Jean-Pierre Martinet (1944–1993)

Adolphe Marlaud, “a lover of shadow and silence,” concentration camp-scrawny with a “urinous complexion,” tries to “live as little as possible so as to suffer as little as possible.” He has unsatisfying, almost involuntary sex with his concierge, “a colossus” who is so much taller that “in the morning, when there was still a bit of fog, I couldn’t always see her beaming face.” Of course, they’re both mad in their own way.

His street, the “joyless” Rue Froidevaux is lonely, miserable, cold “even in August.” Even the ivy clinging to the Montparnasse cemetery walls “didn’t believe in what it was doing.” His apartment overlooks his father’s grave, which he defends from cats and dogs with a rifle with telescopic site..

Adolphe works in a funerary and wonders if “mourning women wear black underwear.”

This is an exciting and disturbing novella, almost a long short story. There’s so much packed into it that each word seems to do more than its own work.… (mehr)

J'avais très envie de découvrir cet auteur mais les avis sur les autres livres m'ont fait peur. Je me suis lancée sur cette courte nouvelle. Elle est très intéressant pour moi en tout cas car l'auteur y développe les thèmes de la solitude, de la dépression, de l'attachement (plutôt que de l'amour) à travers l'histoire d'un homme qui travaille et vit près du cimetière où son père est enterré. L'idée est qu'il surveille la tombe et que cela l'empêche de vivre. D'autant plus qu'il travaille dans un magasin de pompes funèbres. Le style est plein d'une légère ironie malgré le ton lourd. J'ai aimé cette première rencontre mais cela m'a semblé trop court pour en faire l'écrivain du siècle. Il est clair que la prochaine fois je prends Jérôme à la librairie.… (mehr)

I love promoting obscure, worthy writers, and Martinet is absolutely worthy.

First of all, a note on the size of this book. Amazon lists the book at 48 pages. However that includes the translator’s introduction. The story itself is 26 pages long. The translator describes it as a small novella. Let’s be honest. It is a short story. But what a Molotov cocktail of a story it is!

Adolphe Marlaud lives alone in a dirty section of Paris. He tends to his father’s grave and works part-time at a funerary shop. The concierge of the building he lives in demands that he have sex with her. He is a puny, less than five foot tall, scrawny man that she says resembles her dead husband. She is a massive woman of over six feet tall and over 200 pounds. He is very passive so therefore reluctantly submits. Since his motto in life is “live as little as possible so as to suffer as little as possible”, this certainly goes against his wishes.

This short story was as pristine a story could be and as perfect a short story could be. I can’t say enough about it. It is dark. But as the narrator flirts with his own insanity, there are a few times when I laughed out loud, like in the case when he had a nightmare about King Kong chasing him wanting to sodomize him.

Martinet is now growing into cult status in France. This is his first book to be translated into English. He is largely regarded as the French successor to Dostoevsky and I totally agree with this, even with only having read 26 pages of his writing. He is a pure existentialist. Not since Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", has a piece permeated my mind. His masterpiece is said to be “Jerome”, a 400+ page novel that I can only hope will soon be translated into English. I would devour anything this man has written.

The picture of Martinet in the book interestingly reminds me of Balzac for some reason.

This quote after the narrator meets a widow that surprises him with her intelligence by suggesting that he would be better by rereading the “Treatise on Concupiscence”:

“Joy, joy, tears of joy, my vision blurred, my heart beat wildly, my very words intoxicated me. Were her undergarments also black? This idea made me ill. Black panties, black bra. Tears of desire on that funereal lingerie. She wept, that grief-stricken woman, she wept, she was all sweaty, all limp, she was melting away, and me with her, lost between her balmy thighs smelling of rotting fish, kelp, an oyster bed caressed by a warm wind blowing from Andernos, when the Arcachon Bay is nothing more than a paradise of silt, at low tide, in the intense light of noon. I could have talked forever, the young woman didn’t know how to get rid of me, my tongue swelled in my mouth, it swelled enough to choke me, and my boss was obliged to chase me off into the back room, giving me little kicks, like I was some poodle that had had an accident in the living room. I’d have given up several years of my life just to spend an evening with that ravishing, witty widow.”

I’d have given several years of my life just to have had an evening of conversation with Martinet, who died in 1993.

Highly, highly recommended. I very rarely give books five stars.… (mehr)