Marie Redonnet: Mobie-Diq (1982)

Marie Redonnet's Mobie-Diq, particularly with its hyphenation, obviously calls to mind Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, as well as the Bible (Jonah and the whale), but more so – this being Redonnet and early Redonnet in particular – Samuel Beckett. Minimalism is in the nature of this play, which like Tir & Lir (1988) merely has two characters, although unlike that later play has no voices of other people.

Mobie is the ageing woman, Diq her husband, and they are in evening dress – which little by little turn to rags as the play progresses – because they have been having the honeymoon they didn't have on marriage, on board the luxury liner Tango. Unfortunately the ship (like the Titanic on its maiden voyage) comes to grief and Mobie and Diq are apparently the only survivors, on a rowing boat without a compass, but not without hope.

Although, the audience surely knows that hope is a short-lived commodity in the Redonnetian (as in the Beckettian) universe: the 'treasure' found in the boat will prove to be valueless, any compensation after the disastrous voyage (paid for by the sale of their pathetic home) will not be forthcoming, and inevitably they will end up in the belly of a whale. Gulp, all gone.

Links to my other Marie Redonnet posts:

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Marie Redonnet: Rose Mélie Rose | Mellie Rose
Marie Redonnet: Seaside
Marie Redonnet: Nevermore
Marie Redonnet: Tir et Lir

Marie Redonnet: Tir & Lir (1988)

Tir & Lir feels bleaker even than anything of Samuel Beckett's, who is of course a primary influence. This is Marie Redonnet's first play, although it was actually written before her noted novel trilogy Splendid Hotel (1986), Forever Valley (1987) and Rose Mélie Rose (1987).

The writing is simple, pared down. An old married man and woman, Mub (pronounced 'Meub') and Mab, are ailing and live for the postman bringing letters from their son and daughter, Tir and Lir, one from each of them arriving every Monday, and the play is set over a ten-week period: so ten letters.

Tir is in the army and the first letter in the play reveals that a stray bullet has hit his leg and that he is in hospital. Lir is obviously a prostitute (prostitution being a common theme in Redonnet's work), and although the name of her job isn't specifically mentioned her first letter reveals that she has a fever which is putting her clients off.

After each letter Mub writes back to Tir and Lir, and in spite of a brief remission of both of them things get worse. Tir has a have his leg cut off and will receive a pension, and Lir is hospitalised as she has a 'microbe'. In proportion as the health of Tir and Lir worsen, so to do the mobility and general health of Mab and Mub, and any hopes of the four joining each other in a home, any hopes even of them meeting again, are dispelled slowly.

Not that there are any surprises here: quite early in the play it becomes evident that the eventual death of all four of them is inevitable, that Mab and Mub will be the only two characters in the play, and that they and their son and daughter will die miserably. The final letters arrive as usual on Monday, only one is written by Tir's superior officer, one by Lir's doctor, to inform their parents of their son and daughter's imminent death. Time for Mab and Mub to die together in their hovel.

Strangely, this is not as slit-your-throat depressing as it reads, and it's almost as if Beckett had been reborn (even though he was still (just) alive at time of publication of Tir & Lir).

Links to my other Marie Redonnet posts:

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Marie Redonnet: Rose Mélie Rose | Mellie Rose
Marie Redonnet: Seaside
Marie Redonnet: Nevermore
Marie Redonnet: Mobie-Diq

Marie Redonnet: Nevermore (1994)

Unsurprisingly, Marie Redonnet's Nevermore is translated into English using the same title. Slightly surprisingly, though, the Times Literary Supplement review described it as a 'frenetic erotic thriller'. Frenetic is certainly is: in the space of just 160 pages many characters appear (and often disappear), and many things happen. Also, unlike the other two Redonnet books I've read – Rose Mélie Rose and Seaside – this is certainly a thriller, a kind of detective story with a great deal of mystery, many twists, dead bodies, etc. But erotic? Well, there are a few brief moments of that, plus a few brief moments of sexual abuse, but if a reader is looking for an erotic book this is not it.

This may have some of the hallmarks of Rose Mélie Rose and Seaside – a strange, haunting atmosphere throughout, the prominence of decay, the suggestion of prostitution and iffy clubs, etc – but other things are very different. The minimalism has gone, there's a much stronger (and often bewildering) plot, and there seem to be (half-hearted) attempts at satire on (or parody of) the American detective genre with the bourbon-swigging and the casual treatment of women.

The novel has mainly American-sounding names (Willie Bost, Ronie Burke, Cassy Mac Key, etc), and appears to take place in a vaguely American west coast border town. And the reference to film-making inevitably made me think of Hollywood, and for some reason of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard in particular. And yet the frequent use of the word 'pissotière' (site of two murders and one suicide) resolutely returns us to France.

There's a sense of immediacy that adds to the raciness of the story, underlined by the use of the present tense. There are also delightfully-expressed touches of pessimism virtually throughout: of San Rosa (where the novel is set): 'if it weren't for the town center like a poisoned wound, San Rosa could be a paradise'; and (with surely a hint of Beckett?) of Willie's soon-to-be-abandoned book: 'he doesn't see any way of making sense of life other than by bearing witness to what no one wants to know'. (My translations.)

Nevermore begins improbably with Cassy casually meeting Willie and towing his broken-down jalopy into town in her new Pontiac, and ends with their disappearance after viewing the bones of a whale in a grotto. Only no one knows where they've gone to, and by the state of most people's memories (memory being a central theme) they'll no doubt soon be forgotten. Intentionally.

