An estate-agent husband comes home from work and, discovering there is no bread, sets off to buy some. Routine enough, perhaps - except he never returns. The experience leaves the narrator, the missing man's wife of seven years, understandably bewildered. "In a single moment I realised it was true, it wasn't a dream, that my husband hadn't come home tonight after going to fetch the baguette. That was what was real, there were the facts. In the days that followed, I was going to have to re-experience this sensation, this shock in my heart: the sudden release of adrenalin, an electric current striking the tips of my fingers and paralysing my throat, freezing my organs and lingering like frost on my outermost bronchial branches."
However, as this is the second novel from a writer whose debut, Pig Tales, tells the story of a young woman's bizarre transformation into a pig, don't expect an ordinary tale of loss and yearning. Darrieussecq is as daring as she is original and politically astute. This new book is a remarkable achievement in that she has chosen to follow a surreal comedy with an intense, highly cerebral, even intimidatingly cool exploration of the true nature of love. Recalling life with her husband, she admits realising: "I started to lose interest. His dreams, when he bothered to tell me about them, were always disconcertingly ordinary. He had never been able to give himself the slip in his sleep . . . "
The book is powerfully felt through physical sensation rather than the emotions; the exactness of the language in describing those sensations is breathtaking. On finding herself alone, apparently abandoned by her partner, she does not so much grieve for the man as for the now-empty space he once occupied. She cannot remember his face, but she does know his behaviour. "I couldn't imagine my husband being at another woman's place while I was wandering lost in the streets looking for him. I couldn't imagine it, not because I could take his fidelity for granted but because he was a rational man who would never have left me all alone like this to worry." No, he would phone with a good excuse.
What follows is a tour de force. Darrieussecq's technical control of a narrative concerned with the subconscious of a highly rational, intelligent, even detached individual suspended between various layers of denial and acceptance is awesome, and Janet Stevenson's translation evokes an atmosphere of calm despair. At the heart of the book is the narrator's move towards independence and her gradual rejection of the state of dependence in which she has lived. Whether or not the husband returns soon becomes irrelevant. Of far more importance is the narrator's new understanding of exactly what their relationship was. Even more important is the clarity with which she confronts this. Small wonder Darrieussecq has been welcomed as an exciting new talent. Put another way, she has provided a much-needed lifeline for French fiction, strangle-held for so long by an increasingly sterile cleverness. It has become easy to dismiss contemporary French fiction as literary theory masquerading as narrative. It is slightly more complex than that - it is a literature caught in extremes of intellectual trickery or hysterical melodrama. Aside from the major contribution of the late Georges Perec, author of Life: A User's Manual and a writer who combined French literary trickery with humour and humility, there has been little to applaud.
The publication of Truismes in France in 1996, and as Pig Tales in its English translation in 1997, has made a literary Joan of Arc of sorts of Darrieussecq. Pig Tales begins with an apology: "I know how much this story might upset people, how much distress and confusion it could cause." Archly clever, even vaguely pornographic, that novel's genius lies in its deliberately deadpan tone as the narrative quickly acquires shades of Moll Flanders.
Having acquired a job as a "massage girl" in a dubious establishment, our heroine is initially delighted by her speedy increase in beauty. This is quickly overtaken by a series of bizarre physical developments which soon have her hovering between human plumpness and more porcine dimensions. Her boyfriend eventually throws her out. Life becomes more desperate as she becomes more piglike. As her plight worsens, the book also becomes increasingly hilarious, albeit in humour more sick than black. Fortune smiles as she meets a new beau, Yvan, handsome and caring with a small drawback. If the moon is full, he turns into a werewolf.
While there are few traces of the surreal humour which sustains Pig Tales evident in My Phantom Husband, Darrieussecq leaves no doubts as to the sharpness of her observations and her amused exasperation at her friend Jacqueline's attempts to help. The first book is as much a political parable exposing a sick society as it is a picaresque about a poor girl at the mercy of her body and that same society's responses to it. This second book, with its final Chagalllike flourish and dissection of a shadow marriage, is probably the more ambitious, as it attempts to succeed without the zany comedy. Here the achievement rests exclusively on the undoubted quality of the writing itself. It looks like French fiction has found a saviour; it has certainly discovered a singular new voice.
Eileen Battersby is an Irish Times journalist
