Fiction: A little girl rushes out into the street. She is hit by a passing van. The driver is devastated. From this simple, everyday tragedy French writer Pierre Péju, a teacher of philosophy, shapes a starkly beautiful narrative that develops into a philosophical allegory of unsettling moral profundity.
Long before her body is crushed in the accident the little girl, Éva, has already become the innocent victim of an unsettled life that has never been fair.
Each day she waits after school, long after the other children have gone home, for her mother to collect her. On the day of the accident, the child is prepared for her inevitable school-yard vigil. "Éva is anxious, as she is every afternoon. She dreads not seeing her mother in the waiting throng, dreads not finding a pair of fond eyes meeting her own, drawing her near." Péju evokes the terror felt by a child by entering the mind of one. Urgent yet subtle, the opening sequences of the book seethe with fear. The child exists in an aura of uncertainty. Thérèse, her mother and all the child has, is not only unpunctual, she is barely present. Arriving late, she usually "flutters a hand in a vague gesture of explanation, shakes her head and smiles as if to implore her child's forgiveness before resuming her expression of hazy detachment." This is a mother "who shrinks from holding hands" as if such contact suggests "an encumbrance, an embarrassment". Péju explores the situation from the little girl's point of view and understands that her mother's distracted behaviour has left the child with "a sense of being nothing, of being invisible". Desperation, not carelessness, causes her to run blindly through the driving rain into the busy street.
For a moment before the accident, Péju pauses and acknowledges "the slightest shift in circumstances and it", the accident, "would never take place." The tiniest details decide the outcome of anything. Something, or someone, could have intervened. But it didn't, leaving fate to take over.
As Éva's panic overtakes her, the person who will innocently, but no less emphatically, dictate events, approaches. Vollard, large and lonely, is a bookseller. "On his own as usual, he is driving his green van chock-a-block with books in cardboard boxes." This giant of a man is not a dealer. For him, books are far more than business. They have always been his lifeline, his only salvation.
Considering that this narrative is most emphatically a novel of the mind, it is extraordinary to see the way in which Péju draws on the physicality of the events. The accident is as hectically choreographed as the steps of a frenzied, medieval dance. Vollard the perpetrator immediately becomes the second victim, as well as the main witness. "Every muscle in him contracts, he is seized with terror. Brake pedal slammed, steering wheel wrenched to the left, Vollard clinging, straining with all his might as though he could, with his own bare hands, still prevent the iron monster from goring its victim." The few seconds during which the accident occurs are suspended, and elongated into an epic drama. "Time freezes solid, stopped at pure horror." The clarity and elegance of Péju's prose, impressively sustained by Ina Rilke's meticulous translation, convey a sequence of images that live off the page. Reading this book quickly becomes a physical as well as intellectual act: by reading the book, you collaborate in the story. It is also interesting to see the way in which what is very much a story of everyday agony created by a spilt second of ill timing also acquires the quality of fairytale at its most nightmarish.
Silence, language, flight and the effort of being are the major themes.
Vollard's entire life has been spent seeking refuge in words written by a host of writers. He abides by those familiar words: "Everywhere I looked for peace of mind, I never found it but in a corner with a book." In a similar way, Éva's distracted mother, Thérèse, herself in perpetual escape, writes down random words in order to find some meaning to apply to her specific chaos. Restless and vague, she passes her days in aimless driving, or on train journeys to nowhere in particular. Péju's portrait of her is curiously non-judgemental and at times touching. Initially she was a lonely single mother embarking on car trips with a baby. But the baby grew up into a child who had to go to school. Motherhood has eluded Thérèse who, by nature a drifter, is too unfocussed to find salvation in a child.
Ironically, the doctors tending the little girl, who is trapped in a coma, believe her only hope lies in hearing words spoken to her. Her mother can't help. Speaking to her daughter has always been beyond Thérèse. Yet for Vollard, who emerges as the central character, his head is full of books. Reciting stories from memory is his gift to Éva.
Running parallel to Éva's physical crisis is Vollard's spiritual odyssey. Péju allows what has been a detached narrative voice to become that of a narrator who directly addresses the reader when supplying the facts of Vollard's earlier life. "I know very little of the life of Etienne Vollard. There are vast blanks. Swathes of uncertainties." It is as if Éva's trials are merely a metaphor for what becomes a sequence of near-Biblical tests for Vollard, a personalised "Pilgrim's Progress". It is he, not the girl's mother, who is entrusted with her care. The passages in which the child walks towards recovery only to slide away from it acquire a quasi-religious dimension. Silence is the only medium she understands, the sheer effort of trying to live has cost her even a sense of self.
Again in a narrative of inspired coincidence, it is not surprising that Vollard's old-style book shop, more library than commercial outlet, is called "The Verb to Be". In a novel concerned with the business of being it seems the appropriate name. There are elements of melodrama and Péju comes dangerously close to losing the essential grandeur of his tale in an act of potential banality that instead settles into a statement of utter despair.
Beckett, Borges and even Paul Auster appear to stalk the pages of this haunting fable, but ultimately its achievement rests in Péju's realistically eloquent fatalism. Books can and do teach us how to live: this grim though beautiful master work certainly does.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Girl from the Chartreuse. By Pierre Péju. Translated by Ina Rilke. Harvill, 165pp. £12