Lydie Salvayre

Lydie Salvayre is a french writer and La délaration is her first novel published in 1990. She was at one time a practising psychiatrist and so it is no surprise that her first novel should be a psychiatric study. It is written in the first person by an unnamed man who experiences a complete mental breakdown when his partner leaves him. The book is his declaration and it starts with a chapter where he tells us how much his female partner disgusts him and of course she reminds him of his mother. He is disgusted physically and mentally and he cannot sleep at night. His partner leaves him.

He is immediately plunged into a nightmare of his own making, he can hardly sleep at all, he is extremely restless, he walks around the streets of Paris for something to do. Going back to visit his mother makes him feel worse and he thinks about his unhappy childhood. At the office he thinks his fellow workers avoid looking at him, he does not know how to compose his features, he is frightened of bursting into tears. His compatriots suggest a holiday and he rents a villa with them, but cannot face being with them. He goes to America meets a couple who are happy to be in love. He is ashamed for himself and returns to Paris on the next available flight. He functions less and less well, he joins a dating agency, but after some initial excitement he can hardly be bothered. He ceases to function all together and is committed to a mental institution and is treated by various psychiatrists who try and reconnect him to his childhood; his mother looms large.

It is a short novel that takes the reader on a journey in the mind of an extremely unhappy man whose misogyny pushes him over the edge into mental illness. It is a piece of writing strong on physiognomy as an expression of feelings although the man's face is not described. It feels more like a study of a condition than a story. One thing that did interest me was the use of the Minitel as the first mass-market Internet-style service for sex-related applications. Minitel, unlike the Internet, was private by design, and the privacy features of Minitel took sex chat into the workplace. In the late 1980's, it apparently reached endemic proportions in Paris. In this book our hero's continual use of the Minitel with its abbreviations and euphemisms, reduced his command of the french language to such a low level he could no longer communicate on a day to day basis. Is there a lesson here? 3 stars.… (mais)

A l’heure ou la célébrité se suffit à elle même et où les stars des écrans (tous les écrans) ne brillent plus que par leurs strass et leurs paillettes, ce petit manuel essentiel est enfin arrivé pour nous permettre, à nous aussi, de parvenir à cette gloire.

Adressé principalement au milieu littéraire (mais déclinable à souhait), cet essai démontre que le talent, le travail, le style ou le propos ne sont que peu de choses face au succès. Car oui, pour avoir du succès, il faut en avoir (si ce sophisme (qui, je l’espère, aurait charmé Schopenhauer) vous semble curieux, il est temps pour vous de lire cet indispensable ouvrage!)

Peut-être un seul bémol pour le dernier chapitre qui m’a semblé tellement inutile !

Un essai brillant ! Une pépite d’humour pour pleurer de dépit devant notre consternante époque… (mais)

Louisiane is doing her best to deal with a bailiff who's taking inventory of her possessions prior to seizing them for unpaid rent, but her deranged elderly mother keeps butting in, convinced that it's 1943 again and the bailiff has been sent by Pétain (always "Putain" to her) and Darnand (the head of the fascist Milice). The story keeps gliding backwards and forwards between the bailiff's systematic progress through the two women's claustrophobic flat and the wartime village in Haute-Garonne where Louisiane's mother grew up, and where Louisiane's uncle Jean was brutally murdered by fascist thugs when he was eighteen.

It's constructed more like a stage-play than a novella, but it's an original — and surprisingly witty — look at modern France's relationship with the Vichy era, and the way individual human lives (and thus, by extension, society as a whole) get broken when we attempt to sweep past injustices under the carpet instead of looking for a true resolution.… (mais)