The Second Circle
Review
THE "LOIRE-ATLANTIQUE" CYCLE
by Jean
Rouaud
reviewed by Fin
Keegan
Now that Jean Rouaud has produced the final volume of what has turned
out to be a quintet the time seems propitious to reconsider Fields of
Glory (Les champs d'honneur, 1990) and its four successors.
The author grew up in the rainy département of Loire-Atlantique
(precipitation features heavily in his books). At the age of twelve he
lost his father, aunt, and grand-father, all within a year of each other.
Rouaud's work, which is profoundly autobiographical, has been written out
of this pain. As Proust, presiding ghost over this work of memory, pointed
out: we learn only through suffering. To judge by the reaction of a teacher,
in the third volume of the series, to the young narrator's account of visiting
his father's grave--he grades him bottom of the class, a judgement delivered
with sadistic ritualism before the other boys--Rouaud was not especially
mollycoddled in the aftermath.
But Rouaud is not buttonholing us to lament
his ill-treatment by Fate. Far from it. Over time, one infers, his experiences
have sensitized him to Provincial France's--and Provincial Europe's--great
and curiously unacknowledged devastation by war and the programme of "Modernization"
which succeeded the most recent conflict. In Fields of Glory, by
working back through the deaths of grandfather and aunt (the third loss
is skilfully skirted, as are the characters of the mother and the narrator
himself, for later exploration) Rouaud picks his way carefully to the still
smarting scar of the Great War, that ghastly bloodletting sandwiched between
the Franco-Prussian and Second World Wars, a catastrophe which still marks
the landscape of the north and altered the lives of families throughout
the country.
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THE "LOIRE-ATLANTIQUE"
CYCLE
by
Jean Rouaud
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1.
FIELDS OF GLORY
AMERICAS,
AFRICA & ASIA
EUROPE
2.
OF ILLUSTRIOUS MEN
AMERICAS,
AFRICA
EUROPE
& ASIA
3.
THE WORLD MORE OR LESS
AMERICAS,
AFRICA & ASIA
EUROPE
4.
POUR VOS CADEAUX
and
5.
SUR LA SCÈNE COMME AU CIEL
are
as yet untranslated. Join our mailing
list for notification.
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His method is purely
and intensely literary: a burrowing in to life through anecdote and observation
(life at Random, his imaginary town, is reminiscent of domestic life at
Combray, and of the farming family of the German film Heimat). Painstaking
in his approach, he takes entire paragraphs to nail down such everyday
talismans as the family 2 CV, but always in a highly readable and never
programmatic manner, a favourite device being the recounting of domestic
embroglios in a mock-epic style, a rhetorical dilation which can easily
accomodate the treatment of war and death that come in their train. Rouaud
is never afraid to give a subject, no matter how small, its due: so we
get a lengthy and amusing chapter on the rain of Loire-Atlantique: but
don't be misled; this approach finds echoes that say, the geeky accretions
of Nicholson Baker or the playful memoranda of Oulipo cannot. Like W.G.
Sebald, Jean Rouaud understands that the great events of Twentieth Century
history, all but forgotten now by the culture except as fodder for kitsch
historians and venting (a)moralists, are still echoing on in the interior
life of individuals in ways that have nothing to do with the ideological
battles of academics and politicians.
The second book in the cycle, Of Illustrious
Men (Des hommes illustres, 1993), is largely a loving portrait
of his father, a resourceful and courageous man, Resistance fighter
turned travelling salesman, and an individual of whom anecdotes abound:
it turns out he has the Breton rain to thank for having escaped a forced
labour train bound for the Reich. With a tenacity and delicacy equal to
the first book, his prematurely arrested life is traced, leading back by
degrees to the Occupation and the pounding of Nantes from the air.
These first two being as remarkable as they were
it was asking a lot that the third book of the series, The World More
or Less (Le monde à peu près, 1996), match its
predecessors. Too much, as it turns out. The book recounts the unhappy
adolescence of our narrator, now revealed as "Jean" (the first book, told
in the first person plural, does not betray his gender, out-Prousting Marcel
in the reclusive narrator stakes). The style and method are there, their
rhythm and tenacity undiminished, but Rouaud's grief being now the subject
matter rather than the prism through which his greater themes (love, family,
the trauma of civilians and civilian-soldiers) are viewed, the intensity
of regard seems dangerously unjustified. This occurs most pointedly in
an interminable chapter detailing the myopic Jean's misadventures on the
football pitch. This may well have been hysterical in French but, in the
hands of a translator who seems to know next to nothing about football,
it is not at all funny (and Rouaud can be very funny). But Rouaud is not
being sorry for himself, at least no more than most of us, since his alter
ego's sensitivity is depicted with the same warmly ironic perspective as
family members, friends and neighbours. All this not to damn the book,
its place in the cycle is assured and will be savoured by fans: its uses
Jean's myopia and near-comic level of sensitivity with symbolic dexterity.
The fourth and fifth books are as yet untranslated,
so English-language readers at least shall have to wait and see if Rouaud
finds his form again. My feeling is that he will since, to go by French
reports, the focus of the narrative moves from the young Jean on to the
figure of his mother. We are counting the days. 
Fin Keegan
Other reviews by Fin Keegan
at
The Second Circle:
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Palace of Dreams by Ismail
Kadare
Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin
The "Loire-Atlantique" Cycle by Jean Rouaud
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi
Justine by Alice
Thompson
Brief Reviews including Donald Antrim and John Lanchester
A Profile of
the Harvill Press
A Profile of
the Editions de Minuit
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