wears a dress with horizontal pleats as supposed evidence that she is ‘not like other people’. After all, she says, her father had a ‘de’ name. But Charlotte also screams and shouts when Lili tries to leave the maternal fold. She cannot survive alone: she is fused to her overgrown, adult daughter.
We slowly realise that Lili’s life is not like a novel for its novelty, but for its exquisite ordinariness. It is so typical that there are certain narrative parallels with other novels published in mid-century France, for example The Easy Life by Marguerite Duras, which similarly follows a young woman biting against the metal of a repressive family. But Bessette also forges her own path. In contrast to Duras’s sculptural first-person, Bessette draws on a complex network of shifting narrative perspectives. Her fragmented, free indirect voice blends characters until they combine. This ambivalence is carefully preserved by Briggs, who has retained the dialogue’s original syntax, omitting English speech tags and quotation marks in favour of the French en-dash. Indeed, Bessette pushes the limits of narrative convention to breaking point, moving into verse in the final sections. The effect is overwhelming, discomfiting and sometimes dazzling.
Maybe it was Bessette’s unique ability to collapse ambivalent feeling into narrative that caught Duras’s attention. Duras championed the work early on, though it eventually slipped out of print by the century’s end. Now, it returns in translation, part of a wider revival of interest in French writing among English-language readers. There seems to be a particular interest in 20th-century writing by French-speaking women, for example Annie Ernaux and Duras, an interest in part driven by publishers like Fitzcarraldo Editions.
But although there are parallels, the authors are distinct. Where Ernaux addresses a collective history and Duras a history formed in self-mythology, Bessette seems most interested in the bloody present — and Bessette’s present is bloody indeed. When Lili runs into the shepherd after years apart, the writing reaches fever pitch. Bessette draws out a visceral reaction as pure and immediate as that of crying: something like unease, aversion or even revulsion.
But today the air between us is being ripped apart and bright red love is spreading like blood pooling from a wound that it’s impossible to close, impossible to close, and that no one could ever repair (like a nightmare).
This sense of recoil mounts towards the end of the novel. Lili’s mother gives a speech on the thankless task of parenting — ‘If anyone is going to cry here it’s me: I’ll cry because I have a criminal for a daughter.’ Lili doesn’t fight back. She closes the curtains when she is told for fear that the neighbours might ‘eavesdrop on our family’s shame’.
In her mother’s hands, Lili is pulped into animal submission, and we are too. Bessette pushes us into complicity with a vicious set of characters whose fighting instincts enthral. This is a novel of sobbing, fighting, retching, writhing and screaming. It is lying prone on the ground, turning in circles on knees and begging for more. Finally, in the closing scene, it is a novel of laughter. The three girlfriends are clustered around a game of cards and shuffle the decks, giggling.
In their laughter, Bessette captures the perverse pleasure of a savage social order that drives its participants into tight-knit and destructive relationships. Foolish is the girl who considers herself above it all; Bessette shows us that the rules always apply. And where they are not adopted, they are enforced. Bessette’s mark — exacting, passionate and complete — lingers long after it is first made.