Hall

Daniel Pennac is a french author who earned the respect of the critics with his 2007 publication [Chagrin d'ecole] (sorrows of school), which is an autobiographical account of the early school days of the author. We have been studying his book in our french class and so when we next visited the library I found one of his novels; Le Cas Malaussène. However when I got it home and read the blurb on the back cover, I discovered it was a revisitation of an earlier novel: Au bonheur des ogres. I thought it a good idea to read the earlier novel first and so I downloaded it on my kindle.

The earlier novel features the family Malaussène and the main protagonist is Benjamin, who is the head of the family in the absence of his mother, who is away on an extended holiday and who will come back pregnant as usual. There are six children and all have different fathers. Benjamin works in a Parisian departmental store as a "Bouc Emissaire and anyone who has tried to return faulty goods to a big Paris department store may have some indication of what this entails: quality control, but with a difference. When a customer returns faulty goods to the reclaims office, Benjamin is summoned to the office and the manager says to the customer that the faulty goods are entirely the result of Benjamin's shoddy work. The manager then launches into into a tirade against Benjamin threatening him with the sack and reducing him to tears. It is at this point that the customers generally withdraw their complaint. When bombs start going off in the store then Benjamin is soon targeted as the scapegoat and is interviewed by the police. The novel then turns into a sort of detective story, with Benjamin's family, helping and hindering him to clear his name. It has many funny moments with Benjamin himself proving to be a good teller of stories.

Pennac is a good enough writer to include situations that show the downside of Paris society and the workings of the department store. References to Emile Zola's novel; Au Bonheur des Dames are not accidental. The humour is fairly black and the book certainly has a darker side. The situations are well worked through and Pennac avoids making the obvious wisecracks. The french is colloquial and there are instances of the author developing his own verlan, but this did not stop me being amused. (there is an English translation) 3.5 stars. ( )

Fare una classifica dei propri libri preferiti è molto difficile, si è costretti a una lunga e meditata preparazione, a dolorose scelte e a ripensamenti continui. Essendo una persona indecisa per natura, le mie classifiche letterarie rispecchiano la mia confusione interiore, ma ho la fortuna di avere, nella mia personale top list, un punto fermo: Il paradiso degli orchi al primo posto! Credo che questo libro abbia influito sulla mia visione del mondo molto di più di quanto abbia fatto la scuola! Sembra esagerato, ma se sono la persona che sono (e non, magari, un serial killer ;-)) lo devo anche a questo bellissimo romanzo! lo rileggo ogni anno, tant'è che ormai lo conosco a memoria, ma non mi annoio mai...anzi, ogni volta ho quella piacevole sensazione di familiarità che si prova entrando in un bar frequentato da vecchi e buonissimi amici.
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Une relecture de toute la saga Malaussène avant d'attaquer [b: Ils m'ont menti|33512781|Ils m'ont menti|Daniel Pennac|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1482175953s/33512781.jpg|54273112], premier de la nouvelle série "le cas Malaussène".
J'ai dévoré la saga quand j'étais gamine (pas si longtemps après sa sortie), j'avais adoré. D'où interrogation pour la relecture: vais-je aimer? Vais-je kiffer? La gamine que j'étais avait-elle bon goût en matière de livres?
Les réponses sont oui, mais oui, bah apparemment oui.
C'est chouette, c'est déluré, c'est improbable, c'est drôle (très drôle parfois), ça se lit comme on mange une tartine de beurre (facilement et avec délectation), les personnages sont incroyables, plus vrais que nature. Comme à la première lecture, j'ai envie de tous les connaître, de taper la discut' avec toute la smala et leurs satellites.
Ça n'empêche pas le vaguement gore, le un peu cra-cra, l'histoire pas nette (avec un grand H, l'histoire, aussi, parfois) et je découvre, aussi, en tant qu'adulte, un brin de sensualité qui m'avait globalement échappé quand j'étais jeune et innocente (pas que je sois vieille et criminelle maintenant, mais bon).
Allez, un petit reproche pour la route: on regrettera les quelques clichés de genre: "les femmes sont comme ci, les hommes sont comme ça", ça va que tous ces gens sont avant tout humains.
En tout cas, une semaine pour lire un livre, ça faisait longtemps que ça ne m'était pas arrivé. Et la suite de la saga semble suivre le même chemin! Je vais dévorer Malaussène. ( )

The first part of Pennac's Mallausène saga. The central character, Benjamin Malaussène, works in a big Paris department store, "Le Magasin", nominally as "controle technique" but in fact he is the person who is designated to be told off in the presence of dissatisfied customers for any mistakes the store makes: he is a professional scapegoat. Benjamin has an eccentric gay best friend; he lives in a quaint-but-development-threatened Paris neighbourhood with his enormous dog; in the flat under him is a large and anarchic collection of younger half-siblings to whom he stands in loco parentis, their mother being off somewhere taking steps to maintain the supply; the North African owner of the café on the corner acts as a sort of surrogate grandfather to them all. In short, he's so like the hero of a comic novel that he really couldn't be anything else (except possibly the hero of a comic film). But then there is a series of bomb explosions in the store, and it starts to look as though Benjamin is going to be the scapegoat for something rather more serious than a defective fridge.

I think this was the problem I had with the book to start with: it seemed to be a compilation of charming and funny details from the standard repertoire of the comic novelist rather than a coherent narrative you could engage with as a novel. It's done well, especially Pennac's cunning conversion of coarse, idiomatic street-French into witty literary language, but there seemed to be too great a gap between the comic elements and the serious crime story. This worked itself out eventually, but I felt uncomfortable with it in the first half of the book.

The French title Au bonheur des ogres is, of course, a reference to Zola's famous department-store novel. Being French, there are also a whole string of allusions to high-literary crime fiction (Carlo Emilio Gadda, Jerome Charyn, etc.), and there's a postmodern element when the real story of events starts to get mixed up with the serial bedtime story Benjamin is creating out of it for his smaller siblings. I'm not sure if I'll go on with this series, but it was an entertaining light read. ( )