A Russian Mother: A Novel (French Expressions)

Rating:
Summary: A postmodern homage that is haunting, complex, and profound.
Review:

Although Mr. Bosquet is probably best known for his poetry, here he proves to be a noteworthy novelist in this profound study of the relationship between a mother and her only son. A complex blend of biography, history, and autobiography, this novel asks the reader to be--at times--a psychoanalyst, a literary theorist, and an historian. Originally published in 1978, the novel won the Grand Prix du Roman from the Académie Française. Intense and moving, this is the first novel of Mr. Bosquet's to appear in English. With Barbara Bray's fine translation (albeit choppy near the end of the book), its value for international readers is bound to increase with its reception by anglophone audiences. There is no mistaking this book for something other than deliberate and heavy duty literature. The most persistent question that follows us through this postmodern homage is deciding how much autobiography is interwoven into the fictional biography being written. This unease is only added to by the uncertain status of the afterword by Germaine Brée, one of America's most important French professors, and the introductory note that, combined, inform us of Mr. Bosquet's work, life, and who his Russian mother was.

Mr. Bosquet's opening line ("You're my mother; you're dead; all I feel is relief.") recalls Albert Camus's opening line from "The Stranger" when Mersault tells us Maman has died. With this as our starting point in "A Russian Mother," we follow the narrator's relationship with his mother over two continents and five decades; from Odessa where the family has to flee in 1918 (first to Sofia and later to Brussels), to New York of the 1940s and 1950s where the narrator's parents live removed from war-ravaged Europe. As with all biographies, much is revealed about an author's self when undertaking the task of writing someone else's life and this novel is no different. Mr. Bosquet has captured the difficult web of memory and filial emotions that at once allow a son to see his mother as she operated within the family, while also having to admit that it is most likely those closest to us whom we know the least. This is especially true of the family here where privacy and autonomy are necessary to those members who hope to guard a certain sense of sovereignty over their roles and lives. In the course of the novel, we learn of the son's shady past of black market deals and nights in bordellos. He runs a brisk bartering business in post-WWII Berlin but eventually becomes (like, not ironically, Mr. Bosquet) a writer based in Paris. That so much about the son is learned from the descriptions of his relationship to his mother lends to the narrative slipperiness we feel from start to finish as we read through this book.

There is once peculiar scene that will haunt readers for the novel's duration since it addresses the sexual tension implicit in the relationship. But Mr. Bosquet's canny narrative works in such a way that satisfying this drive or desire has to occur so the story can continue. From Russia to Belgium to America, from childhood to adulthood, the picture of how a bitter relationship formed between son and mother becomes clearer as the mother becomes less a Freudian object of association and more a full blown character in a work of fiction. At one point, the postmodern narrator admits: "Is it done to cut one's mother up into chapters? Does one distort her by clothing her in words? I'm embarking on a dubious and uncertain operation: that of trying to resuscitate you by telling your story as if you were a character in a book, no truer and no more false than those to whom I sometimes give life in my work but who have never really existed." The narrator knows how divergent and convergent life and literature can be, but those closest to us can either come to life or be obscured and misconstrued by having our words mediate memory and record on their behalf. This dilemma is skillfully presented in its full complexity by Mr. Bosquet. If writing this story is a form of distortion, we can be certain that not writing it is worse despite whatever the son's motives are for representing or misrepresenting the life of his mother.

The one minor drawback to the work might be its overall structurelessness. Mr. Bosquet's reasons for this are not mysterious: chronological shifts effectively show the cyclical nature of memory. But even so, how the image the son constructs of the mother evolves is somewhat confusing. It is basically unclear who she is or what the depths of personality are; all we are certain of is the son's bitterness. Although Mr. Bosquet makes no such suggestions, I wonder how the novel would read if read according to its chronological order as opposed to its chapter sequence. Indeed, it could be very revealing to read it in the way Milorad Pavic sets up "Landscape Painted with Tea," where a crossword puzzle at mid-point presents many viable endings based on the order in which the remaining chapters are read. Here we have no such choice but we may not be the worse off for it. This essentially eloquent and powerful story reminds us that we are forever our parents' children.

Craig A. Hamilton