Any French readers? Herve Bazin?

[TheGander]

For done reason I’d always been disdainful of the idea of Bazin probably thinking he was out of date and irrelevant, but I’m reading my way through his books, especially the portraits of family life ( Madame ex, l’ecole des pêres, le Matrimoine) and really enjoying them. Anyone else?

I must admit I've never heard of him, but based on your recommendation just looked him up and his books do sound interesting... I'm going to give them a whirl! Thank you!

I'm the same as Beachtastic. Never heard of him but I think I would like to read him.
Thanks TheGander! Will put him on my TBR pile.

Vipère au poing. It's fiction but based on his own childhood. Two films also made of the book (one early 70s, one early 00s), both worth a watch.

I just looked it up. It has a Wiki page!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viper_in_the_Fist

...and is £3.49 on Kindle 😍

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vip%C3%A8re-poing-Cahiers-Rouges-French-ebook/dp/B0068Q3SZ4/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1JYUT3J4D8ASO&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.6GcWa-uTDQhTmfRGmSiWoJAkfCWUVbq76roV4GD-x7vz4tQcvT5XcWJsdyPlQPVYyGK1MD1YxS6YzKmXxsvywQkBHtKo8Aza_9hrXGJtZtrLFW7igD3wzHsu7TooRsDRiz8s_nWLW4iDZ7-MTU-ZFzBjhv9h0EBoI0te8z4x-pwyjodqimoVDYcF8stm4KwgqNihkz4pvnd-W3sYP83IZOpDxjJ59cKH3w7HvFnxbIE.naMTmHxO33bMwf_lzeY9HwWLAqS2I-k1HLHgloBiGnA&dib_tag=se&keywords=vipere+au+poing&qid=1756643042&sprefix=vipere+au+poing%2Caps%2C107&sr=8-1

Vipère au poing is really good and the second film with Catherine Frot is a favourite of mine! It's one of the first books that I enjoyed reading in French!

Glad to have inspired you! He can come across a little as “ entitled mid century Frenchman “ but there’s an honesty and lack of self consciousness which I think some modern male writers would struggle to equal. And TBH, the world is so beastly ATM that I gave enjoyed finding refuge in the 60s and 70s.

Why would you think a writer is out of date and irrelevant? Just because not every single one of his views and attitudes matches those of a 21st-century Guardian-reader that doesn't mean he isn't worth reading or has nothing to say. Homer regards sex slavery as normal. But The Illiad and the Odyssey are still great works of literature. You can read and admire them without endorsing slavery!! There are plenty of things in contemporary fiction that will shock and disgust readers in the 22nd century. I suspect people 100 years from now will regard anyone who ate meat as a disgusting monster. They may refuse to read Sally Rooney or Ian McEwan because their their characters eat sausages and burgers.

Whoa! I’m not disagreeing with you. I wasn’t insisting that he be woke. I guess I thought ( obviously wrongly) he wouldn’t be relatable or engaging. His attitudes to his wife in le Matrimoine would certainly not go down well on Mumsnet ( for example his disappointment at her getting crows feet at 30 after she’d borne him 4 kids, swiftly followed by an affair with said wife’s 20 year old cousin).

He looks very interesting, will definitely look him up. I have never heard of him until now

Im also having a bit of nostalgia kick, and reading slightly older authors.

The Wiki article has this:

Viper in the Fist, while short, is a vitriolic indictment of early 20th century French rural bourgeois society. Bazin's hatred for this social milieu is obvious. He depicts a family where hypocrisy is rampant and where observance of Catholic rituals is far more important than virtues like love or compassion. While most portraits of common people seem good-hearted, depictions of the bourgeoisie and the ecclesiastical world are generally despicable. The various priests as educators collaborate with the narrator's mother's cruel follies and betray their lack of virtue with venal acts such as fornication with young women.

The universe that Bazin depicts — rural bourgeois rentiers — is slowly dying, but the characters do not seem to recognize this. They consider themselves the salt of the earth, replacing the former nobility, who failed in keeping France on a path they consider worthy. Like the nobility, they despise commerce. They have lofty opinions of themselves, yet their lives are mostly ruined. They cease to support the monarchist Action Française only because the Pope requested it, not because they themselves judged that it was repugnant.

Well, I'm looking forward to reading it! Like you, I'm taking refuge from the modern world by immersing myself in older books 🌞

I’ll be reading it too 😊.

