There were three sons before the lovely peasant girl Cleofe had came down from the hills to work for the Pellegrina family. She ended up in granddad’s bed.

Buck can’t remember the name of the older son, so he calls him Grumpy. Don Lorenzo, the second, is an abbé, always walks around with his hands in his soutane. The last is the randy grandfather.

When the old goat finally dies, Signora Pellegrina tells the boys to “divide what’s left.” Then she says: “The clothes I have on are my own. Don’t grumble if I wear silk.”

Cleofe’s appearance in the house changes everything. She was from Terrina. “The women of Terrina go to bed as God made ’em, naked.”

Our house had no curtains, and the rooms are not dark at night. Don Lorenzo saw her naked, white, white, with her legs long. My grandfather seemed like a monster crouched over her, clamped to her belly, looking into her eyes.

The abbé stood there til the dead came to life, ill augured witness of my mother’s procreation.”

White, white, with her legs long. This is Pound speaking, no? The poet tells us that Enrico Pea reminds him of “Tom” Hardy. You recall Tom Hardy. Strange people from the midlands, with their strange disheveled ways. With Pea, the brothers are locked up in this cold house, and the maid Cleofe is with child, and the abbé Don Lorenzo thinks of her as the Madonna, “with the child at breast as Mary in the desert of Egypt, followed by Herod. Eyes the colour of Macaboy snuff.”

And Buck, telling of his grandfather,

Middle high, live glance, biblical beard like my own, thick hair shining like filed iron. Face bright and rosy, thick mulatto’s lips like a suckling infant’s, he talked of life and death, of Dante, love, early grain crops, manures; half shutting and wide opening his eyes as if fixing an image when he got het up over poetry and things of that sort.

And we wonder, is Pound talking of Buck’s “grandpop?” Or is he talking about Ezra Pound? Pound always did have some quarrel with individuation, between his writings and his world. And himself.

At the start of Moscardino, we have some thoughts on Ezra Pound and Enrico Pea by Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz. She speaks of “the war years,” presumably World War II. There is a quote on the back cover of this volume from one of Pound’s 1941 “radio speeches,” where he speaks with affection of Enrico Pea.

 

Rachewiltz then writes about “Pound’s detention at Saint Elizabeth’s.” She lists Italian writers who came to his defense and wonders why those writers should “care more about the poet’s fate than his compatriots.”

Well, mercy me. Have we forgotten so soon? Pound was stuffed away in St. Elizabeth’s so he wouldn’t have to be hung. His radio talks were made from Rome during the early 1940s on behalf of Benito Mussolini, against Franklin D. Roosevelt, the United States, and the Jews.

These radio speeches were, to put it mildly, a disgrace: emotionally, patriotically, and racially.

Mussolini, after all, had a profound influence on Adolf Hitler, was the inspiration for Nazism. Mussolini was, after Stalin, one of the earliest (and craftiest) crafters of the totalitarian state. The Italians didn’t hang him upside down, on the streets of Milan, in 1945, because he needed a drying-out. Mussolini was a thug, with thuggish ways. He made the Italian railroads run on time, and killed several hundred thousand Italians, Abyssinians, and Austrians, in the process. This was Pound’s hero.

Be that as it may, Moscardino is a lovely book, printed and bound with grace by Archipelago. And Pound here proves, as he did so long ago in his renderings of Riyuku, that he was a far better translator than poet. He takes Enrico Pea’s dark Italian and changes it into lusty Pound-English so that at the funeral of Buck’s grandmother, we get to see — potent vision — “Don Lorenzo’s shoes were laced crooked with twine with mud on the ends of the low knot, and caked round the edge of his soutane, black stockings and silver buckles. He felt the water dripping down his sides from his hair, his face wet with rain and tears.”

The hole swallowed back the loose earth. It looks as if yeast were swelling it up; puffing it over the edges of a garden flowered with paper, cotton, and wire.

