Brief Thoughts: Zündel’s Exit, Marguerite Duras's The Lover and Maupassant Stories

This post is an example of what I will likely be primarily using this newsletter for. So without any preamble, here are some thoughts on my final reads of the year.

Zündel’s Exit by Markus Werner (Dalkey Archive, translated by Michael Hofmann)

This strange short novel takes the idea that we are all one assault on our comfort and security away from a complete existential collapse to a wild extreme. Konrad Zündel is a respected schoolteacher harboring an arrogant philosophical malaise that has no outlet other than relentlessly criticizing his wife. After a trip is cut short following him losing a tooth in front of horrified bystanders and finding a severed finger in a bathroom, signs of ominous deterioration, Zündel returns home to seemingly discover that his wife is having an affair. Split between righteous indignation and wounded betrayal, Zündel vanishes.

The novel’s narrator is Viktor Busch, a friend of Zündel’s who pieces together the decline and fall of his friend via Zündel’s journals and conjecture based on what he knows about his personality. Lucky for Viktor, Zündel doesn’t spend his escape from his life experiencing the world, but instead jumping between hotels and bars where he writes down his monomaniacal ravings.

Markus Werner is a brilliantly inventive and self-aware writer. Almost from the start we know that Zündel’s suspicions are wrong, highlighting the comedy walking alongside his tragedy. Werner uses the existential crisis setup as a means to explore the consequences of a life of complaisance and lazy entitlement. Zündel sees himself as a writer kept dormant by the obligatory grind of life, simply waiting for a break from his obligations to write the novel, treatise, manifesto, etc. that’s obviously always been in him. But as we see, he has no discipline, focus, or true philosophy, and as his unhappiness consumes him his musings become the ramblings of a man of half-formed principles who never valued the makings of his own life or the loyalty of the people in it. The madness that comes from a self-inflicted wasted life.

The Lover by Marguerite Duras (Pantheon, translated by Barbara Bray)

This novel was weirder than I expected. The central affair isn’t terribly interesting on its own, and Duras understands this and ultimately focuses on its futility and consequences. Set in French Indochina before World War II in a world of hopeless desperation. It is more about the destructive force of family and the power of escape. Most of the characters remain vague ideas. The elder brother infecting everyone he meets with his violence and fatalism; the younger brother peripherally radiating weakness and tragedy; and the titular Chinese lover with his all-consuming passion, even as the unnamed narrator passively allows her family to humiliate him with their racism.

It is the narrator and the mother whose complexities have all of Duras’ attention. The narrator is an adolescent, but she treats her affair with The Lover with an instinctual detachment learned from a premature lifetime of pain through seeing her mother’s decline. The mother was a vibrant beauty until she was crushed by the weight of widowhood and debts. The mother is an amalgamation of all her children, the volatility of the elder brother, the weakness and loyalty of the younger brother, and the world-weary self-preservation of the narrator. But unlike them all, the narrator wants escape.

One of the strongest elements of the book are the parts where the narrator, already committed to her future as a writer, invents and imagines the private lives of the people in her life, especially The Lover. It is her that finds his hidden depths, depths that likely aren’t there at all.

A Parisian Affair & Other Stories by Guy de Maupassant (Penguin Classics, translated by Siân Miles)

Going into finally reading Maupassant, I expected cynicism, cruelty and lust. However, I was not expecting the diversity of his subject matter, his skill at writing from such varying perspectives and, most of all, his compassion. Maupassant is a writer who, admittedly, has been clouded by his legacy for me. Wealthy Flaubert protégé, meets with success with his first published story (“Boule de Suif”) and is widely popular for the majority of his life until he dies at the age of 42, mad and syphilitic. It’s all there, the opulence and debauchery. So of course all of his stories are going to be about aristocratic decadence? Wrong.

Many of his stories are about the wealthy and aristocratic, but just as many are about the struggling provincial lower to middle-classes. Sex and lust are arguably his most common topics, but they are used to explore conflicts between the sexes and the changing sexual mores in rapidly modernizing France. “Boule de Suif” sees characters from every class trapped on a long journey together through France in the midst of the Franco-Prussian war. Self-preservation reigns, and all prove to be cowardly and morally corrupt other than the titular prostitute. “Femme Fatale” is the strongest story of Maupassant’s signature mode—decadence and class warfare. A government official’s son falls in love with a plain and poor young woman. Tragedy looms as in the background a seaside restaurant is the setting of lurid carousing where the lower-classes are morally advancing at a pace much faster than their rich and stifled betters.

“Hautot & Son” is a simple story of extremely moving compassion. “Idyll” is a comedy of kindness between two peasants. A couple of many examples of Maupassant taking simple ideas and showcasing brief glimpses of little kindnesses.

Two of the best stories in this collection see Maupassant mining his private anxieties into incredibly nuanced, amazingly modern art. “Coward” takes his complicated relationship with dueling (he was a skilled shooter and swordsman, but disapproved) and uses it to explore the consequences of a culture consumed by masculinity and pride. Likely inspired by the instance where Maupassant nearly fought a duel with the poet Jean Larrain who he accused of plagiarizing Bel-Ami. With “The Lull-A-Bye” a daydream becomes an at turns hilarious and deeply sad mediation on suicide and the possibility of a world where death is no longer feared. Maupassant, often ill due to venereal disease, contemplated suicide numerous times in his life.

A story that impresses me more the more I think about it is “Mother of Invention”. Maupassant is a master of writing about cruelty, and there is deep and disturbing cruelty at the heart of this story. But in a shift that perfectly showcases the surprising subtleties of so many of his stories, instead of doubling-down on the misogyny he goes the direction of empathy.

Quick side note: bizarrely this collection includes the short version of his famous story “The Horla”. Can see no logic behind this decision. Collections of his stories from Modern Library, Oxford University Press, Norton and Liveright all include the full version. The short version feels like an intriguing germ of a potentially great story.

Well, that’s all I got for now. Until next time, folks!

P.S. — Comments (and likes) are always encouraged.