RAPPORT DE BRODECK (LE) [Perfect Paperback]

 

 

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The characterization implied in the above quote can be taken as an important theme, underlying Philippe Claudel's evocative novel. Much in his novel is literally not quite accurate, but fundamentally very true. Brodeck, the first person narrator and a man who "has the language", has been tasked by the village men to write a "Report" on an Incident (referred to consistently as "l'Ereignies" in the original French text) that occurred just prior to Brodeck's arrival at the village inn. Something violent has happened to the "Anderer" (meaning "Other"), a recently arrived visitor to the village. The Report is to explain what has occurred and why and absolve the men from any responsibility. Reluctantly, for reasons that become clear in the course of the novel, Brodeck agrees. However, to protect himself [in case that may be needed], he embarks in parallel on a much fuller, intimate account, secretly written and carefully protected from his nosy neighbours.

The small village, where Brodeck and his family live, is located in an isolated mountain region, close to a national border, seemingly to Germany. Throughout the text Claudel uses terms and phrases that can be associated, more or less easily, with a form of German dialect. The soldiers who occupied the village during the recent war (presumed to be World War II) are referred to as "Fratergekeime", (a term which suggests someone like a brother). There are also geographical clues to the setting of the novel in the Lorraine/Alsace region of France, that had a German as well as French history and where the author was raised and lives. At the same time, Claudel deliberately introduces unconnected and remote place names, not so much to confuse the reader, but to take his characters and events out of a specific reality and to bring a sense of universality to his underlying themes of fear, collective guilt and action, forgetting and forgiving.

The story is set a short time after the war, but the emotional scars are still strongly felt by villagers; hostility towards outsiders remains a strong expression of their continuing uneasiness. Brodeck's own suspicions towards some of the villagers may not be groundless. He had been an outsider, a "Fremder", brought into the village as a young orphan. The description of his background is deliberately vague, yet various clues suggest, nevertheless, that he might be either Jewish or Roma.

Piecing together the evidence for his official report and while primarily concerned with his own "confession", Brodeck's narrative jumps backward and forward in time and moves from place to place. His writing changes from a stream of consciousness to a realistic documentary account to dreamlike recalling of happier times. In his mind he often returns to the most harrowing experience of his life: being taken from the village to a camp, a "Kazerskwir" (KZ - concentration camp) where the brutality of the system sorely tested his survival instinct and humanity. Upon his return from the place of no return, he finds his name on the memorial for those lost during the war. The question who might have sent him to the camp resurfaces prominently as he investigates the Other's recent fate.

Placing much of the novel within the confines of a small village and its environs allows for a precise description of events, while at the same time giving the story a somewhat otherworldly touch that is not without metaphors and symbolism. This duality between fact and mythical applies especially to the character of the Other. He treats his animals, a horse and a donkey, more like human beings and speaks to them in a way that has the villagers become highly suspicious. "This man," explains the priest to Brodeck," he was like a mirror... he did not need to say a single word. In him, each person saw only himself reflected. Or, maybe, it was the last messenger of God, before He closes His shop and throws the keys away."

In total contrast to the suspicions and tensions that hang over Brodeck and the villagers, palpable all the time and to different degrees, is the freedom and lightness Brodeck feels in the outdoors. The beautiful landscape exudes peace, privacy and promises healing power that the village can not provide. Claudel's language is deceptively fluid and sometimes deliberately simple and straight forward to the point that the reader wants to go back wondering whether more is lying beneath the surface. Several times I found myself going back over a chapter or two, finding connections and suggestions that had escaped in the first reading.

Philippe Claudel's book is exceptional, if not unique. Written by a well-known and award winning French author, his subject matter remains highly relevant both in France as elsewhere. While there may be many books that place concentration camp experiences into the centre or prominent background of a novel, I am not aware of any that do so intricately link those experiences into a post-war context like BRODECK. Richly drawn characters are confronted with realistically presented challenges. For example, the priest, himself not a reliable figure, assesses the mental condition of his parishioners and understands their need to talk to him: "People are strange. They commit the worst without asking themselves any questions, but afterwards, they can no longer live with the memory of what they have done."

The narrator's own personal recollections of the traumatic past is seamlessly integrated with his insightful account of the village's events and post-war conditions in his specific environment. Questions speak to the reader from the pages: What has changed, if anything and what been learned since? Given my German background, one recent book that comes to my mind as one that addresses, in non-fiction form through a series of essays, some of the underlying themes that Claudel raises so brilliantly in his novel: [ASIN:0887849598 Guilt About The Past]]. [Friederike Knabe]

*) Having read the novel in its original French, all translations in this review are mine.

