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Belle et Boring

DSK's eyes

Belle et bête
Marcela Iacub
Stock, 128pp, €13.50

There are moments when I feel that as long as I live and as hard as I try, France will remain forever a mystery to me. Reading Marcela Iacub’s book Belle et bête, a fictionalised account of her six-month-long love affair with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was one such moment. Hailed as it was by Le Nouvel Observateur for its “literary power of stupefying proportions” and described by Libération as a piece of “experimental literature as violent as that which she experiences, inspired by a spirit of risk”, I was prepared for something remarkable. This is how the book opens:

You were old, you were fat, you were short and you were ugly. You were macho, you were vulgar, you were insensitive and you were mean-spirited. You were egotistical, you were brutish and you had no culture. And I was mad about you.

That, more or less, is how it goes on, for 120 pages or so. It’s an unrepentantly verbose and embittered apostrophe to a man already disgraced, which leaves you feeling a mixture of distaste, exasperation and boredom – the kind of boredom, as I realised when I’d got about halfway through, that you might feel listening to a particularly long closing speech by an overweening barrister.

Iacub was indeed a barrister, back in her native Argentina, before she moved to France in her early twenties and became a brilliant jurist specialising in bioethics. More recently, she has made a name for herself as a clever, provocative columnist for Libération, where she writes mostly about sexual politics, often lamenting what she sees as the widespread erotic impoverishment of contemporary society.

When DSK was arrested in New York, she leapt to his defence, publishing a book entitled Une société des violeurs? (“A Society of Rapists?”), in which she offers a fierce criticism of the feminist witch-hunt that followed. He now rues the day that she ever became his champion.

As you can probably guess, Belle et Bête is not an apology for Strauss-Kahn – any doubts about this are swept away by the presence of an insert at the front of the book attesting to his libel suit against the author – nor is it, despite Iacub’s frequent assertions to the contrary, a love story. I, at least, could not detect any love in it. Perhaps that is because her approach is scientific and theoretical. “I wanted to create a theory of love from my situation,” she writes. “[A] nun who falls in love with a pig. A nun who turns away from the grandeur of divine love to wallow in filth.”

At this point, I should explain that there are two metaphors running through Iacub’s book – one of her lover as a pig and the other of herself as a saint or nun. And that they recur on every page. The other motif – that of Iacub’s saintliness – is built around the following assertion: “I was in love with the most despised being on the planet.”

From this point, we realise that, apart from his piggishness, we are not going to learn much about Strauss-Kahn. The book, rather, is about Iacub; her decision to defend an underdog and then submit to his (inevitable) advances. Above all, it is an ode to her writing life, which she likens to a form of auto-eroticism: “My writing. That operation, which consists in the transformation of my self into the object of my own passion.”

Although the text is littered with the most potent abstract nouns – truth, desire, happiness, love – the effect was to leave me cold. I could not believe – as I waded through all that unbridled narcissism (Iacub likens herself to Voltaire and Victor Hugo) – in her so-called passion. The account felt throughout not like a novel but like a very dry, very calculating exercise: “The only thing left to me in order to forget the pig and to have no further dealings with you was not to kill you but to write a book.”

In the penultimate chapter, the author describes a scene in which her lover tears off her left ear and eats it, then faints, in a spasm of ecstasy, into a pool of his own semen:

Thinking about it, I realised that my love  for the pig had died at the very moment he had mutilated me. As if my left ear had been the repository of my feelings and that without it I could no longer feel anything for him.

This scene, like all the erotica in the book, is, of course, purely symbolic. The problem is that the material never rises above this emblematic register, nor does it stoop to anything resembling experience. By the time I had dragged myself through the final chapter, I was, just as Le Nouvel Observateur had predicted, utterly stupefied, both by the book and by the praise it had received.

A version of this review appeared in The New Statesman

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À paraître…

An evocation of London, explored through the Circle Underground Line. To be published in March 2013.