I read Vipère au poing last year, and did find the misogyny in it hard to stomach. It effectively put me off wanting to read anything else he wrote. I don't remember all the details, but the protagonist's hatred of his mother (which is arguably justified) extends to other women as well: as he grows up, he treats another young woman violently, purely as a sexual object. Here's the review I wrote at the time on the 50-Bookers thread:

This autobiographical novel from 1948 (a French classic, apparently) is a coming-of-age story about a young boy in rural France who has a horribly abusive mother. Her sons nickname her Folcoche, which is a slang term for a sow who gives birth and devours her own piglets. The mother is also the metaphorical viper of the title. The story is vivid, packed with literary references, and has moments of irony and dark humour. However, the mother is so unmitigatedly evil that I found the book difficult to read. I have a lot of sympathy for the protagonist, but the author views gender through a lens that is very much of his time.

As I recall though, the protagonist's hatred of women is matched by his hatred of Catholic priests!

It was a horrific story of childhood abuse and not an easy read. His other novels sound less harrowing and more accessible based on what you say, @TheGander .

Thanks Cassandre I think that’s what I also experience. Hard to know what is Herve Bazin’s own views of women and what is about the protagonist only, but as it’s known to be largely autobiographical one has to assume he had a complicated attitude to women at the very least. As you mention there is also an uncomfortable class based element. In Le Matrimoine he is having an affair with a woman of a lower class whom he would never entertain as a marriage partner ( although he enjoys the sex) and his wife is a virgin on their wedding day. He drops his lover after he marries although in a Trump like way he gives marks to both women and is gratified to see a few years later that she hasn’t aged well and his wife’s score now outstrips hers. So there are definite misogynistic tropes. However, I do appreciate the sociological insights into post war France, which seems so different from today’s incarnation, although I believe there are still echoes of the old country if you know where to look. His writing style is also easy to get into.

Frankly, he sounds quite tame in comparison with Michel Houellebque, one of whose tomes I once made the mistake of reading!

To be honest, I'm big enough and old enough to face up to honest accounts of misogyny. Know thine enemy and all that. It makes it easier to address it when you encounter it in real life IME.

True how could I have forgotten Houellebecq. I’m going to stick my neck out and say I quite like his bracing honesty. He’s obviously a bit of an oddball but he describes his experiences truthfully.

I read Atomised, ages ago, and I just found it profoundly depressing and awful.

I must admit that I have a copy of his latest novel Anéantir, having read lots of intriguing reviews of it. It's the book of an older man than the one who wrote Atomised, and I'm always willing to keep an open mind.

I read l’extension du domaine de la lutte where he outlines ( amongst others) the Darwinian nature of the dating scene from the point of view of a beta male.

Ah, the comparison between Bazin and Houllebecq makes sense! They're both provocateurs I would say. They're out to get a reaction.

And they both make no secret of their misogynistic views. I use the word misogynistic advisedly, because I think sexism can sometimes be unintentional or unconscious, whereas misogyny is when someone is explicit in declaring their negative views of women.

I do shudder to think that Vipère au poing was regularly taught in French secondary schools in the past. I'm all for controversial books being taught in schools, but how you teach them matters, and I'm not sure many teachers of the time would have been keen on a feminist lens.

We tend to think of the cultures of the Western European nations as being very similar but I think there are notable differences, including attitudes towards women, and indeed between the sexes generally.

I'm not saying that the Gisèle Picoult case could not have happened here, but the difference can be observed in the way the law is worded and what sentences are available to punish men who abuse women. It emerged in that case that the sanctions for such abuses were rather lighter in France than here.

On the positive side I think many French people were horrified to learn this and that reflects a change in attitude over the last few decades.

In any event, I think this shows why it is valuable to read books from other cultures - to learn and understand these differences.

My mum was a (British) student in France in the early 60s and she says attitudes were definitely more conservative in France then. I suspect that when he wrote Vipere au poing he may not have been thought of as particularly misogynistic but by the 80s he was under suspicion. Attitudes had obviously moved on, plus he had a larger body of work by then and the rather problematic depictions of women and man/ woman relationships were adding up.
The Gisele Pelicot case was interesting. I’d hesitate to say attitudes to women are more old fashioned and there’s more tolerance of male sexual coercion and violence- that awful behaviour could easily be happening here. I think maybe the difference has been a reluctance in France to face up to and talk about sexual abuse until recently.

I was a student teacher in France in the 1970s, and it was a very weird place. I think there's definitely a cultural tendency to view all sex as "good" whether the woman wants it or not. I had some very grim experiences while there, and the school staff just shrugged. This is echoed by the local mayor's comments on Gisele Pelicot ("What's the fuss? She was asleep and no one died") 😳

They invented the term "chauvinism" after all!

Also, I think French literature has always revelled in cruelty of all kinds, some of it psychological (e.g. Maupassant, with stories like Le Gueux and La Parure). There's also writers like Céline...!

As a further complication there is a difference in the attitude between Metropolitan France and la france profonde, which I think was demonstrated during the Pelicot trial.

The BBC 4 series Sambre, about a decades long pursuit of a serial sex offender, also offers an interesting insight.