FIRST THOUGHTS: A rare and endearing grandiosity from Philippe Claudel
Since then, he has confirmed his status as a top-tier talent with such acclaimed novels as Broderick’s Report, The Investigator, and the masterful Monsieur Linh and His Child, and gilded his résumé with a Prix Goncourt and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize among a slew of other major industry honours.
He has also won great plaudits as a film-maker, and remains probably best known to international audiences for writing and directing the 2009 BAFTA Award-winning, I’ve Loved You So Long.
Those readers familiar with Claudel’s work will find his latest offering, Parfums, quite a departure. Ostensibly a memoir, or perhaps more accurately a patchwork gathering of memories, and with no quarter given to chronology, the author offers 63 vignettes, each one a single, intense one- or two-page paragraph fixating on some olfactory stimulant, sometimes in a specific way, on other occasions almost incidentally.
Subtitled: ‘A Catalogue of Remembered Smells’, the vignettes, at their best, astonish in their ability to attack the senses. In the tradition, if not the style, of Proust’s madeleine, a scent triggers an explosion of memory, and brings to life again a frozen, scatter-shot moment of the author’s past.
‘Garlic’ is an early example, evoking a day in his adored and long-dead grandmother’s kitchen, watching in anticipation while she prepares for him a specially purchased steak. ‘Girlfriends’, catching him on the first turn into puberty, portrays with the very sweetest poignancy the excitement of a first kiss, not with the dreamed-of and lusted-after Valerie or Nathalie but the reality of “Fat Frenzi”, the leftover girl at a crowded party and the only but still somehow ideal fit for a leftover boy, and savouring the crystallised fruit scent of her breath, inhaling the flavours of her neck, her cheeks, her mouth.
‘Cabbage’ — “the odour of overcooked poverty” — the stench of rooms never aired, accounts for a lot of his youth, a relentless but always relished part of his diet. ‘Coal’ remembers the dirty-faced delivery men and how the “dark, heavy smoke trickles from all the chimneys in the town,” and laments the shift toward central heating, for all that has been lost.
The anxiety of the insecure and underdeveloped finds its voice in ‘Communal showers’, and the “fusty stench of dampness” that defines a post-football changing room, while a mother’s concerns ensure that days spent basking on hot riverbanks are haunted by the reek of Ambre Solaire, in ‘Suntan Lotion’.
And in the sad, lovely ‘Sleeping Child’, Claudel recalls how it was to stand in the room and watch while his young daughter slumbered among dreams, breathing “the most natural of fragrances”, finding life at its earliest stage but even in the moment recognising childhood’s fleeting nature.
Parfums shouldn’t work, except in the most casual fashion; yet while each piece stands a morsel in itself, the gentle but persuasive intensity of the writing, the poetic succulence of prose alive with description and with its own irresistible rhythms, ensures an accumulation that builds to a rare and endearing grandiosity, something considerably greater than the sum of its parts.
And in philosophising beyond the nature of memory by incorporating thoughts of ageing and even an eventual end, this latter quoted vignette in particular captures some of the essence of what gives this unusual book its real depth. It reads easily and echoes with sensual pleasure, but one of the subtle flavours within the sentences is a gentle melancholia, which results in an inescapable emphasis placed on what the past has taken, what changes time has inflicted.
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