Men Read online

  PRAISE FOR MEN

  ‘Marie Darrieussecq brilliantly explores female anxiety about the masculine, and the desire for the masculine—always such a mysterious thing for a woman—whether he is black or white. This radical otherness takes us to the heart of what it means to be a woman.’ Télérama

  ‘From Los Angeles to Cameroon, via Paris, Marie Darrieussecq’s novel is constantly on the edge of the fictional and the documentary. Romantic and creative passions merge with political and ethical visions…The character of Solange is the embodiment of a desire to grasp everything, in the intensity of the moment—and the same spirit animates Marie Darrieussecq’s writing.’ Le Magazine Littéraire

  ‘The issue of otherness is crucial, as is that of the couple. Are the characters a couple, or are they just the sum of one another? This novel and its romance is a surprise from Marie Darrieussecq, but she proves herself to be, as ever, a socially aware writer.’ Paris Match

  ‘The film shoot in Cameroon is a piece of bravura writing… pages that take your breath away…Jungle fever, the attraction between people from different races—is the jungle here metaphoric or real?’ Le Nouvel Observateur

  ‘Darrieussecq revisits the clash of civilisations, of two worlds, one supposedly civilised, the other immersed in the heart of darkness…Without a single cliché or platitude, this novelist chooses to contrast a mythical Africa with that of harsh reality.’ Jeune Afrique

  ‘If it weren’t for her prose, which is like a brooding snake—sharp, sometimes dissonant, twisting—Marie Darrieussecq’s new novel would remind you of one of those slice-of-life films, ultra anti-romantic, no emotional clap-trap…And this novel is all about the cinema…It’s a novel-film.’ Le Point

  PRAISE FOR MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ, TOM IS DEAD AND ALL THE WAY

  ‘There are few writers who may have changed my perception of the world, but Darrieussecq is one of them.’ The Times

  ‘The internationally celebrated author who illuminates those parts of life other writers cannot or do not want to reach.’ Independent

  ‘“To say what is not said, that is the point of writing,” claims Darrieussecq. And that is exactly what this novel, All the Way, does as it shatters taboos, over-simplifications and affectations.’ Le Magazine Littéraire

  ‘I absolutely adored this account of a sexual awakening.’ L’Express

  ‘Preoccupied with what is both strange yet familiar, this clever novel, All the Way, is both personal and universal —and without the slightest trace of sentimentality.’ Libération

  ‘Tom Is Dead is powerful; when one has finished reading it one feels it absolutely needed to exist.’ Nancy Huston

  ‘Tom Is Dead is mesmerising and deeply rewarding…. impressive in its evocation of vastly different worlds and lives.’ Australian Literary Review

  ‘Darrieussecq is as daring as she is original… a singular new voice.’ Irish Times

  ‘She makes all those daring young men of letters look very tame indeed.’ Herald (Glasgow)

  ‘Another astonishing work by Darrieussecq. All the Way is a stunning achievement.’ M. J. HYLAND

  ‘Her gifts are dazzling.’ Observer

  ‘I love the way Marie Darrieussecq writes about the world as if it were an extension of herself and her feelings.’ J.M.G LE CLEZIO, Nobel Laureate for Literature 2008

  ‘As ever, Marie Darrieussecq is a step ahead.’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘All the Way is a darkly comic work that is likely to cause outrage and indignation from the usual quarters…Darrieussecq highlights literature’s ability to explore the dark corners of our own collective box of secrets, in which children are neither as naïve nor as oblivious as we wish to believe.’ Monthly

  ‘Explicit, funny and unsentimental, All the Way captures what it's like to be underage and out of your mind with desire. Darrieussecq is a sublime writer with real insight.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘At the heart of her gripping new novel is the thorny territory of adolescence and its raging loneliness, as a young French girl determines to go all the way sexually. The beautiful translation succeeds in capturing the nuances of the protagonist, the ultra-sensitive Solange, and her kaleidoscope of teenage thought and emotion…Darrieussecq's storytelling keeps the reader engaged all the way, too.’ Australian

  ‘The French enfant terrible Marie Darrieussecq has been much overlooked in Anglophone circles—a scandal.’ The Times

  ‘A dreamy and daring narrative.’ Courier Mail

  ‘A sharp, funny and honest description of a girl coming to grips with her blooming sexuality.’ Herald Sun

  ‘Darrieussecq is not afraid to break social taboos, nor does she flinch from the utter selfishness that accompanies adolescence…sad, funny and challenging.’ Otago Daily Times

  ‘In All the Way, Darrieussecq dissects with anatomical precision the climate of small-town France in the 1980s, with its strange mix of sexual openness and the continued prevalence of a particularly French brand of chauvinism and racism, all coloured by the disappointment of a generation that came of age in 1968, the promised revolution having faded almost completely, leaving nothing more noble than a petit bourgeois sensibility.’ Times Literary Supplement

  MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ was born in 1969 in Bayonne, France. Her novel Pig Tales was published in thirty-four countries. She lives in Paris. Text has also published Tom Is Dead and All the Way.

  PENNY HUESTON is an editor and translator.