Brought up off the King’s Road in the seventies when punk was in full bloom, Lucy is part of a family that comes in the wonderful tradition of English eccentrics. In Heads and Straights, she creates a funny, moving account of a group of people eager to escape the confines of class. Through interlocking tales of their extravagant and often self-destructive journeys away from the Circle line stops of Sloane Square, South Kensington and Gloucester Road, Lucy evokes the collision between conformism and bohemian excess and the complicated class antipathies that flourished in that particular time and place. In the end we are left wondering – is it ever possible to escape, or do we, in our travels, simply loop back on ourselves?

Why did you choose the title Heads and Straights?

The title echos 1970s drugspeak and the language of teenage rebellion. For my three elder sisters the world, in those days, was divided not along class lines but between those who experimented with drugs (Heads) and those who didn’t (Straights). In the four decades since then the word ‘Head’, in family folklore, has come to include anyone, of any age and from any walk of life, who likes to live dangerously.

Why did you choose this cover image?

This picture of me aged fifteen was taken in the canteen of my sixth form college in Kings Cross just after I had enrolled. It was there in that large, noisy room that I first made my visceral encounter with the big wide world beyond my safe and uniformly middle class corner of Chelsea and Kensington. I was terrified, feigning nonchalance (with that spoon), feeling conspicuous (in that jumper) and inwardly praying for acceptance.

http://www.penguincatalogue.co.uk/hi/press/title.html?catalogueId=251&imprintId=1059&titleId=17920

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At Last…

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The Secret Life of France is to be published in French! In April/May 2013. The publishers are Hugo et Cie who offer a small but eclectic list of titles, ranging as far as I can tell from the serious, to the light, to the tastefully saucy.

Any suggestions for titles in French would be very welcome.

As would any suggestions for the additional chapter on post-Sarkozy France that I intend to add to the French version.

Thanks so much.

LMW

 

 

The End of the Affair?

With the publication of a new biography of Francois Hollande’s girlfriend, Valerie Treirweiller, the French public will, whether they like it or not, discover yet another layer in the complex erotic saga that is their president’s love life. “La Frondeuse” (The Rebel) reveals that in the early days of his affair with Trierweiller, Francois Hollande shared his mistress with Patrick Devedjian, a political rival close to Sarkozy. Both Trierweiller and Devedjian are suing authors, Christophe Jakubyszyn and Alix Bouilhaguet for “defamation and infringement of privacy,” but this will not stop the news from spreading across the globe, nor will it help to explain French sexual mores to the rest of the world.

The euphemistic language in which the story of this ménage a trois is recounted reveals all by itself the gap between France and Britain when it comes to infidelity: “At the time,” write the authors. “They (Trierweiller and Devedjian) were both committed (married). They were both hesitating about making the big leap and changing their lives. Patrick Devedjian dithered, so much so that Valérie Trierweiler allowed herself to be courted by another man from another political obedience: Francois Hollande. Little by little the relationship with Hollande took precedence over the other, particularly after the (Trierweiller’s) ultimatum in 2003 to which Devedjian did not give in….It was a bit like the Jules et Jim story. The two men preserved a great respect for one another.”

Far from suggesting depravity the authors convey a certain sympathy for the participants of this love triangle, invoking Francois Truffaut’s 1960s masterpiece ‘Jules et Jim’, in which Jeanne Moreau attempts to share her bed and her life with the two men who are in love with her. Both in print and in interviews, Trierweiller’s biographers carefully avoid judgemental language of any kind. The reason for this is that, despite the constant pressure from foreign media, and from social networks like Twitter, the French are still deeply attached to the lure of secrecy and mystery when it comes to the affairs of the heart.

Valerie Trierweiller is unpopular in France, not for her adultery so much as for her perceived vulgarity in dealing with it. Known for her public outbursts of jealousy towards her boyfriend’s ex, Segolene Royal Trierweiller’s famous Tweet in support of Royal’s rival for her parliamentary seat, tipped the French public into a deep aversion from which it is unlikely to budge. Disposed, as people are in France, to look favourably upon beautiful, well-dressed women, they could not forgive Trierweiller for letting them down with such a lack of savoir vivre. Widely referred to as ‘L’hysterique’, Trierweiller is a kind of anti-model of the presidential mistress, who is traditionally expected to be a woman of elegance and discretion. Some of the online comments about the news of her upcoming biography offer good insight into the general view of Trierweiller in this country:

Unbelievable!!! Now she’s “authorising” a biography…Tweetweiller really has hit rock bottom when it comes to ridiculousness and vulgarity. So this unpleasant and insipid courtisane wishes to show us the emptiness of her existence. She really wants to ram herself down our throats!

