I was deep in the throes of coming of age when Francoise Sagan’s novel, A Certain Smile, hit the bestseller lists of 1956. According to a review in the San Francisco Examiner, “The reader is given the feeling of having opened a young girl’s diary by mistake. But whoever put such a diary down?” I couldn’t. With that younger woman/older man story, I began to see that, to the French, love is a game, a serious, high stakes, but survivable game. I minored in French in college, toured France at eighteen, and have been a sucker for French love stories ever since.
If you discount the existentialists, most French books are about the moves and feints in the game of love. Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time, is a study in unrequited love, suspicious love, duplicity in love. His love for Gilberte, later for Albertine, and the obsessions of the homosexual Charlus, are human, painful, silly, and never dull. His book reveals much of the era just before, during, and after WWI. Proust, a creature of his time, disguised his own homosexuality by making his two love interests women, but the romance remained gamesmanship to the max, displaying all the reversals, plotting, and focus of a chess match.
Modern French bestsellers include The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbary’s imagined love story is more gentle, mature, and less harried than Proust’s tumultuous upheavals. The dowdy concierge blossoms given the attention of a handsome, Japanese tenant. They begin the relationship by finishing each other’s quote from Tolstoy, “All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The romantic hero and heroine “see” each other and begin a slow, beautiful courtship. He wins the game by drawing her out.
Alex Caput is Swiss, but his novel, Leon and Louise, is supposedly the story of the love of his grandfather’s life. He approaches the game of love playfully. Our hero and heroine spar verbally, are frank with each other, and struggle to do the right thing after a terrible explosion and another man’s jealousy interfere with their lives. Like all the intellectual French, the narrator can’t resist philosophizing, but does it poetically. Here is an excerpt in which Leon finds women difficult to understand.
…he knew… a woman’s psyche is connected in some mysterious way with
peregrinations of the stars, the alternation of the tides and the cycles of the
female body; possibly, too, with subterranean volcanic flows, the flight paths
of migratory birds and the French state railway timetable—even, perhaps,
with the output of the Baku oil oilfields, the heart-rate of the Amazonian
hummingbirds and the songs of sperm whales beneath the Antarctic pack
ice.
Now, that, brings a certain smile.