Paris, Let Me Go!
(I really am trying to move on from the Paris theme...I swear.)
"I sometimes discovered relics of hope embedded in me like fossils in ancient stone, an odd collection of elements that everything seemed to repudiate."
"My moral decline was beautiful, since it hadn't taken me away from her for too long; beautiful, because beauty is never what you head towards, but what you come back to."These are just a sampling of the sentences I loved from Florian Zeller's debut novel, Artificial Snow. Zeller's , an intellectual French phenom and a mere twenty-two years old when this was published,gives us a narrator who is a bourgeois young man brokenhearted over the break-up, breakdown of a relationship with a woman named Lou. The narrator is the universal young male from anywhere with good looks, money and intelligence - a bit arrogant, self-absorbed, and possessing an extremely healthy libido. He always has a woman to sate his physical needs, but the one woman he can't get over is Lou who he dated for a couple of months. Zeller sets up his novel of rejection with an opening scene of missing the metro, the last metro. It gives him an allegory to frame his perceived failure and depression:
"I belong to the generation of assassins. Of those who, come spring, have forgotten why they should feel emotion."
"The recurrence of these incidents seem to give them a mystical significance. Along the lines: everybody's gone, except you; or: you're the only one waiting for a train that's just gone, again."There is an honesty, a perscipacity and a ruminative tone through this slight novel that inveigles the reader, makes you fall for his selfish behavior, his attempts to gratify his ego through the pain of Lou's rejection. We never get a clear sense of Lou, of why she was different than other women for him. We just know that she was and to let go of that first love is the most difficult. We read as Zeller's narrator drinks himself into pain numbing stupors, mechanically seduces women without gratification to give him reprieve from loneliness for a night and my personal favorite, call out from work and lie in bed all day because anything else is too much of an effort.
By no means is this a perfect novel, but the comparison to Francoise Sagan and her success with Bonjour Tristesse is easy to make. A novel philosophizing about the pain of love. And Zeller has such glittering narrative moments that capture the universal:
"Sadness doesn't recognize the traditional frontiers of matter; it takes possession of everything around it and spreads by means of the nostalgic method of contamination; we don't just feel sad in part of ourselves, we're swept away by sadness the way a flood sweeps away daffodil shoots; the liquid invades your whole body and stays put. It's called drowning."I like this book for it's precociousness and for Zeller's imperfections. I felt the same about the narrator - imperfect, precocious and a man who admits he's is in pain.
In the future, look for my review of his masterpiece to date, The Fascination of Evil.
Artificial Snow
By Florian Zeller
Translated from the French by Sue Rose
Pushkin Press
Paperback
119 Pages
ISBN: 9781901285840
14.95
Posted by Monica at 5/20/2009 7:19 PM 
Categories: France
Tags: florian zeller artificial snow french fiction france
Categories: France
Tags: florian zeller artificial snow french fiction france
Nice to see someone else reading Zeller. I've read all his books and this is probably the least of them. The Fascination Of Evil, in my opinion, is the best he's produced, but I think he'll deliver something better down the line. His recent novel, Julien Parme, wasn't it.
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Hi Stewart, glad you have liked Zeller. Fascination of Evil is my next. But it is nice to discover a contemporary writer continuing to produce, develop his voice, and hone his craft. Looking forward to more of his work. Thanks!
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