Critics round on the queen of French shock fiction
Acclaimed author's tale about an affair with a black rapper may have broken one taboo too many
Her books have shocked, titillated, appalled and delighted readers for more than a decade. She has been condemned as a self-obsessed, navel-gazing publicity hound, who represents all that has gone wrong with French fiction, and lionised as a courageous writer challenging social and creative taboos and suffering for her bravery. But never before has a work by Christine Angot, labelled the queen of 'auto-fiction', suffered the indignity of being judged boring.
Angot's latest work - Le marché des amants (The lover market) - recounts her recent relationship with a fading rapper, Bruno Beausire, more usually known by his lurid stage name, Doc Gynéco. More than 300 pages long, liberally peppered with references to her lover's frustrated proclivity for sodomy, and featuring lengthy passages describing sex in a lift, discussions over whether or not to go for a coffee or who will call whom later, the book is the first of Angot's 14 works to be destroyed by the literary critics.
'She has been lynched,' said Christophe Ono-dit-Biot, author and culture editor of Le Point magazine. 'It's very French. We build them up and then suddenly we decide to trample them into the dirt,' she explained.
The attacks have undoubtedly been ferocious. Critic Christine Ferniot, writing in Lire magazine, described The Lover Market as 'dry, grey and boring... a B-series film with a Richard Clayderman soundtrack.' For Jérome Dupuis, in the weekly L'Express, the book was 'a long woolly text stuffed with inept conversations.'
Though - or perhaps because - Doc Gynéco controversially supported the right-wing President, Nicolas Sarkozy, in last year's election, the criticism has cut across political divides. An appalling review in the left-wing Le Nouvel Observateur was followed by worse in the influential intellectual Telerama listings magazine. Its critic described the book as a 'banal compilation of insignificant dialogues'.
But for some observers the row is rooted more in the social tensions and prejudices of French society than in any literary flaws in Angot's latest work. The book's title is taken from one sentence - 'on the lover market, a black is worth less than a white'. Jean-Pierre Boulé, professor of contemporary French studies at Nottingham Trent University, said: 'The reaction has been so virulent because... what Angot, 49, is talking about is deeply shocking in the new conservative climate [in France].'
Most of the polemics about the book have certainly focused on the relationship between Doc Gynéco, who is from a poor suburban background, and the white middle-class writer. Some have even described it as a 'misalliance'.
Her defenders point out that earlier books in which Angot described having sex respectively with her father, an elderly banker and figures from the cultural world have all been critically lauded.
'It seems that this is one taboo that you can't transgress,' said Ono-dit-Biot. 'Doc Gynéco himself is actually quite sympathetic, and though it might be a bit soppy the book is a rather nice love story. Angot's the girl from the good bourgeois family who ran off with the gardener. So she's been taken apart.'
Angot refuses the title 'queen of auto-fiction', despite being described as such by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on its official website. But some have seen her fall from grace as a sign that 'auto-fiction', a largely French literary genre that consists of using one's own slightly disguised experience as a basis for a narrative in which fact and fiction are mixed without clear distinction, has had its day.
One of the major successes of this autumn has been a book advertised explicitly as 'not auto-fiction', in which a character condemns the genre as being defined as 'the more I speak, the more I am right ... I speak and it's called a book'.
The best-selling author Michel Houellebecq, whose last book and the film based on it were both panned, is the latest proponent of the genre to fall foul of the critics. But Philippe Lançon, literary critic of Libération newspaper, pointed out that a lengthy new work by author Catherine Millet, whose account of her adulterous sex sessions with multiple anonymous partners became a global bestseller six years ago, has been well received. Millet's new book, Day of Suffering, recounts her own jealousy within her marriage, her masturbatory fantasies and sessions with her psychologists.
'The problem with Angot's latest is what she says, not how she says it, Lançon told The Observer. 'Millet's latest is very stylised, much more educated. The reader is among educated people and it's much less shocking,' he said.
This year's autumnal crop of literary offerings includes 676 novels, of which 210 are foreign translations. Stars include David Lodge's Deaf Sentence and Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, which was third on the French bestseller list last week.
'They are the kind of books that the French are no longer producing: well-written, humorous, satirical with bite in the one case; beautiful storytelling that perfectly conjures a historical moment in the other,' said Boulé. 'There is a longing for such works.'
Critics round on the queen of French shock fiction | Books | The Observer
18-08-08, 05:57 AM
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