A French Novel. Frédéric Beigbeder

into two phases: childhood and adulthood, and that it is completely pointless to further refine this analysis. Formerly, there existed a third phase, known as old age, which linked the two, when childhood memories flooded back, giving a semblance of unity to a human life. But to enter into old age, one must first accept it, leave life behind and enter into the age of memory. Caught up in desires and in adult plans, the author is not at this stage, and has almost no memory of his childhood.

      He does, however, have one, involving shrimping and a beach on the côte Basque. Like Cuvier reconstructing the skeleton of a dinosaur from a single fragment of bone, from this single memory Frédéric Beigbeder reconstructs his whole family history. It is a serious, solid work in which we discover a French family, a relatively harmonious blend of bourgeoisie and aristocracy of staunchly rural stock. A family heroic to the point of lunacy during the First World War, and consequently rather more circumspect when the Second World War breaks out. After 1945 they are gripped by a lively appetite for consumerism, an appetite which after 1968 will extend to a new level, becoming widespread in the sphere of morals. A family like many others, most of which belong to the upper classes; but it is the very ordinariness of Beigbeder’s family history that makes it compelling, since the whole history of twentieth-century France unfolds before our eyes, related without apparent effort. On first reading, we get a little confused sometimes with all the characters; that is the only thing for which one might criticise the author.

      In adolescence, everything changes. Memories flood back, but there are two things basically, two things in particular that linger in the author’s memory: the girls he has loved, the books he has read. Is that all there is to life, is that all that remains? It would seem so. And here too, Beigbeder’s honesty is so obvious that we would not think to challenge his conclusions. If it is indeed this and this alone that seems important to him, it’s because it truly is. Deep down, the pleasure of autobiography is almost the opposite of that of the novel: far from losing oneself in the author’s world, we never forget ourselves when reading an autobiography; we compare ourselves, we connect, we confirm, page after page, our sense of belonging to a common humanity.

      I was less interested by the sections about the nights spent in custody for taking cocaine on the public highway. It’s curious; I should have empathised, having myself spent a night in prison for an offence almost as stupid (smoking a cigarette on a plane) – and I can confirm that conditions in custody are not exactly comfortable. But the author and his friend the Poet protest a little too much; they mouth off. The portrait of the writer as a boy, a sickly little thing, all chin and ears, doing his best to follow in the footsteps of the big brother he admires, is brief, but it is so powerful that I felt I could sense that child reading over my shoulder through the whole book. In this delinquent episode, something is wrong: the child does not recognise himself in the adult he has become. And this, too, is probably the truth: the child is not father to the man. There is the child, there is the man; and between the two there is no connection. It is a discomfiting, embarrassing conclusion: we would like to think that there is a certain unity at the core of the human personality; it is an idea we find difficult to let go of; we would like to be able to make a connection.

      That connection we immediately make is in the pages the author devotes to his daughter, probably the most beautiful in the book. Because imperceptibly he realises, and we realise with him, that the childhood years his daughter is going through are the only years of true happiness. And that nothing, not even his love for her, will prevent her from stumbling over the same obstacles, from sinking into the same ruts. This increasingly poignant blend of secret sadness and love culminates in the magnificent epilogue, which in itself would justify this book, in which the author teaches his daughter, as his grandfather taught him, the art of skimming stones. In that moment the circle is closed and everything is justified. The stone that skips magically ‘six, seven, eight times’ across the sea. A victory, albeit limited, against gravity.

      Michel Houellebecq

      PROLOGUE

      I am older than my great-grandfather. Capitaine Thibaud de Chasteigner was thirty-seven years old when he fell during the second battle of Champagne, on 25 September 1915 at 9.15 a.m. between the valley of Suippe and the outskirts of the Argonne forest. I had to pester my mother to find out more; the hero of the family is an unknown soldier. He is buried at the Borie-Petit château, in Dordogne (my uncle’s place), but I saw his photograph in the château Vaugoubert (belonging to another uncle): a tall, thin young man in a blue uniform, with cropped fair hair. In his last letter to my great-grandmother, Thibaud says he has no wire-cutters to clear a path to the enemy’s lines. He describes the flat, chalky landscape, the incessant rain turning the ground into a muddy swampland, and confides that he has received the order to attack the following morning. He knows he will die; his letter is like a ‘snuff movie’ – a horror film made using no special effects. At dawn, he fulfilled his duty, singing the ‘Chant des Girondins’: ‘To die for one’s country is the most noble, most enviable destiny!’ The men of the 161st Infantry Regiment launched themselves into a hail of bullets; as intended, my great-grandfather and his men were ripped to shreds by the German machine guns and asphyxiated with chlorine gas. It might be said that Thibaud was murdered by his superior officers. He was tall, he was young, he was handsome, and La France ordered him to die for her. Or rather – and this gives his fate a curious topicality – La France ordered him to commit suicide. Like a Japanese kamikaze or a Palestinian terrorist, this father of four sacrificed himself knowing precisely what he was doing. This descendant of the crusaders was doomed to imitate Jesus Christ: to give his life so that others might live.

      I am descended from a gallant knight crucified on the barbed wire of Champagne.

      1

      CLIPPED WINGS

      I had just found out my brother had been made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur when I was arrested. The police did not handcuff me straight away; they only did that later, when I was being transferred to the Hôtel-Dieu, and again when I was transferred to prison on the Île de la Cité the following night. The President of the Republic had just written a charming letter to my elder brother, congratulating him on his contribution to the economic dynamism of France: ‘You are a perfect example of the sort of capitalism we want: a capitalism of entrepreneurs rather than one of speculators.’ On 28 January 2008, at the police station in the 8th arrondissement in Paris, officers in blue uniform, guns and truncheons dangling from their belts, stripped me completely naked in order to search me, confiscated my phone, my watch, my credit card, my money, my keys, my passport, my driving licence, my belt and my scarf, took samples of my saliva and my fingerprints, lifted up my testicles to see whether I had anything stuffed up my arsehole, took front, side and three-quarter photographs of me holding a mugshot placard, before returning me to a cage two metres square, its walls covered with graffiti, dried blood and snot. At the time I did not realise that, a few days later, I would be watching my brother receiving the Légion d’honneur in the Salle des Fêtes of the Élysée Palace, which is not quite so cramped, and that through the picture windows I would watch the leaves of the oak trees in the grounds moving in the wind, as though waving to me, beckoning me to come into the presidential gardens. Lying on a concrete bench at about four o’clock in the morning that dark night, the situation seemed simple to me: God had faith in my brother, and He had abandoned me. How could two people who had been so close as children have had such different fates? I had just been arrested for using class-A drugs on the public highway with a friend. A pickpocket in the next cell hammered on the glass half-heartedly, but regularly enough to keep the rest of the prisoners from getting any sleep. Sleep, in any case, would have been impossible, a utopian dream, since even when the convicts stopped bawling, the police shouted to each other along the gangways at the top of their lungs, as though the prisoners were deaf. The air was pervaded by the smell of sweat, vomit and undercooked microwaved stewed beef with carrots. Time passes very slowly when you don’t have a watch and when no one thinks to switch off the flickering strip light on the ceiling. Lying on the filthy concrete floor at my feet, a schizophrenic in an alcoholic coma groaned, snored and farted. It was freezing, but I was burning up. I tried to think of nothing, but it was impossible: when you bang