An Examination of Conscience in Times of Change

Abstract

Christophe Bataille. Absinthe. Translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Pierre Michon. Masters and Servants. Translated by Wyatt Alexander Mason. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1997. For the average English-speaking reader, the contemporary French novel has effectively disappeared from the radar screen of world literature. With the possible exception of Michel Tournier (whose novel Ogre was turned into an uninspired cinematic vehicle for John Malkovich), few French writers have managed to make an impression on the American book-buying public since the glory days of Duras, Robbe-Grillet, and the nouveau roman. Indeed, as French writers become increasingly associated with the arcana of contemporary criticism, francophones in other parts of the world (one thinks immediately of Patrick Chamoiseau in Martinique and Anne Hebert in Quebec) have become the standard bearers of imaginative literature in French. recent publication of two excellent novels-Christophe Bataille's Absinthe and Pierre Michon's Masters and Servants (in superb translations by Richard Howard and Wyatt Alexander Mason, respectively)-attests to the fact that, despite this eclipse, contemporary French letters are alive and well. Absinthe is the second novel by the young prodigy Christophe Bataille who in 1993, at the age of twenty-one, won the Prix du Premier Roman for Annam, a story of French missionaries who sail to Vietnam in the eighteenth century. Although far removed from the setting of Annam, Bataille's sophomore effort shares his first novel's austere beauty. A lovely and delicate piece, Absinthe presents the reminiscences of its narrator, who details his boyhood in Provence around the time of the First World War, and particularly his relationship with the mysterious and reclusive Jose, a distiller of absinthe. A frequent visitor to Jose's laboratory, the narrator is slowly inducted into the esoteric cult of the narcotic liqueur,, and seems poised to become the master's apprentice and heir when the French government bans the alcohol and Jos6 disappears. Years later, the narrator discovers a manuscript penned by his mother that reveals the distiller's early life and, like a Proustian madeleine, serves as the catalyst for his reflections on his own youth, and for the penning of Absinthe itself. Shrouded in the melancholy of nostalgia, Absinthe is on one level a novel about loss: of childhood, of culture, of home. It lovingly describes a cohesive community as yet undivided by the horrors of war and the unwanted instrusions of bumbling government officials, a mythic Provence before the mass death and paternalistic bureaucracy of modernity. It is a place that now exists only in memory: The region itself has changed, the narrator wistfully concludes following a visit to his parents' house after the Second World War. But Bataille's interest in themes of regional identity, memory, and modernity ultimately take a back seat to his fascination with the mysterious green liqueur itself. In concise but exquisitely crafted prose, he describes the lost culture of absinthe: the various stages of the distillation process and the bizarre tools used to accomplish it, the rituals of its consumption, and its mystical, visionary effects. Unfortunately his minute reconstruction of these vanished practices sometimes comes at the expense of characterization and the full development of the weightier themes mentioned above. While the novel is full of beautiful surfaces, in too many places motives remain obscure, relationships unexplored and undeveloped, leaving the reader with the impression of a rococo artwork-an elegant but ultimately insubstantial aesthetic object. same cannot be said for Pierre Michon's Masters and Servants, a novel as profound and powerful as it is beautiful. book consists of five separate pieces on art and artists: the first concerns Joseph Roulin, a poor postman painted by Vincent van Gogh; the second considers Goya's rise to fame from humble beginnings; the third gives us the death of Watteau; the fourth reconstructs the life of Lorentino, an almost unknown quattrocento painter, from a few lines in Vasari; and the fifth shows us Claude Lorraine as he chooses an illiterate swineherd to be his apprentice. …