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company (UK) Ltd

  130 Wood Street, London EC2V 6DL, United Kingdom

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House, 22 William Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © P.O.L éditeur, 2013

  Translation copyright © Penny Hueston 2016

  The moral right of Marie Darrieussecq to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The lyrics of songs appearing in the text have been left as the author remembered them for the writing of this work of fiction.

  Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes was originally published French in 2013 by P.O.L éditeur.

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company in 2016.

  Page and cover design by W.H. Chong

  Typeset by J&M Typesetters

  9781925240917 (Australian paperback)

  9781911231028 (UK paperback)

  9781922253538 (ebook)

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Creator: Darrieussecq, Marie, author.

  Title: Men/by Marie Darrieussecq;

  translated from the French by Penny Hueston.

  Subjects: Man-woman relationships—Fiction. Race relations—Fiction.

  Blacks—Race identity—Fiction. Whites—Race identity—Fiction.

  Stereotypes (Social psychology)—Fiction.

  Other Creators/Contributors: Hueston, Penny, translator.

  Dewey Number: 843.914

  ‘We have to love men a lot. A lot, a lot. Love them a lot in order to love them. Otherwise it’s impossible; we couldn’t bear them.’

  Marguerite Duras

  ‘Over the ocean, so they say, beneath the sky, and far away, there is a town of mystical renown and on the evening breeze beneath vast dark trees all my hope flees’


  Josephine Baker

  You go by sea and reach a river. You can take a plane, of course. But you reach a river and you have to enter the river. Sometimes there’s a port, and cranes, cargo ships, sailors. And lights at night. A port on the habitable section of the delta. After that there’s no one. Only trees, as you head up the river.

  OPENING CREDITS

  He was a man with a big idea. She could see it shining in his eyes. His pupils coiled into incandescent ribbons. She sank into his gaze to follow the river with him. But she didn’t believe in his project. It would never happen for real. Does anyone ever make it to the Congo?

  That was the thing about him: he was a problem. And his big idea cost too much money. Expected too much from too many people. And for her the big idea was like another woman in his life.

  ‘From brooding too long on the Congo/ I have become a Congo resounding with forests and rivers/ where the whip cracks like a great banner.’ He read to her from Césaire. Who was not her favourite writer. But who left us some decent pages, there’s no denying it. And who was black, which carries some weight. Arguably. From then on, she came from there, too. From an impossible, cataclysmic, teeming country.

  Every morning she woke up afflicted with a skin disease. Her shoulders, her breasts, the insides of her arms, anything that came in contact with him—her skin was ruptured with an embroidery of encrusted lines that were spreading. She rubbed and scrubbed but they didn’t go away. She showered but the water made no difference, and in the mirror she could see, beneath the skin, patterns of narrow tunnels, of delicate, hollowed-out pearl necklaces.

  Even the make-up artist couldn’t do anything for her. And she was supposed to play the role of the diaphanous French woman, no tattoos, no marks. You can’t see your own face. Nor your back, granted. If you twist around, you catch a glimpse of shoulderblade, a bit of collarbone and the small of your back. But you carry your face in front of you like an offering. He saw her. She only saw herself in films or in the mirror. That flawless face, on which marks were even more visible.

  And who was he? An actor like her, supporting roles, not that well known—his face was familiar, but not his name, which was hard to pronounce. If he had a radical streak in him, it manifested itself in his determination to keep his name—to make a career with a name like that. A name that she, too, would have liked to go by. She imagined combining it with her own typically French first name, Solange.

  He didn’t like her looking at him when they made love. If she opened her eyes, he went shhhh. She shut them again; she went back inside the red darkness. But she had seen his face, overcome with emotion, his cheeks radiant, the sweat on his cheekbones, like tears. And his eyes fixed on her, shhhh. Two black pinpoints, staring out from under his eyelids, his Chinese eyes, two slits, beneath his triangular forehead.

  She remembered his beauty geometrically, but who was the man in the photograph? Who was the man whose picture was in all the Hollywood gossip magazines? Who was the man who used to look at her, who, in her memory, is looking at her now? Her skin no longer bears any trace of him, only the imprint of time, the scars from film shoots that she seems to have dreamt up.

  THE BEGINNING

  The beginning is like an incision. She is forever revisiting the beginning; it stands out distinctly in the course of her life, whereas what follows seems back to front, or cut off, or in disarray.

  She saw him, only him. At one of George’s parties. Most of the guests were there, but she entered a magnetic field. A denser sphere of air that excluded everyone else. She was silent. In his presence she was reduced to silence and solitude. She could not speak: she had nothing to say. A palpable, dazzling force field radiated from him, a blast from a contained explosion. A wave coursed through her and she disintegrated. Her atoms were pulverised. She was in suspension and, already, that’s what she wanted: disintegration.