 

“Pea (Enrico) ” appears in Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos LXXX as the man who fitted the mahogany counters in the Bank of Egypt in Alexandria. When Pea first met E.P. in Italy in 1941, he was quizzed intensely about “the precise extent to which the fellaheen were exploited by the Jews, the Greeks, and the English intruders. ” Pound was already broadcasting on Rome Radio against the Allies and “the Jews” a fact quietly elided by the prefatory matter here but in October that year he was also broadcasting in typically God-on-a-soapbox support of Pea: “This is just announcin’ that Italy has a writer, and it is some time since I told anybody that ANY country on earth had a writer. ”

Unsurprisingly, Pea’s reputation abroad was not much boosted, and Pound’s contemporaneous translation of Moscardino, the first novella in a tetralogy, did not appear until 1955. This finely-printed new edition attests that Pound’s literary judgement had not gone as awry as his politics: Pea is undoubtedly “a writer” of unusual quality. The radio speech’s comparison with “Tom Hardy,” though, is misleading: both writers deal in peasant melodrama, but Pea’s narrative voice is ironically compressed, quite unlike Hardy’s loquacious local historian. Lyrical vignettes and sentences wrought with Flaubertian realism “Prolix by nature, knobby of nose he shaved his dry face daily” are rendered in a musically enriched English prose which only occasionally clots, or stumbles on Pound’s hammy Americanization of Pea’s dialect phrases.

The story [is] a Shakespearean tale of a husband’s violent jealousy redeemed in later life by paternal affection moves from the mythological passions of an older generation (painted, admittedly, with streaks of Hardyesque hellish red) to the more life-sized childhood of the eponymous narrator. Pound translates this domestic tragicomedy with the sympathetic intensity and tenderness of attention that would characterize the poetry written after his imprisonment and mental breakdown at Pisa four years later. His daughter, Mary de Rachewitz, laments in her preface that Pound’s “humility and gentleness, ” “fun” and “efficiency” in his family life have been overshadowed by his imperious public persona; indirectly, all those qualities are evident in this translation.

Elisabeth Rynell, To Mervas. Translated by Victoria Häggblom. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2010. Pp. 192, $15.00 pb.

Elisabeth Rynell’s newest book was a finalist for the August Strindberg Prize and is her first novel to appear in English. Translated from the Swedish by Victoria Häggblom, To Mervas follows a pair of previous prose works–A Tale of Loka and Hohaj–as well as the poetry volumes Night Conversations, Sorrow Winged Angels, and Desert Wanderer.

To Mervas concerns itself with Marta, a middle-aged woman living alone in the city who is as far-removed from her family and friends as she is from her own crippling past. The book opens with Marta receiving word from Kosti, her long-lost lover, and the message is almost as mysterious as it is brief. Stirred by his sudden interruption, Marta decides to journey to Mervas in search of Kosti, but first she must overcome a measure of stasis in order to come to terms with the more horrific aspects of her personal history. Unfortunately for Marta, she is not merely a victim: she has acted at least as much as she has been acted upon, though what might be bad news for her is a boon for the psychology of her character. This allows Rynell to skirt the specter of melodrama as her narrative technique and use of language serve to create a timeless world that epitomizes the mystery inherent in good storytelling.

Considering her lyrical prowess, it’s fitting that Rynell introduces To Mervas with an eloquent epigram in three stanzas. “Life must be a story,” she begins, “or else it will crush you.” And though such a sweeping declaration could easily be misconstrued by a weary reading public, these opening sentiments shine brightly because of the graceful nature of the tale that follows. At least as significant, however, is the way the epigram springs to life in the following stanza and provides an adequate denouement in the third: “I’ve been thinking that just like a fire, a story too has its place, its hearth. From there it rises and burns. Devours its tale.” The stanzas perhaps work best as a brief epilogue, since their success hinges on the elliptical nature of the observations. But the lines also foreshadow an interesting technical decision as author and character will at times crowd the narrative for control over the tale.

