Book Review: The Islanders

The Islandersby Pascal Garniertranslated from the French by Emily BoyceGallic Books, 2015From Gallic Books comes the slim 140-page The Islanders, Emily Boyce's translation of Pascal Garnier's 2010 Les Insulaires, a novella about a small group of people coming together by chance during a fierce winter in Versailles and finding themselves dealing with questions of grief and identity and the thread of a plot that gradually escalates to murder. A man named Olivier has been called back to his old home in Versailles by the death of his mother, and while he's in the city to deal with the final arrangements (some of which seem to have been made by his mother with the specific intention of allowing her to harass him from beyond the grave), he meets his old friend Jeanne and her blind brother Rodolphe, although he seems to spend an equal amount of time woolgathering around town, like the scene where he visits his old prep school on Avenue de Saint-Cloud:

His first death had come the year he turned fourteen and he had not stopped dying and being reborn ever since. Amazing – only in Versailles could you see the words 'Long Live the King!' graffitied on the school walls. The front gates were locked but he could see through them to the dome of the chapel across the main courtyard. The cassowary feathers of the Saint-Cyrien cadets hung limply in the inevitable rain. He was sorry not to feel anything at all. Funny the lengths the brain goes to in order to protect the body.

And before you're tempted to risk a platitude about how elusively profound the French are, yes, your first instincts were correct: that prose is bad. The first sentence is indeed hyperbole of a rock-lyric banality; the second sentence is indeed simply a random one-liner dropped into the paragraph without any reason; the third line describes something that's either self-evident or physically impossible; the fifth line is the first mention of rain in a scene that's already gone on for 500 lines and described every other detail of Olivier's surroundings; the sixth line is an explicit contradiction, since feeling sorry about something is, in fact, a feeling; and the seventh line, like the second, is a complete non sequitur, since Olivier's body isn't being protected from anything and wouldn't be no matter what he felt about seeing his old school.When Rodolphe and his friend Roland have lunch at a little restaurant next to the Theatre Montsanier, Rodolphe makes himself objectionable. When poor mousy Roland objects, Rodolphe launches into his rationale:

'Listen. The other day, I was waiting for the bus. It were chucking it down. I was standing on the edge of the gutter. I heard a lorry coming. Everybody behind me stepped back. Not one of them thought to take my arm. I was soaked to the skin. And you're asking me to like these people?'“They spent the afternoon at the Cyrano, which was showing One Hundred and One Dalmations.” we're then told. “The usher had to shake them, they were snoring so loudly.”

More than one hard-pressed critic has compared Pascal Garnier to Georges Simenon, and this will be a great relief to the present generation of lazy readers who want to validate their choice of mud-simple novellas (whose authors obviously ripped them out while in the loo) over the full-length and actually-worthwhile novels and biographies their fellow adults are reading. There are college-level classes taught (by professors who should feel thoroughly ashamed of themselves) about the garbage Simenon pumped out, and the fact that Simenon is dead (being forced to read his own books in Hell, one assumes) has left a gap in the ranks of slackweight authors who can be hysterically overpraised by people who ought to know better. So it's a relief of a kind that Pascal Garnier's works are here to be compared to his betters. Long live the new king!