Mireille Best, the pen name of Mireille Lemarchand (1943-2005), spent her teenage years in the Burgundy port of Le Havre, where the Seine meets the English Channel. The city was devastated by Allied bombing in 1944; more than 5000 of its citizens died. Cared for elsewhere by her grandmother, the child was chronically ill, admitted to maisons de santé throughout her youth. But difficult post-war conditions are only dimly evoked in Camille in October, Best’s roman de formation published in 1988 by Gallimard, the third of her four novels, all of which foreground lesbian characters. She was never inclined to include flights of place description in her prose fiction — and she had a reason.
Best once said that she conjured her main characters in such a manner that would advance a normalisation of lesbianism. That is, her intention was to portray these desires and challenges as instantly recognizable – even while peering directly at their unique situations and veerings from so-called conventional life. Her work is hyper-social with a flair for terse remarks on mental states. Her eye and intellect zoom in on habit and routine, and the idiosyncratic gestures of memory. Sentences designed to offer “atmosphere” would only work to particularize — and thus distract from her all-in investment in elevating the citizenship of her characters.
In Camille in October, Camille begins by recalling herself at age 11 during the mid-1950s. She, her 9-year old seizure-prone brother Abel, and her plucky 8-year old sister Ariane circulate between their mother’s house and that of Margot whose kitchen brings together the mothers of the working class neighborhood. Camille speaks – and because Best hated semicolons (and often commas, too) there are blanks where those unsightly marks have been banished:
The Mothers should have killed themselves Or let themselves die It was the only logical step
in the situation. But no. Very few died, of those among them. They had a stubborn resistance,
animal-like … The passive resistance of things half buried. The men climbed on top of them,
knocked them about sometimes, weighed on their conscience as much as on the rhythm of their days
The kids screamed vomited grew fell sick escaped went bad … The Mothers endured it all The
knocking down of days one after another endlessly … The eternal circuit house-shops-girlfriends
and repeat The persecution of trifling things The grumblings chores bullying Running for cash
to the neighbors who might still have some while waiting for payday of the government cheque …
Camille’s dissatisfactions, critically drawn, may be familiar, but Best’s narrative is rhythmically and intuitively engrossing as she moves nimbly from one moment to the next. “I lived my childhood as if under anaesthesia,” Camille says, “with the grey sky above my head and inside things moving like smoke. For a long time, it left me with a certain incapacity to distinguish the real from the imaginary.” The father appears in flashes, ill-tempered and threatening. Countering the alarming forces around them is Ariane, sardonic and commanding. Where Camille seeks “the highest level of invisibility,” Ariane waits for her own moment. Speculation about the mothers continues – but also, Camille defines the psyche of the voice we are hearing:
But it’s between eight and nine years old that I came unstuck from the world – or rather, that it
was detached from me in order to be presented to me as a spectacle – and ever since I have been
vainly seeking how to re-enter it and blend in, how to get back through the glass.
Then at mid-book, Camille recalls encountering, at age 15, the village dentist’s wife, Clara, a person of “superior intelligence” who bedazzled her with “the fragility of her waist and the little swelling of her belly The smooth legs, without the least hair, and tanned … That smile – big, silent laugh that comes at you, as though projected, as one would blow a kiss – it’s over, I will never be able to get rid of it It entered into my body and I know that day and night I will carry it, like a really little knife, like a minuscule burn …”
Without gesturing to epiphany or turning point, Best’s Camille makes it clear by indirection that the desire for Clara’s approval and affection is not a phase. An inherent, utterly human condition has emerged into daylight. Early impressions of Clara trigger broad yet still specific meditations and conclusions. “So many people can’t put up with the least fogginess the least ambiguity: a scouring is indispensable to them, an immediate explanation is owed them – even if they have to fabricate it themselves in haste and incoherence, or worse yet: to throw themselves without a second thought onto the first one that is presented to them …”
Mireille Best’s poor health prevented her from graduating high school – but it was there that she met her partner, Jocelyne Crampon. As a writer, Best was an autodidact, tutored through her vast readings. Camille in October shows her exquisite sense of timing and her sure-handed nudging of plot and tuning of tone. She is never in a rush; the pace is attuned to the expressive needs of Camille’s mind. Stephanie Schechner, the translator, renders it all with a lively sensitivity. The novel also offers oblique illuminations of Best’s sense of herself as a writer and observer. Camille speaks:
It’s precisely because of the speed at which things traverse me, each distinct though torrential, that
I’m slowed down: I must constantly survey them and list them, tirelessly ‘be up to date’ on some
personal list for clearing out the chaos. And this type of machine in me, that incessantly registers and
analyses and verifies and classifies, doesn’t allow itself to be slowed down by trivial events.
[Published January 7, 2020 by Seagull Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 271 pages, $24.50 hardcover. To purchase from Bookshop.org, click here]