The truth is that the words from the epigrams seem to originate in Marta since her search for identity directs the course of the plot–and the inclusion of a speaker in stanza two makes its own rhetorical case. But more than this, the language here is Marta’s language, just as the novel represents Marta’s story. Though the action concerns a fairly straightforward journey, the structure is not simplistic; Rynell switches between an epistolary first-person point of view–in the form of Marta’s diary–and a limited third-person that allows her to comment from beyond the margins. A series of flashbacks allows readers to witness Marta’s tortured childhood, concentrating chiefly on an abusive father who forces himself upon her mother in full view of his children. When Marta herself becomes a parent after a one-night stand, Rynell does not shy away from exploring Marta’s flaws, a strategy that reminds us that fictional lives are not always meant to brighten the corners of every room. Marta leaves for Mervas in a rickety, recently purchased automobile, an act that registers enormously as she must first give up her flat and reflect on the death of her severely handicapped son. Though his presence defined Marta as a sort of modern-day Hester Prynne, his death destroys her, and the fact that she is responsible creates an unflattering parental parallel. Her memories are presented in detail but without much commentary or judgment, and this analytical approach is as startling as it is lucid: Marta recounts her life with the same unwavering commitment to penance that one might find in a lesser saint–but one, like Augustine, that best understands sin from experience.

Such talk of course returns us to the danger of melodrama, and since Marta does in fact achieve a measure of success in her battle with the past, it’s significant that Rynell keeps her protagonist from giving over to histrionics. Marta sees the diary as a process of “assembling, comparing, sorting, and memorizing” her thoughts, as she and Kosti worked previously on archaeological excavations; but the metaphor here needs to be more than an act of thematic convenience, and this is where Rynell’s innovative gambles pay off.

The shift in point of view doesn’t disrupt continuity nearly as much as it should. The novel is divided into four sections which are split equally between the first-person diary entries and the limited third-person. Stylistically, the prose doesn’t change much when we leave Marta’s perspective, as Rynell continues to write in the same odd, despairing, and unhappily comic manner that she uses for Marta’s interior accounts. Marta sees things plainly, if not simply; she exhibits the artifacts of her past as if she is curator of a museum, thus avoiding the confessional tendencies common to the epistolary form. Instead, the prose is interesting if not exactly lucid, full of wonderfully awkward phrases and descriptions that are easier to comprehend than to see:

The world is empty, I thought as I walked along. Just that: the world is empty. Here, on these flayed, meat-colored shores, it becomes visible; here it becomes true. The world is empty. The words ran through me repeatedly, although I didn’t quite understand them. I didn’t even agree.

Since the novel is in translation, credit should be given to Häggblom for her wonderful invention of Marta in English, since Rynell surely created a perfectly forlorn version in her native tongue. Nonetheless, I can only assume that both writers do a remarkable job mastering the nuance of incantation which is always capable of holding us in a spell. Since Rynell is also an accomplished poet, it isn’t surprising that To Mervas at times reads like a novel in verse, a fluctuating meditation on the nature of life and living, a wonderfully complex metaphor for trying and failing and trying again.

 

Brian Maxwell
University of North Dakota

To Mervas
Elisabeth Rynell
trans. from the Swedish by Victoria Häggblom
Archipelago (Consortium, dist.),
$15 paper (192p)
ISBN 978-0-9819873-7-8
A wrenching tale by Swedish novelist and poet Rynell traces a woman’s personal journey through shame and violence. Out of the blue, Marta receives a troubling note from an ex-lover, Kosti, whom she has tried to forget for more than 20 years and who now inexplicably summons her to Mervas, an all but abandoned Nordic mining town. Marta, nearing 50, with a long-suppressed background of growing up under an intensely abusive father, has recently come to peace with the death of her teenage son, whose severe physical and mental handicaps had absorbed her life. Not insignificantly, Marta and Kosti broke up because she wanted to have kids, and he didn’t, and so she got pregnant by someone else. The novel cuts to devastating flashbacks and flash forwards as Marta travels to Mervas, while a tender interlude with an elderly couple challenges Marta to stop hiding from her life. Rynell proves a fearless writer in this emotionally relentless work and finds a lyrical grace in Marta’s self-awareness.