  He was wearing a strange coat, long, made of delicate, flowing material. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the base of the canyon, at the lights of Los Angeles. His demeanour, his dark head, was unfathomable, as if the effort required by his own bearing completely preoccupied him. As if he were the only human being present who was aware of the burden that is a head. Backlit by the lanterns, his long hair was outlined in a deep cowl and his slender silhouette gave him a monastic air. The intensity of the force field became such that one of them—she—pronounced a few words, about the balmy evening, or George, or whatever they were drinking, and it was like taking a breath. The night turned pale in the fog; a watery haze formed over them. He rolled her a cigarette. Their hands did not touch, but there was such a brutal strengthening of the force field that the cigarette floated, passed between them without their knowing how, in the vibrating, humming space. In the dark, he mimed looking for a lighter in the bottomless pockets of his coat. He didn’t have one—no, he did—the flame erupted. She burned her hair leaning in too close and she laughed, mistakenly, as he was already silently demanding the utmost seriousness from her. She took a drag and surfaced for air, one last time.

  Then she plunged into the core of the world, with him, into the force field, into the fog that was choking Laurel Canyon, into total happiness, impenetrable and white—disintegration.

  He was a phenomenal actor. He had the ability to call up different lives, right before him, around him, metamorphosed, one on top of the other, and never bogus. It was him, multiplied. He had reached the level of self-confidence to be himself in role after role, like George or Nicole or Isabelle. But he had never reached star status. And yet, as she witnessed later, he inspired adoration, fear and neediness.

  At first she thought he was American. His intonation, the way he moved. An eccentric American, for sure, but in the Hollywood Hills you dress however you like. As for her, everyone knew she was French. She could work on her accent and play an American, but most of the time they wanted her to play a French woman: the shrill bitch, the elegant ice queen, the romantic victim. Wearing Chanel and Louboutin outfits, which she got to keep after the shoot.

  He would play a drug dealer or a boxer, sometimes a cop or a priest or the best friend of the broad-minded hero. He had been a low-profile Jedi in an episode of Star Wars. In real life he played an American like everyone else, like he had played Hamlet when he first started out. With the same quiet intensity. The same focused indifference. At the Bouffes du Nord theatre, when she was at the Paris Conservatory, it could only have been him. His voice was muted and deep, his torso enormous, broad shoulders on a long body, which she could only guess at because he was wearing a kind of cloak. His voice seemed to emanate from deep in his throat, beneath that soft hollow spot where the neck begins and where she would so love to kiss him, later, asking him if he was annoyed by her feelings for him, and he would reply: ‘Why would I be annoyed?’

  His ts had a soft, mellow fullness, scarcely different from his ds, which at first she took to be the affectation of a handsome man and an actor—the way certain aristocrats speak in France—whereas for him it indicated his background. In her case, people often joked that, even from a satellite, you could tell she was French. Was it her figure? The angle of her jawline? Or the tic of starting sentences with a little sceptical pout? Apparently, languages shape faces. Her speech therapist in Los Angeles, with whom she practised accents, thought it was an issue of muscular tension.

  Yes, she was French. He had been to Paris. He liked Paris, the historical buildings. Yes, it’s a beautiful city. How long had she been in Los Angeles? Four years (she pretended to think about it), one-two-three-four, since 2003. Ever since her son had chosen to live with his father—she felt the urge to tell him that, although nothing in his tall figure, in his unfathomable demeanour, in the absence of a smile, invited the sharing of confidences. He had asked about Los Angeles for other reasons. To chat about their careers, in fact. He was silent; she remained silent. Already, she was following his lead. She had just grasped that he was not American. Once she had confirmed that she was Frenc
h, he had revealed another accent, perhaps another way of behaving. He was Canadian. Which did not completely satisfy her. But she didn’t press for more. Not immediately. She would rather have been consumed in a flash, like vampires startled by daylight, than claim to reduce him to the matter of his origins. They were two strangers, two adopted Americans. Two strangers also oddly familiar to each other. As if they knew each other already through intervening countries. As if the intensity of that day was also the logical, electrical consequence of history’s detonation system.

  The coyotes were yapping in the hills, close by. They came to drink from the swimming pools. Their call was more like a wailing, not at all like a wolf, more like some kind of freakish baby. George eventually came over, a bottle of Cristal in his hand. He had just been in a science-fiction film and bits of the set, like the cosmically white armchairs, had been reused for the party. He seemed, as ever, to have fallen from heaven, in an immaculate suit, with his tanned complexion, and his smile like the Milky Way. He introduced them to each other, first names only, as if it was obvious, as if they were as famous as he was. That’s how classy George was. With him everything became normal again: the gigantic turquoise swimming pool, the hundred-odd guests, the steamy night in the hills, and that looming man’s impossible first name, like bones grating. And two days later she would realise that he hadn’t heard her name at all.

  They were whisked away by a group of people, George’s gravitational field. There was Kate, and Mary, and Jen, and Colin, and Lloyd, and Ted, and two or three of Steven’s friends and also that girl who was in Collateral Damage. A beautiful ethnic girl, as they say in France, Puerto Rican perhaps. Heads bobbing, shadows fluttering. She was looking around for him in the dark. She did not dare scrutinise his face, his impassive Jedi countenance. Earlier she had made an effort to look away, like him, at the hills, at the flame of the lighter up close, or at the Great Bear far away. And that actress, the Puerto Rican, there was something odd about her gaze, a sort of squint—yes, she was ogling him; she did not take her eyes off him, whereas everyone else was staring at George, at his white silhouette in the light.