I read this book, along with Madame Bovary, in anticipation of a trip to France that I took. A couple of the places that I ended up going are fairly prominent in the narrative (Paris and Strasbourg), but, looking back, it probably wasn’t the best book to read for travel prep, but it might be one of the best books I’ve ever read. In contrast to Madame Bovary, this novel, written in 1970, feels modern in that it shares a certain messiness that I feel a lot of modern books like to lean into. It also seems a big more navel gaze-y in that it presents the reader with such a complex web of meaning that it’s easier to say that the author probably doesn’t have one clean message here. In fact, in almost all respects I would say this is one of the least clean books I’ve read. It reads most similarly to a dirty wound that’s festered for several days, but continues to bleed, puss, and discharge grime, which is subsequently reintroduced back into the gore. The book is of course about an unlikely hero named Abel Tiffauges who is, in addition to his troubled childhood, sudo-pedaphilic tendencies (more about this later), and bent for the esoteric, thrust into the early french-german conflicts of WWII. Tiffauges is a problem for the reader by page 1, in which begins the first section of the book, which is relayed in a journalistic style. Tiffauges relays in his journal his current humble existence as a mechanic, his odd relationship with a schoolmate who ends up dying and engraving in Tiffauges a sense of occult purpose, and his “phoric” principle which leads Tiffauges to admire the prepubescent naivety and drives him to get closer to the children of the Paris suburb. Much of this twisted mind’s inner dialogue is delivered with some amount of humor and self acknowledgement by the author, but it remains a give scenario up until the end of this first section which finds Tiffauges charged with the rape of a schoolgirl, something which the reader can easily interpret valid charge, but one which Tiffauges never admits to doing in his journal, so we’re left to determine whether he’s guilty on our own.
After these charges, Tiffauges finds himself in the crosshairs of history. The French of gearing up to weather the beginning rumblings of WW2 and Tiffauges is sent to the frontier as a concession of his unfavorable position in the rape trial. He finds himself tending pigeons, his battalion is overrun, he’s thrown in a POW camp. The rest of the book finds Tiffauges in Germany and Austria rising through the nazi ranks. This portion of the book is really beautiful and there’s much too it that it would be exhausting to go through every narrative detail, but I’ll mention the final twist at the end. Tiffauges finds himself in a commanding position at a school for hitler youth, but one day he finds a jewish child collapsed in the snow outside the castle he’s stayed at. He nurses the child back to health and, in the end, finishes the war by escaping the Russians with the jewish boy on his back. I’m sure if someone read through what I’ve just written they might be confused just by the nature of the harsh contradictions here, and this is where much of the books lives. Tiffauges is by most all measures an awful person and has a sick mind, but this awful person is still a person, on display in all his most vulnerable angles here. Despite these damning flaws, he becomes somewhat of a hero, a commentary on the nature of war, individuals, and nature as a whole.
There’s a lot to write here, but two things that I’d like to touch on are the style and the treatment of nature. As mentioned, the first portion of the book is done in a journalistic style. From there it moves to a 3rd person narration of the war, then to a synthesis of both, towards the end. The prose is always fairly baroque, which works to establish Tiffauges intelligence and mania during the sections in the journal and works to make the page shimmer with beautiful descriptions and images through the narrated portions. There is some meaning to unpack here, but to me the primary purpose here is to make the book enjoyable. The subject matter is more often than not prickly to an extent that might make the average person put down the book with some disgust, but, while I don’t have a weak stomach for these things, I could see even the most squeamish bracing through on part of the prose.
Speaking of beauty, nature in the book is perhaps the main character beyond Tiffauges. To me the author, Michel Tournier, seems a naturalist beyond most other categories. He gives a face to nature which is lively, serene in the face of war, and all encompassing. While the journals don’t give you a sense of nature, once the narration starts, the work seems to open up with possibilities of the natural. Tiffauges relation to pigeons and a blind stag give character to the work Tiffauges inhabits, and the sections where Tiffauges is working at the Nazi hunting lodge create an unlikely bridge between the natural and Hitler’s metaphysical position in the world. Overall, this book surpassed my expectations (while not really meeting them either. I would have liked to learn more about France, though in a book like this one has learned about France in the sense that one has learned about most everything). Highly recommended.