Yalo, written by Elias Khoury and published by Archipelago Books, takes place in war-torn Beirut of the 1980’s where the main character (Yalo) is accused of rape and is imprisoned and tortured. Forced to write his confession, he starts to sort through his twisted memories of childhood, life as a soldier, and the crimes he did or did not commit.

 

His confusing and painful life distorts his reality, and seeing through his eyes, the reader must sort out truth from delusion. I found myself initially disliking Yalo, then beginning to sympathize with him. Highly psychological, the story of Yalo explores the making of a social deviant and the price of growing up surrounded by war and violence. I’ll have to admit Yalo was a difficult read for me – not because of the writing style, which is superior in its execution of the craft, but because of the dark and disturbing subject matter. It wasn’t written to make you comfortable, and there is no sugar coating here. If you want to delve into the psychological effects of war, and if you wonder what goes through the mind of a tormented soul whose perception of reality has been greatly altered, you will find much worth and fascination in Yalo.

 

The ennoblement of the everyday is the subject of The Waitress Was New, Dominique Fabre’s first book to be translated into English. Working on a small canvas, Fabre paints an intimate portrait of Pierre, the trustworthy barman at a floundering café in the northwestern suburbs of Paris. The café’s eventual closure roils the quiet life of Pierre, who is counting down the days until his retirement. In this frank, frothless depiction of unremarkable characters and events, Fabre breathes life into the banality of the suburbs. His short, distilled sentences convey volumes, begging comparison to another lapidary work of café literature, Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Perfectly matching form to setting, Fabre’s story can easily be savored in its entirety during a leisurely afternoon au café.

 

At 54, Pierre wears his age heavily; the suspiring resignation in his voice suggests septuagenarian rather than a middle-aged man. A benign beholder, Pierre takes interest in the lives of his customers, picking up a copy of If This is Man, after noticing one of his regulars reading it. (“He was some guy, that Monsieur Primo Levi,” Pierre muses. “There’s somebody I would have loved to have as a customer.”) The reader attains an easy and comfortable psychological cohabitation with the barman-narrator, who moves fluidly from observations of the world around him to reflections on his own life, which invariably touch on lost love, failing health, and the pathos of aging:

I’m only a barman, and when I forget that, the world around me seems like a bunch of different movies running at the same time. There are romance movies and sad movies, and if you pay enough attention most of their stories start to get all mixed together, till there’s no way you can go on telling them to yourself. It’s like they’re all chasing after each other, and then, just when you’re ready to decide how they end, you have to serve two beers and wipe down the counter again, and now and then leave the bar with butterflies in your stomach to go hear the results of a blood test of chest x-ray, and then it’s to hell with the film, and good riddance.

 

Fabre hits on something here, for there is indeed a cinéma-vérité to the café: observing and acting are as integral to its experience as eating and drinking. With this cinematic metaphor, Fabre modernizes Balzac’s aphorism “the counter of a café is the parliament of the people,” stressing the visual over the oratory.

 

A slender book, The Waitress Was New nestles itself cozily into a web of intertextuality. Throughout the story Pierre refers to himself as “Pierrot, my friend” an allusion to Raymond Queneau’s Pierrot, mon ami and to the stock character from commedia dell’arte: Pierrot the loyal, hard-working servant; Pierrot the sad, lovelorn clown. Pierre is a subdued, real-life variation of this archetype — not a lachrymose fool but a wistful barman whose unvarnished conversation is a simple pleasure.

Losing one’s livlihood is never easy. The Waitress Was New follows Pierre as the cafe that employed him as a bartender for most of his life suddenly closes. Over the next three days he must acclimate himself to the shock and figure out what to do. A deft examination of the human psyche, excellently translated from the original French by Jordan Stump, The Waitress Was New is a great pick for any seeking foreign fiction.

