Francophile Friday: More Donjon, more Petit Vampire, Chute de Vélo

Bandes dessinées

My Francophone reading this week included both the 3rd Donjon Potron-Minet book and the fifth Petit Vampire. I've got to the stage with both Donjon and Petit Vampire where I don't really have anything to add when I read a new volume other than "keep reading, it's still great". I suppose with Petit Vampire I can add "it's a step up from book 4", because I wasn't thrilled with book 4, Petit Vampire et la maison qui avait l'air normale. Petit Vampire et la soupe de caca is a return to form: we're back to Petit Vampire and Michel having wacky adventures. Once again I'm forcibly reminded of the resemblance to Fungus the Bogeyman, given that a lot of the story revolves around Marguerite's poisonous floating farts (no, really). Even more so, it reminds me of the chapter about kids' manga in Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga: the little Venn diagram demonstrating the overlap between "the filthy and the abnormal" (i.e. what kids are interested in reading about) and "the clean and the normal" (i.e. what their mothers want them to read about). La Soupe de Caca is very much in the "filthy and abnormal" part of the diagram, with much less of the serious-but-somehow-not-didactic stuff that came up in previous stories. To be honest, the scatological humour was just on the borderline of what I can handle; it never quite went over the line, to my relief. La Soupe de Caca is disgusting, but in a charming sort of way.

I picked up Étienne Davodeau's fictional Chute de Vélo on the basis of having greatly enjoyed his biographical Les Mauvaises Gens. Chute de Vélo begins with a relatively slow gathering of characters, mostly from the same family: the mother is elderly and her mind is going, and her adult children are gathering in her house to clean it up prior to selling it. Meanwhile, the third generation get underfoot and see and overhear things they shouldn't; and there is an impoverished family friend called Toussaint who helps them out but insists on sleeping in a tent in the garden. At first it's not at all clear what connects all the various threads, nor is it clear what point Davodeau has, if any; the storytelling is pleasant enough, and at some points very moving -- in particular, the deterioration of the elderly mother is painfully accurate. (Her son picks her up from the hospital and asks her how she is, and is she glad to be going home? "I have tulips in my vase!" she says loudly, her eyes glassy. She gets his name wrong and he corrects her, then pretends he's Johnny Hallyday; but she's too far gone to get the joke, so he awkwardly says "No, no, just kidding, I'm Simon." Ouch. All of this in one page.)

But for all the accuracy of his observations, I wasn't sure where Davodeau was going with all this. It didn't feel like a plot so much as a series of loosely connected incidents. Then came the revelation of the exact nature of the "chute de vélo" (bicycle accident) of the title, and suddenly all the threads pulled together, and it was devestating. It was a punch to the gut. It transformed the entire story retrospectively into something completely different.

Chute de Vélo is an astonishing piece of work that builds towards its climax in almost imperceptible increments. It hides its astonishingness for most of its length, so that it appears to be no more than a reasonably entertaining and realistic but structureless and rambling tale; then comes the reveal, and suddenly you understand why it's taken the five-year-old so long to learn how to ride a bicycle, and why Toussaint sleeps in a tent in the garden, and why it mattered that Jeanne overheard her husband talking about the time when she was late coming home and he believed she had been in a traffic accident. All of these little details (that seemed insignificant at first) come into focus and turn out to have been part of a pattern all along. It took my breath away. Davodeau is an incredibly gifted storyteller: whatever English-language publisher snaps up the rights to his works will be doing a great service for English-speaking comics fans.