Assommons les pauvres! by Shumona Sinha

Abstract

Monzó’s Guadalajara, brilliantly translated by Peter Bush: a normal world has nothing to do with the normal. Both Franz Kafka and John Barth (whom Monzó has translated, along with J. D. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway ) are heavy influences on several of the stories. In one titled “Gregor,” Monzó rewrites The Metamorphosis as a beetle waking up to find himself as an overweight teenage boy. As he struggled to control his new burdensome body, “his family stared at him from one corner of the room with a mixture of admiration and panic.” In “Centripetal Force,” a man tries to leave his apartment only to find himself back in his hallway. When he tries to enlist the help of firemen, they too get stuck in a stairwell reminiscent of an M. C. Escher print. Monzó’s gift isn’t in creating existential loops, but in creating characters who will do anything to escape these traps. The second of five sections of the collection, in which Monzó rewrites myths and fairy tales through a contemporary , thus cynical, lens, reveals Monzó’s Barthian influence. In “Outside the Gates of Troy,” Ulysses and his soldiers fester in the wooden horse for days, waiting for the Trojans to fall for the simplistic trap. “Helvetian Freedoms” follows up William Tell, this time focusing on his son, Walter. Now a grown man, Walter recalls to his teenage son the legendary story of his father shooting an apple off his head. “How could you let him do that?” his son asks, making Walter reexamine that moment: if William cared for him, Walter reasons, his emotions would have made his hands tremble, making him miss his target. Though one of the pitfalls of existential or absurdist literature is the sacrifice of “heart” and emotion for “ideas” and philosophy, Monzó, in small, masterful strokes, gives his stories a full-bodied existence. In “Gregor,” for example, as the transformed beetle-now-boy lies naked on the floor, helpless in his predicament, his mother, still a bug, strokes her son’s eyelashes with her antennae. In Guadalajara, Quim Monzó joins contemporary short-story writers such as Etgar Keret and George Saunders with the ability to show the absurd in the real, and how the absurd reveals the real. Armando Celayo Norwich, United Kingdom Shumona Sinha. Assommons les pauvres ! Paris. Editions de l’Olivier. 2011. isbn 9782879297866 Shumona Sinha was a prizewinning poet in Bengali before moving to France ten years ago. This is her second novel in French. The title is taken from a prose poem of Baudelaire’s, translated as “Let’s beat up the poor.” The narrator, like the author herself until recently, works as an interpreter in a government service investigating the claims of refugees for asylum in France. She is torn between sympathy for these refugees and her desire to be part of a more elitist French culture. She feels different from the other interpreters and sits alone, reading a book, while they gossip. She is both aware of her skin color (which she terms “slate”) and the attraction of the blond, blue-eyed woman with whom she works. (There is an element of sexual as well as cultural ambiguity in her narrative.) Arrested after she hits a poor refugee on the head with a bottle, she tells her story to a police investigator, ominously named Monsieur K. He is quickly aware of how she needs to be different from the refugee clients with whom she has worked, which he misinterprets as hatred for the poor. Her gesture, however, rather like that of Baudelaire in his poem, is a way of making contact with those she both pities and scorns. The men scorn her as well, as a woman who does not fulfill a traditional role, and she knows the horrors of life in the suburban ghettos. While she has chosen to come to Europe, the refugees from the subcontinent are the victims of politics but also of nature, Partition, and floods. They must recite stories to try to impress the French government. There is considerable humor in her description of how the refugees cannot remember the stories told to them by those who brought them to France...