“The Mire of Melancholia”

 

Dominique Fabre’s novella The Waitress Was New, his first book to be translated from French into English, is short enough to read in one sitting. The novella follows narrator and protagonist Pierre for a few days, offering a snapshot of his life. We read his stream of consciousness, which relates his daily routine at Le Cercle, a café just outside Paris.

 

In The Waitress Was New, Fabre takes on a common trope: the sympathetic barman. We’ve all read works before with characters like Pierre, aging men who have spent their lives behind the counter, serving drinks and listening to the problems of strangers. Too often, Fabre sinks into such stereotypes, and Pierre dissolves into the bartender mold. Most of the café scenes, in fact, are trite. In his narration, Pierre waxes sentimental on his role as listener, yet rarely relates the conversations he has or the stories customers tell him, though such details would better engage readers. His sparse dialogue with other Le Cercle employees is shallow and awkwardly written.

 

But surrounding Pierre’s descriptions of coworkers and customers are his reflections on the past and the future. These reflections make up the core of the novella; they are the driving force in Pierre’s life. We learn that he had an adoptive mother who died young; that he dreamed of being “a fireman, an explorer, a soldier, and a soccer player, a long way from Le Cercle, the bright sky I had inside me”; that he’s gone through detox treatments. Most of all, we learn about the women in his life: the past girlfriends and crushes and fascinations; the women he may have loved but was too afraid to settle down with; relationships he didn’t make the effort to keep up. Now 56, Pierre is troubled by the thought that love has passed him by: “Me, nothing, no love in sight. Maybe that was all over and done with now.”

 

Pierre addresses much of his narration to “Pierrot, my friend.” In the comic performance traditions of France and Italy, Pierrot is another stock character, a melancholy fool, customarily portrayed as a naïve clown whose heart is broken by his unfaithful lover. Pierre’s affinity for Pierrot makes them alter egos haunted by love.

 

Pierre is also haunted by a recurring nightmare: “Le Cercle was closed, and no one had thought to unlock the door for me…. Inside I could see more and more dead leaves all over the big gray and white floor tiles. I knocked on the glass door and fumbled with the key, but all around it seemed like people were avoiding me.” Pierre dreads losing his job and being forgotten. He catches a glimpse of his aging face in the mirror and reflects, “all of a sudden I was afraid. I might not be up to this job for much longer, and then how could I live?” Later, “When I die I’ll be replaced just like that.”

 

Pierre is stuck in the mire of melancholia. Fabre’s prose is full of comma splices and run-on sentences, stylistic elements that contribute to the lethargic tone. Troubled by his past, terrified of his future, alternately drawn to and bored by his job, Pierre struggles to find something to live for. Fabre subverts our expectations of stock-barman Pierre, taking us beyond his bar and into his psyche, analyzing him the way he analyzes his customers. Yet The Waitress Was New never rises beyond its protagonist’s loneliness and isolation. The relationships Pierre does have are superficial at best; his fullest conversations are with his dead mother. At the café, his boss is distant and the boss’s wife, to whom Pierre serves as confidante and comforter, treats him more like a barman than a friend, an ear she can pour her troubles into. Even Pierre’s “regulars” are strangers: “I don’t really know them but I’ve been serving them day after day for a good thirty years.”

 

One of the regulars at Le Cercle is a young man in black who always buries himself in a book. Pierre is fascinated by him: “I saw him almost every day. All in all, he seemed like a kid who needed a blowjob and then a Mars bar, or maybe even both at the same time. What will you have done with your youth, my lad?” Pierre philosophizes about the future of the young man, perhaps to recover his own lost youth. He imagines advising him that a life spent “reading hundreds of books in a bunch of different bars” might be the best life the young man could choose for himself. But as with all of the relationships in Pierre’s life, this one is mostly in his head: Though he composes whole orations of advice, he rarely talks with the young man at all.

 

Pierre is frustrating: He worries about the meaning of life but makes no effort to figure it out. Unhappy yet intractable as he is, it’s difficult to sympathize with him. At the end of the novella, Fabre seems to offer him a chance at redemption. As Pierre at last recognizes, “I wasn’t dead yet.” We want to believe there’s hope for him.

AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW
Volume 29, Number 5
July/August 2008

Another Round
Steven G. Kellman

 

The Waitress Was New
Dominique Fabre
Translated by Jordan Stump
Archipelago Books
https://archipelagobooks.org
120 pages; cloth, $15.00

 

To a playwright, all the world’s a stage. But a barman’s universe is colored zinc. Pierre, who has been serving drinks since he was nineteen, looks at life through a shot glass darkly. His current place of employment, a bistro called Le Cercle, is located just across from the bustling Asnières train station in northwest Paris. A large lunchtime crowd keeps Pierre much too busy to spend time at the window gazing at the passing scene, even if he were inclined, and he is not. “I don’t look outside too much,” he explains, “because everything that matters to me in life always ends up sitting down at my bar.”

 

In The Waitress Was New, Dominique Fabre seats his reader at Le Cercle in order to attend to the interior monologue of its amiable but unexceptional dispenser of libations. A short, spare narrative in the tradition of the French récit, it is the first of Fabre’s nine works of fiction to be translated into English. The story begins with the arrival at Le Cercle of a new waitress, Madeleine, to fill in for Sabrina, who has been out with the flu. Without a waitress, the remaining staff at Le Cercle—Pierre; Amédée, the Senegalese cook; Henri, the boss; and Isabelle, his wife—have been under strain. The newcomer Madeleine appears to be competent, but when Henri walks out the door and disappears for the rest of the week, it provokes a personal and professional crisis for those who keep Le Cercle running. Isabelle, who lives with her husband in an apartment above the café, is distraught at the thought that Henri has evidently abandoned her again for another sexual fling. Pierre, who opens the doors in the morning and locks up at night, mopping down counters to start and end each day, is forced to consider his own situation.

 

For eight years, his life has been defined by the daily routines of squaring Le Cercle. It is he who takes charge of purchasing supplies and coaxing payments on overdue bills. Maintaining balance amid the boisterous ebb and flow of orders from thirsty strangers has provided Pierre with an identity, not just a vocation: “I’m just a barman, and the longer I stay on the more life goes by in the best possible way,” he explains. “So there we are.” Where he is now, however, following the disappearance of his boss, is at loose ends, a difficult position for a loyal employee who takes pride in emptying the establishment’s ashtrays and scrubbing out the coffee machine. He is burdened by dreams of dead leaves littering his immaculate café. At fifty-six, Pierre is not quite eligible for a full government pension but can no longer count on spending his days wiping the table tops clean.

 

Fabre’s novella covers three days, and despite its title, which is also the book’s opening sentence, the new waitress at Le Cercle is not its principal figure. Madeleine’s entrance disrupts the café’s reassuring rhythms, but as soon as she settles into the patterns of her job, she recedes into the margins of the story, which belongs to Pierre. The waitress was new, the boss was missing, his wife was despondent, and the cook was incensed, but the barman tries to keep things working. According to Pierre’s stringent ethic of service: “You really are a useful thing in other people’s lives when you’re a barman. The customers don’t realize it outright, of course, but when all’s said and done, in good times and bad, there’s always a bar in their lives, and a barman, a bit wizened but very professional, to serve them whatever they want.” Le Cercle attracts regulars, some of whom even address Pierre by name, but he never establishes anything but a functional relationship with anyone except Roger, a barman at another bistro; however, their custom of sharing a quiet dinner Sunday evenings is threatened by his friend’s preoccupation with a new fiancée.