The Rebel??? The Arriviste would have been more appropriate for Ms Tweetweiller.*

The emphasis is not on Trierweiller’s love life (or on the fact that she had a long-standing affair with a married man) – that is entirely her business – but on how she manages it. She is castigated not for being an adulteress but for being a shameless self-publicist.

There has been a shift, however, in French attitudes towards infidelity and the publication of this biography, despite the circumspection of its authors, is proof of that. There is a growing sense that the public have a right to know about the private lives of their public figures, and an increasing feeling of unease when it comes to extra-marital affairs. Ever since the Dominique Strauss Kahn case, it is as if all the fun has been slowly leaking out of the party. Described for years by the French press as ‘a ladies man’ DSK was suddenly, in the light of the US media, a potential rapist. The word libertine, which had, certainly in Parisian circles, been seen as a compliment, was now tarnished forever.

Contrary to an article on the subject in The Daily Mail by the irrepressible Stephen Clarke, the British divorce rate is actually higher than it is in France, where fewer marriages end in divorce (38% as opposed to 42%). This is partly because marriage itself is on the decline here. The old model of staying married at all costs is no longer popular. Indeed, Sarkozy and Cecilia were the first married couple in the Elysees to break that mould. My own French children, now 24 and 26, both aspire to marital fidelity as do their friends and they tell me that they would rather not marry at all than accept infidelity.

* Comments on an article in Elle Magazine 30/09/2012

http://www.elle.fr/Societe/News/Valerie-Trierweiler-sa-biographie-sort-en-octobre-2207956

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Reporting live from the moral high ground

The Chevaline Murders

Yet again a news story and the particular nature of its coverage seem to reveal the chasm between British and French worldviews. For once, though, the issue at stake is not our respective attitudes to sex, but to murder. Today’s Daily Mail headline on the ‘Chevaline killings’ as they are referred to here in France, offers a hint of the fairly widespread British indignation at the perceived disconnect between our two nations: “Story of the brutal murders of British family driving in the Alps buried by the French Press.”

Having suggested that the French media are somehow trying to ‘bury’ the story, the article goes on to infer widespread callousness in the face of mass murder: “The shocking Alps massacre was dismissed as nothing more than a trivial news item by the French media.”

The evidence for these deductions is two-fold: (i) in the aftermath of the crime, no French papers chose to lead with the story but ‘relegated’ it to the later pages and (ii) that the murders have been widely described as a ‘fait divers’, which the Mail obligingly translates for us as ‘a trivial news item.’

Later in the article there is actually a suggestion that one reason for the ‘relegation’ of this story might be that the murder victims were foreigners. But no. The Mail goes on to observe: “Even when one of the victims was on Friday named as French local Sylvain Mollier, a father of three, only local papers and national tabloid,  Aujord’hui (sp.) put the story on the front page.”

So it is that in the space of a few lines we get the heady whiff of French dishonesty, callousness, and xenophobia. One would be forgiven for assuming that this is just The Daily Mail succumbing, as usual, to the delights of French-bashing but today’s Guardian carries the almost identical headline: “How French press buried the story.”

It would probably be useful to start by explaining the term, ‘fait divers.’ It does not actually mean ‘trivial news story’ but refers to the section of a newspaper that is traditionally devoted to anything that cannot be put into the various sections that tend to divide French newspapers: National, International, Politics, Economics, Sport etc.  In the Fait Divers section, you will find mostly ‘tragic’ news stories such as crime, accidents and robberies. More than French callousness, the location of the fait divers section points to France’s entrenched preference for ideas over reality and its slowness to modify its traditions.

British coverage has once again shown the French how deeply they are disliked across the Channel. L’Express notes with a kind of brave resignation, the hostility and schadenfreude behind much of the reporting of this story in Britain and includes a link to Colin Randall’s rather thin exposé in The Telegraph of “the violent underbelly beneath France’s bucolic charm.”

