2023-12-02 22:59:59
“In concrete terms, not much happens: a table, a woman, three men and a child drinking apple juice,” the novel’s narrator says laconically, thus pushing his strangely uneventful meandering story a little further towards the abyss. The woman in question named Marion, the self-confident and spectacularly attractive mother of ten-year-old Ida, has just returned from her job in the print shop in the next town to the three-house hamlet in the middle of nowhere, singing loudly in her small car. Marion has reason to be in a good mood: not only has she confidently put her chauvinistic boss in his place, she is also celebrating her fortieth birthday on the day that this novel tells the story.
Her husband Patrice is also sitting at the table, a farmer and cheesemaker in dire straits who, even after ten years of marriage, doesn’t understand what this stunning woman had just “lost with a guy like him”. The other two men in the group are Christophe and Denis, two threateningly devious-looking brothers about whom we actually hardly know anything but suspect the worst. What is clear is that the youngest of their clan, Bègue, the “stutterer”, spent four years in a psychiatric hospital and, shortly before the ghostly gathering at the birthday table, killed the neighbor Christine’s dog and is now threatening her with the bloody knife in his hand.
What is a life worth?
What does all this mean? A legitimate question that must banish anyone who has ever picked up this book. In his twelfth novel – the fifth to be published in German – Laurent Mauvignier masterfully demonstrates that a literary narrative does not need a concrete, comprehensible plot any more than music needs melodies that can be hummed in order to sometimes still or precisely because of it have a spectacular effect. Mauvignier had previously shown himself to be an almost obsessive observer and analyst of interpersonal and social relationships in the story “What is a Life Worth?” about a shoplifting that resulted in death, or in the episodic novel “With Light Luggage” about loneliness in the hopelessly networked present of their dynamics.
Laurent Mauvignier: “Stories of the Night”. Novel. : Image: Matthes & Seitz
In “Stories of the Night” he now takes this world view of psychological microscopy further and translates it into a narrative style that could be described as “slow-motion literature”. Mauvignier’s exuberant sentence structures, which are never overloaded and congenially translated by Claudia Kalscheuer, trace the inner worlds of the characters down to the smallest impulses and their origins, be it emotions, memories or the sounds, colors and smells of the present. From the seemingly sober description of the scenery, the narrative repeatedly shifts into the characters’ conscious processes that float as if in a daydream, thereby creating a claustrophobic immediacy.
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