Links to my other Marie Redonnet posts:

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Marie Redonnet: Rose Mélie Rose | Rose Mellie Rose
Marie Redonnet: Seaside
Marie Redonnet: Tir et Lir
Marie Redonnet: Mobie-Diq

Marie Redonnet: Rose Mélie Rose | Rose Mellie Rose (1987)

Marie Redonnet's Rose Mélie Rose (very oddly, but then very Englishly so what do you expect?) translated as Rose Mellie Rose closes Redonnet's trilogy which begins with Splendid Hôtel (1886) and continues with Forever Valley (1887). 

Post-Beckett, I find it impossible to believe that all Minuit writers (who have by at least one critic been labelled Les enfants du Minuit (after Salmon Rushdie's groundbreaking Midnight's Children) haven't to some extent been influenced by Samuel Beckett.

Redonnet's Rose Mélie Rose is manifestly minimalist, and manifestly (as perhaps most if not all of her works) concerned with decay, although there's hope, and hope which transcends the minimal hope (a few flowering leaves, for example) in Samuel Beckett's work.

Even the title Rose Mélie Rose suggests rebirth, revival, or the beginning of the recycling of life. And names are significant: Rose is the woman who found Mélie in a cave and brought her up, Mélie is the twelve-year-old who goes from L'Ermitage to Oat after Rose's death, to go to Nem's house (where Rose lived and another Rose works) and then meets another Mélie, who speaks of Rose, but which Rose?

Puberty is significant: in Seaside, the loss of virginity is a matter of course, as it is in Rose Mélie Rose, where Mélie just accepts (and even appears to enjoy) the mingling of menstrual and hymenal blood on the passenger seat in the driver's lorry.

But this is obviously abuse, no matter how old Mélie may appear to be, although she doesn't experience it as such. Abuse too is Pim taking Mélie into the women's toilet and serially sexually abusing her, even if she enjoys it. What is the reader expected to understand by Mélie going into the cave where she herself was born, then giving birth to a child (named Rose of course) and leaving her there?

Links to my other Marie Redonnet posts:

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Marie Redonnet: Seaside
Marie Redonnet: Nevermore
Marie Redonnet: Tir et Lir
Marie Redonnet: Mobie-Diq

Marie Redonnet: Seaside (1992)

This is my first Marie Redonnet, and certainly won't be my last, although it's disorienting at first. This is a kind of play that reads more like a novel, but Googling around I find that her first three novels, which seem to be a trilogy of sorts – Splendid Hôtel (1986), Forever Valley (1987) and Rose Mélie Rose (1987) – share some of the characteristics of this book. An article of the time in Libération was titled 'Fin de partie', so I'm glad I'm (far from?) the only one to think Redonnet's work recalls Samuel Beckett's. But the pessimism – and perhaps therefore necessarily the humour – is more subdued than in Beckett.

Onie is about thirty, just passed her driving test and bought a new car, although she gets lost and her car engine is enveloped in smoke. Onie has been a dancing partner to the quite well-known Endel, until a fall from a ladder ended her career. Uncle, when he died, left Seaside Hôtel on the island of the same name to Endel, who as a kind of consolation has given the hotel to his former partner Onie, who ends up asking Lolie for help.

Lolie (who bears little resemblance to Nabokov's Lolita) has lived all her life in a bungalow which used to take in paying guests, but which now (unlike before) doesn't seem to get anyone in broken-down cars, people forced by circumstances to stay the night, abandoning their worthless heaps. So she just exists there with her very old grandmother, can read and write so doesn't have to go to school, but is missing human contact: her grandmother sleeps increasingly during the day, and the 'husband of [her] mother' (so her step-father?) is becoming increasingly absent, maybe even (the reader might imagine) drowned.

So Lolie welcomes Onie as a possible very rare guest, and Onie begins to teach her to dance. A 'young man' of about twenty appears on a motor-bike, having also lost his way. He wanted to film Seaside Hôtel, which was very popular during the silent movie era, but says now all that's left is the façade, the rest has crumbled away. And of Onie's hopes for its revival, there is obviously nothing left.

After he dances with Lolie (who does it with a different style to Onie, and who has recently begun menstruating) they disappear inside the bungalow. Early next morning Onie has buried Grandmother, whom they recognised had died the night before, and Lolie tells her that she had sex with the young man, who left soon after, and mentions a different kind of blood, but still naturally spilled.

Unable to fulfill her wishes, Onie drifts off on a small boat and Lolie and the grandfather (who isn't really the grandfather, but who cares?) push the new car with the bust engine down to the boathouse where the grandfather lives with other (much older) abandoned cars and who also dies shortly afterwards: that final push of the car has caused heart failure. And Lolie hitchhikes off (she hopes) to take more official, more different, dancing lessons: she's still a minor so can't officially run the four rooms in the bungalow, but she will return and give much more satisfaction – again, of a different (and expensive) kind, of course – to her paying guests. The new name of the bungalow will of course be 'Seaside Hôtel'.

Links to my other Marie Redonnet posts:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Marie Redonnet: Rose Mélie Rose | Mellie Rose
Marie Redonnet: Nevermore
Marie Redonnet: Tir et Lir
Marie Redonnet: Mobie-Diq