Surely no one seriously believes that French people are any less shocked and appalled by this crime than their British neighbours? France certainly has much to learn from Britain when it comes to investigative reporting but let’s not use this as an excuse for yet another moral campaign.

A version of this piece appears in today’s Independent

Woman on the edge…

wikipediaOn May 2nd, between the first and second rounds of the presidential elections, Francois Hollande’s partner, Valerie Trierweiler gave an interview to the women’s magazine, Femme Actuelle. A smiling head shot of the future premiere Dame de France illustrates the piece and confirms her photogenicity and her radiant status as a woman in love. With hindsight is is possible to discern, between the lines of this apparently innocuous interview, the somewhat pathological mindset that will lead to Trieweiler’s recent disgrace. For that is how her ‘tweet‘  in support of Olivier Falorni, Segolene Royal’s rival for the parliamentary seat in La Rochelle, has been widely received; as a disgrace and an outrage to the political process. In the aftermath of the tweet an anonymous source at the Elysees Palace confided to Le Monde journalist, Thomas Wieder: “I’m stunned. I expected to have to deal with governmental, not conjugal crises.”

In the Femme Actuelle interview Trierweiler “confides” that Francois Hollande has complete faith in her, “except for my tweets!” she adds. “Some would prefer me not to respond so frequently on this social network, but everyone respects my freedom. I have a strong character and I won’t be reined in.”

It’s all here, isn’t it? The familiar invocation of the heady word ‘freedom’ and of course ‘the strong character’ to justify bad behaviour. As if the French public is still just as in thrall as it ever was to the myths and excuses of LURVE. The problem is, that particular bubble has burst. DSK did it in New York with his unbridled phallus. For years, under cover of expressions like l’homme a femme (ladies man) or chaud lapin (no satisfactory translation available) he managed to get away with being quite simply out of control with women. The way the Valerie Trierweiler tweet has landed is a further demonstration that public opinion in France has shifted. Love can no longer serve as a viable defense for hysterical and obsessive behaviour, for however vehemently Trierweiler denies that the tweet was triggered by jealousy of her boyfriend’s ex, no one is fooled. Her rivalry with Royal has been widely documented. As Elise Karlin, journalist at L’Express puts it in her article entitled ‘Valerie Trierweiler: The Ministry of Envy,’ “Nothing can explain taking this public position except the outrageous and irrational jealousy of a woman towards the person who came before her in her man’s heart,” a jealousy  that, according to one of Hollande’s close supporters, polluted the entire Presidential campaign.

Six weeks after her interview with Femme Actuelle, Trierweiler goes on to Twitter and her hand shoots out. In pressing “enter” she not only compromises her own credibility by breaking her promise of political neutrality, she also publicly contradicts the President who has already given, however reluctantly, his support for Royal’s candidacy in La Rochelle.  Later in the  interview she says, “I would not allow myself to offer him my opinion on the nomination of one or other candidate…At his side I am quite simply his woman, like any woman in love.”

Trierweiler goes on, not for the first time, to boast her discretion: “People come up to me (at political meetings) and thank me or congratulate me for my discretion. They say I have the right attitude, of one who is there but in the background…” She often describes herself as ‘shy’ and ‘private’ but she also likes to trumpet her love for Hollande from the rooftops. She demanded that he kiss her on the lips in public to mark his commitment to her, insisted, even during the height of the presidential campaign that his evenings be kept free for time together, and on the night of his victory organised, without telling him, for their song to be played on the podium: Edith Piaf’s highly romantic La Vie en Rose.

I can have sympathy for Trierweiler’s feelings. Let’s face it, we’ve all been there. Or at least I have. The mad, needy, utterly unreasonable behaviour that can often come with loving someone. In some ways you have to take your hat off to her for the sheer lunacy of her behaviour. She is playing out for all to see the agonizing paradox of the love state, the soi-disant independent woman utterly enslaved to the object of her affection. It’s just a pity for her that this particular archetype has lost its kudos, even in France.