 

The author’s ambitions are ostensibly modest: to enter into the mundane mind of a solitary middle-aged man who also serves by standing and waiting. Though he occasionally summons up memories of a failed marriage, it has been three years since Pierre’s last romantic attachment, and he now resigns himself to taking meals by himself in restaurants and doing his weekly laundry alone. Like Stevens, the butler who narrates Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), Pierre is a self-effacing minion who ends up riveting the reader’s attention. Yet it is not on account of any glamour, valor, or brilliance that this Willy Loman of apéritifs takes control of the proceedings. Pierre does not claim to be especially articulate, noting that his profession encourages an aptitude for listening rather than speaking: “[L]ike any barman I’m much better with my ears,” he observes, while admitting that he is selective about what he pays attention to: “and then the good thing about your ears is you can decide what to hear.” In Jordan Stump’s clear translation from Fabre’s French, Pierre is forthright without being eloquent. However, the reader who listens carefully will notice that Pierre is a remarkably obtuse analyst of his own condition. “Deep down I’m a relaxed kind of guy, like most of my colleagues in the business, from what I’ve seen,” says this most fastidious of servers. Yet he also admits to weariness: “But I’m also a worn-out kind of guy, as it happens.”

 

Introspection can surely plumb greater depths. The Waitress Was New revels in the banality of the tipple. Nevertheless, Fabre’s considerable achievement is to make something extraordinary out of an ordinary existence, to turn straw into strawberry daiquiri, a stimulating potion. It seems farfetched to compare Fabre’s largely unreflective barman to Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who became the subtle conscience of the Nazi Lagers.However, one of the regulars at Le Cercle is a young man who always dresses in black, orders a beer, and sits by himself absorbed in a book. Pierre favors him, though not enough to learn the fellow’s name, and, spying on his reading, sometimes buys his own copy to read. The most recent literary assignment that he has appropriated from the black-clad customer has been If This Is a Man (1947), Levi’s memoir of surviving Auschwitz. Like Levi at home in Turin, Pierre lives in a third-floor apartment accessible by a wooden staircase. And, without finishing the book, he thinks about its author’s gruesome fate, plunged to his death over his building’s balustrade.

 

However, there are limits to how much the barman chooses to think. In the final sentences of The Waitress Was New, the hour is late, but instead of picking up Levi for bedside reading, he concludes: “I wasn’t really up to reading on a night like tonight.” A man of limited options and imagination, Pierre might as well call it sleep: “Then I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I went to bed.” The reader of Fabre’s enthralling novella is unlikely to turn in for the night before every one of its finely crafted pages has been turned.

 

Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the author of Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (W. W. Norton). He was awarded the National Book Critics Circle’s 2007 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

Ordinary People
Dominique Fabre’s novel The Waitress Was New
By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

 

Not much happens in Dominique Fabre’s novel The Waitress Was New (Archipelago: 118 pp., $15 paper). But then, that’s entirely the point. Narrated by Pierre, a middle-aged Paris barman, the book offers a slice-of-the-unexamined-life, a glimpse into the quotidian.

 

It’s not that Fabre’s characters are unimportant, just that they tend to go unnoticed; the people we see on the bus, in the corner store or on the sidewalk — quick impressions that drift almost imperceptibly across the eye. “The office workers get off at the station to take their train,” Pierre observes, “the others go on to the warehouses and the last few factories a little further along, we’re all together, just a little tired. . . . And then no, after all, you catch a glance, a face, and things are much better than you think.”

 

Fabre’s prose (as translated by Jordan Stump) is spare and impressionistic, elegant yet matter-of-fact. The perfect vehicle for a narrator to whom the world “seems like a bunch of different movies running at the same time. There are romance movies and sad movies, and if you pay attention most of their stories start to get all mixed together, till there’s no way you can go on telling them to yourself.”

 

Pierre’s own life is more a matter of small steps, of putting one foot in front of the other, even as he understands exactly where that leads. “There couldn’t have been more than ten of us in that last car,” he reflects one evening on the Metro, “and I felt like we were all rushing together toward a big, not completely black hole, but I seemed to be the only one who knew.” Here, we have the essence of Fabre’s vision — resigned but not despairing, gently, if uneasily, reconciled with fate. Vivid, haunting, deeply moving, this is fiction that has much to tell us about the profundity of daily life.

 

david.ulin@latimes.com David L. Ulin is Book editor of the Los Angeles Times.