Sophie Divry: Quand le diable sortit de la salle de bain (2005)

Knut Hamsun's Hunger and George Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London, the experimental Franco-American writer Raymond Federman, Guillaume Apollinaire, Rabelais, and many others, are all influences on Sophie Divry's Quand le diable sortit de la salle de bain (lit. 'When the devil came out of the bathroom', but at the moment untranslated). The book is both a serious reflection on twenty-first-century life – particularly the poverty, the bureaucratic idiocies and the casual (and largely accepted) sexism in it – although it is also highly amusing.

Quand le diable sortit de la salle de bain is hard to explain. It's about Sophie, a young divorced and childless woman from Lyon, France, who is without money due to being honest and declaring that she has earned a small amount of money working as a freelance journalist: it's only 150 euros, although the social security system won't allow her any benefits until they've seen on paper the amount of money earned. The problem is that she can't prove her earnings as she's still waiting, but no proof means no more money, and she's literally starving.

The devil tempts her into stealing, but fortunately the christening of a nephew sends her down to Montpellier to her widowed mother's, where she can stoke up on some food for a few days. Returning to Paris she finds a temporary job as a waitress: it's poorly paid but she finds a little satisfaction waiting on fat, rich pigs, until she's reduced to washing the dishes and loses her cool when she wildly attacks one of the kitchen staff for his constant sexual harrassment.

That's essentially the story, although it doesn't mention the book that she's writing, the book within the book, when her friend Hector – also a character in the book – in a moment that reminds me of Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, comes out of the book and demands that Sophie stop making him wait to have sex with the woman he's long been lusting after. And – in a moment that reminds me of Apollinaire – when Hector invokes the devil, there's a double page spread of a prick (Sophie hates polite words) 'drawn' in words, and spurting 'AH! AH! AH!' etc. Divry also plays with different fonts and font sizes throughout the novel, and the love of long, breathless lists is frequently evident, such as the pages of lists of the things Sophie doesn't like about men: as she remarks, the list is so comprehensive that there's not a great deal positive left to play with.

Quand le diable sortit de la salle de bain is in love with words, so much so that Sophie finds the French lexicon insufficient: why, for instance, is there an adjective for Sunday (dominical) but not Saturday, why no separate words for being wet with rain and wet with snow, why no verb for 'I bought it on the internet', why no word for the false notes a violin makes when someone's learning to play it? She even tries to make up her own words, of which 'Sansconvictionnement' ('unconvincingly') is probably more than enough, although the reader can see her point.

This is a very playful book (or two) which leaps(s) out at you.

My Sophie Divry posts:
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Sophie Divry: Quand le diable sortit de la salle de bain
Sophie Divry: La Condition pavillonnaire

Sophie Divry: La Condition pavillonnaire | Madame Bovary of the Suburbs (2014)

Madame Bovary of the Suburbs is not a bad translation of the title for Sophie Divry's La Condition pavillonnaire: the novel itself, in its central and by a long way the longest of  its three parts, quotes Flaubert's Madame Bovary: 'Au fond de son âme, cependant, elle attendait un événement': 'Deep in her soul, though, she was waiting for something to happen.'

La Condition pavillonnaire is concerned with the life story of the fictitious M.A., from a young child until her death: the first part takes us through her schooldays and university in Lyon up to her marriage to François; the second with her boredom with the marriage, her bourgeois existence and her extra-marital affair with Philippe from work, whose severing of the relationship due to his promotion to Cergy with his wife and children leaves her devastated; and in the third part we see her doing a number of other things to try to fill in the gaps in her existence, try to heal her: charity work, psychiatry, yoga, acupuncture, etc, until she's a widow with grandchildren and will soon die.

Almost throughout, apart from the few occasions when 'vous' is used for the family in general, M.A. (a distancing 'name' in itself) is addressed as 'tu', which far from treating her in a familiar fashion almost belittles her, sets her apart, which of course is so true. Sophie Divry used to be a journalist for the monthly Décroissance (meaning 'ungrowth' (the paper is against consumerism)), and there are several instances in the book which give lists of the parts or the functions, for instance, of the car and the washing machine, all of which add to the impression of dehumanisation. And the car's wheels will continue to turn after M.A.'s death, the washing machine will continue to turn, on her death a new buyer will live in the couple's former house, and the cycle of life to death, the bourgeois suburban condition, will continue.

My Sophie Divry posts:
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Sophie Divry: Quand le diable sortit de la salle de bain
Sophie Divry: La Condition pavillonnaire