Imagine a region on the border between two powers, its nominal sovereignty shuffled between them with the ebb and flow of history. Imagine a place whose personal and place names belong to one country, but whose official language is that of the other, and whose local dialect is a hybrid known only to its inhabitants. Imagine a land of mountains and forests, where individual villages are isolated "like eggs in nests," and where even somebody arriving from three hours' walk away will seem a stranger. Philippe Claudel was born in Lorraine, parts of which have shifted between France and Germany, but the setting of his novel is left deliberately vague. The country borders on Germany, of that there is no doubt, but the mountains seem a lot higher than the Vosges, and the isolation is more complete.

I read the book in French, and Claudel does something similar with the language. The French (sometimes elevated, sometimes down to earth, always brilliant) is sewn with numerous German words in italics. But they are German with a French accent, German in a dialect, words which may mean one thing but suggest others. The word for their neighbors over the border, for instance: "Fratergekeime," with its suggestion of both brother and stranger. Added to the mostly-Germanic proper names and the vagueness about place and time, Claudel creates a kind of fog with his writing, despite the clarity of his actual descriptions. And a special experience for me, to add that extra layer of a foreign language not my own to a book where foreign-ness is a major subject.

For Claudel's fog parallels a moral miasma, where nothing is as it seems. There is absolute evil, certainly, and at least one radiant touch of absolute good, but for the most part the moral lines are not so clearly drawn. Brodeck, who admits to being a nobody, stumbles into the village inn to find all the men of the village there, following the murder of a visitor from outside, a man known only as the "Anderer" (the Other). This stranger, oddly dressed, smiling but saying little, came to them three months earlier, riding a horse and leading a donkey, and has stayed to make sketches of people and places around the village. We know nothing else about him, and only gradually realize that he is now dead. Brodeck, who has had some university education, is asked to write a report that will exculpate them all for their actions. As the period appears to be just after the Second World War, there are obviously many reasons why the villagers might decide to take justice into their own hands. Brodeck writes his report at the behest of the mayor, a huge pig-farmer named Orschwir, but he feels increasingly uneasy in doing so, and simultaneously tells his own story in a separate document.

Brodeck apologizes for telling his story out of sequence, but really this is one of Claudel's greatest technical achievements. It soon becomes clear that we are dealing with a Holocaust narrative, and that Brodeck is one of the very few who have survived the camp and returned. The horror is simply there as a fact, a touchstone of absolute evil among so much moral uncertainty. Much as Styron would do in SOPHIE'S CHOICE, Claudel takes us there, then pulls away, only to return with further details later. So Brodeck's story is layered like sheets of paper cut up and folded together. It is also compressed in time; we recognize the events, but they do not fit the normal timeline. Similarly, Claudel avoids any facile type-casting. Brodeck, for instance, might be Jewish, but he might equally be Romany; at any rate, he was brought to the village as an orphan child, a stranger from far away. And the confused nationality of the villagers themselves also precludes easy classification, as friends, collaborators, or even enemies.

Claudel has a way of introducing major plot points in almost casual throwaways, but with each revelation we learn more about the other people in the story, whether these be Brodeck's immediate family (his wife Emélia, his infant daughter Poupchette -- an especially tender creation -- or his adopted mother Fédorine) or the various inhabitants of the village. One by one, we meet the drunken priest, the old schoolmaster, the frightened innkeeper, the nosy neighbor Göbbler (another wonderfully evocative name), and many others. We also get many different views of the Anderer, who says little but seems to have the power to reflect each person's character back on themselves, like a mirror. The curious thing is that the more we see the villagers as individuals, the more they seem to coalesce into a group, joining forces against all outsiders. They are shut in as much by the narrowness of their own minds as by their mountains. Much evil in those years was the result of group pathology, yet Claudel also shows us why, in certain circumstances, group solidarity is necessary.

Grim though this story is, Claudel lightens it with almost ecstatic descriptions of the mountain countryside. Its harsh facts are offset by rays of unexpected grace, unexplained events, and persistent Biblical overtones. As a novel, it is impossible to pin down, and deliberately so. It is all too easy to take a Holocaust story and tell it in the past; it happened, but it is over, and the people responsible were not ourselves. By refusing to pin people down with places, dates, and nationalities, Claudel avoids the easy distinction of Them and Us, and suggests that something very similar might happen now. Focusing on what happens when the survivors come home is a brave and powerful approach. I can think of only two other examples: DAWN by Elie Wiesel and ÉTOILE ERRANTE by JMG LeClézio. Both these authors are winners of the Nobel Prize; from the evidence of this novel, Philippe Claudel might well enter their company.

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