René Frégni

‘Concision kills everything,’ says the femme fatale at the heart of this book. ‘What's essential always lies in the details.’ And yet this is a concise novel, which races through the evolution of a destructive love affair without lingering on the details, choosing instead to pick out the major highlights – or lowlights.

The setting is a nameless town on the Provençal coast, a kind of mini-Marseille where Paul runs a small restaurant in a square. His days are spent washing dishes, watching tourists, and ogling his waitresses – until the fateful morning he encounters Sylvia, and precipitates a downward spiral that takes in animal attacks, psychiatric hospitals, angry French painters, and manslaughter.

What's perhaps most interesting about L'été is how openly nonsensical Sylvia is as a character. No attempt has been made to disguise her as anything other than what she is: a paranoid male fantasy about the beauty and cruelty of women. She is described, breasts-first, in a hundred breathless scenes, flouncing in and out of the story in abbreviated dresses and acceding to rationed bouts of anguished, ecstatic lovemaking.

Paul, our enamoured restaurateur, is driven to pacing his rooms unshaven at three a.m. and exclaiming, ‘Dieu avait dessiné le monde avec la pointe de ces seins,’ which is his (or his author's) idea of waxing poetic. Sylvia herself, meanwhile, rather gives the game away by coming out with such motivational speeches as the following:

« J'ai besoin de vous voir boire, me chercher, souffrir. J'ai besoin de vous voir vous haïr, vous déchirer. Votre jalousie féroce, j'en ai besoin pour vivre. Les hommes disent que je suis belle, je ne les crois pas, ils disent ça à toutes les femmes. Je veux les voir souffrir, je veux les voir vomir de souffrance ! J'aimerais qu'ils s'entre-tuent pour moi ! »

[‘I need to see you drinking, searching for me, suffering. I need to see you hating yourself, tearing yourself apart. Your crazed jealousy is what I need to live. Men tell me I'm beautiful; I don't believe them; they say that to all the girls. I want to see them suffer, I want to see them vomit from suffering! I'd like them to kill each other over me!’]

Even treated semi-parodically, as in Martin Amis's London Fields, I find this kind of character ludicrous; it's best played for pure aesthetic effect, something like Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson. Here, it asks to be taken seriously, which is impossible. The book does succeed in leaving you thinking – just less about the characters, and more about the ideas of men and women that seem to have animated it.… (more)

René Frégni lived a strange vagabond existence in his youth, deserting from the army and living abroad for years under a false identity. It contrasts strangely with his later life back in France, where he has lived for the last twenty years or more in the little village of Manosque in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence – writing, running workshops in local prisons, thinking back on his travels, and raising two daughters.

This gentle, bittersweet book takes the form of his journals over the space of about a year. It seems to have been prompted by his youngest daughter heading off for university in Montpellier, leaving Frégni all alone; through these journal entries, you come to know the quiet rhythms of his life, rising early, having a coffee in the square, wondering around his empty apartment, observing his neighbours, wondering in the countryside, and helping friends and acquaintances in nearby villages.

Writing novels, he says, allows him to ‘hide, escape, disappear and be everywhere at once’. Whereas in this journal he can be ‘plus intimidé, plus indiscret’. And he is indiscreet: his thoughts are full of longing and awareness of the women around him. I don't know what happened to the mother of his daughters, but it's clear that he's been on his own for some time – the book is infused with a generalised yearning that I would call loneliness, though he avoids the word.

A running subplot, for example, involves the behaviour of the two young women who live in an apartment across the courtyard from him, into whose bathroom, unbeknownst to them, his kitchen window looks (a typical motif in French literature). These sections are a peculiar mix of creepy, erotic, sweet, and sad. These feelings interact in strange ways with his struggle to let go of his daughter Marilou, who used to take up his whole life, and with whom his contact has now been reduced to a few postcards, the occasional weekend meet-up in a restaurant.

Dans les collines de Manosque j'avais été tout pour elle, le soleil, l'insouciance, l'éternité. Dans cet étroit restaurant arabe je n'étais plus que son père.

[In the hills of Manosque I had been everything to her – sunshine, frivolity, eternity. In that little Arab restaurant, I was just her father.]

He is proud of her, and accepts with as good grace as he can manage the student boyfriend who has taken his place as the man in her life. But as he sits in the evening alone, watching the setting sun turn ‘every palmtree to a firework’, it's clear that he misses her very much indeed. ‘C'est beau et difficile de devenir une femme,’ he says. As this book makes clear, the same could be said of becoming a father.… (more)

Antoine, a widowed postman, goes off the rails when his seven-year-old daughter, the only person in his life who really matters to him, goes missing. The police are doing their best, but they haven't come up with any solid leads. Fortunately, like just about every honest citizen of Marseille who has ever graced the printed page, Antoine has a close friend from primary school days who is now a notorious gangster (and another who is now a celebrated prostitute and the unofficial mascot of OM ...!).

I was looking forward to this book, but it didn't really live up to my expectations. Probably more my fault than the author's: for one thing, I've got Jean-Claude Izzo fresh in my memory, a writer Frégni clearly also admires very much, but wisely doesn't try to imitate. So I'm looking for things in the book which aren't there and don't actually need to be there, like Izzo's political engagement and his wide interest in Marseille as multi-culti melting-pot. This is a straightforward revenge thriller, and that's the second problem I have with it: it's a book driven by the central character's need to find whoever's responsible for the pain he's suffering and do something unspeakably violent to them. There are plenty of sound literary precedents for that, but it isn't something I'm looking for in a crime novel. In fact, any novel in which the characters have a technical discussion about different types of guns before going on a senseless killing spree is liable to put me off, even more than a novel in which the make and model of every car that appears is described in detail.

Maybe I need to try one of Frégni's other books.… (more)