Candy Story

by Marie Redonnet, Alexandra Quinn

Candy Story recounts a turbulent year in the life of Mia, a young woman whose apparent calm is perpetually threatened by inner doubts and outer catastrophe. Her modest dreams of happiness are dashed by the deaths of her mother, old friends, and her lover. Mia is a talented writer, the author of an autobiographical novel. Now, assailed by calamity and misfortune, she struggles with writer’s block, confounded—at least for the moment—by the senseless world around her.

 

Candy Story is the fourth novel by Marie Redonnet. Translations of the first three— Hôtel Splendid , Forever Valley , and Rose Mellie Rose —are also available from the University of Nebraska Press. In its unadorned prose and passionate focus on the inner life of a young woman, this fourth novel is unmistakably allied to the earlier ones. It will enthrall Redonnet’s admirers and win new ones.

 

Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycée before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.

Genres: France, Fiction

99 pages, Paperback

First published August 27, 1992

About the author

Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycée before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.

Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged the crucial influence which Beckett's work has had upon her literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great master of modern literature.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even by Marie Redonnet’s typical standards this is a strange book. Though it contains elements of mystery it is not foremost a mystery. I would be hard-pressed to classify it in broad terms. It’s easier to say what it is not with respect to some of Redonnet’s other work, as it is decidedly less fablelike than the triptych and not as deliberately genrefied as Nevermore. However, it is still very much a Redonnet novel, both in style and in theme. It contains the usual blasé mentions of killings and other violent acts, mingled with those of the narrator’s questionably consensual sexual encounters. The action transpires among the customary dizzying array of barely sketched characters with similar-sounding names. Also here are the revelations slow-born of a serpentine, repetitious narrative construction that characterizes much of Redonnet’s prose. And yet, while it displays common Redonnet themes, the story itself is at times almost banal in its concerns, which is not something I’ve encountered in her work before. The narrator, a writer stuck in limbo after her first novel, is living adrift among a privileged community of writers, literati, and socialites. There are allusions to her unstable upbringing and to significant events and relationships in her past. She travels frequently between Paris and fictional areas of (seemingly) southern France. Some of the places described felt familiar from other Redonnet novels, though they are either named differently or remain unnamed. In all this novel felt more personal (and just more realist) than any of Redonnet’s other fiction that I’ve read. Particularly the descriptions of the narrator’s relationship with her mother appeared woven of the thinnest fabric in the veil between fiction and authorial experience. Definitely a curious book, though not by far my favorite of hers, and in fact I experienced more than a few moments of boredom, which is unfortunate in a book clocking in at just under 100 pages. These moments eventually passed, though, and I grew more engrossed in the latter third of the book. Still a solid three stars for me, but recommended primarily for Redonnet completists.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Redonnet levers her fiction into gear with the crank of computational affectlessness, rendering her work seemingly devoid of shape, liveliness or narrative spark. But it’s there. So this seemingly arbitrarily generated occurrence happens to a seemingly arbitrarily generated character and then another seemingly arbitrarily generated occurrence happens to another seemingly arbitrarily generated character, matter-of-factly reported by the narrator, who then has sex with someone who calls her Candy. Then another seemingly arbitrarily generated occurrence happens to a seemingly arbitrarily generated character and then another seemingly arbitrarily generated occurrence happens to another seemingly arbitrarily generated character, matter-of-factly reported by the narrator, who then has sex with someone who calls her Candy. And so on. It’s only 96 pages. If someone would like to present me with an academic paper on Redonnet I’ll revise this knuckleheaded review, but for now I can only guess at her behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings. For balance, I love her novels Hôtel Splendid and Forever Valley.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

She had a fixtion on misfortune, and because of her fixation I was haunted by the idea of misfortune.

Marie Redonnet's superb aspects are her ability to evoke a very real tragedy with prose that is seemingly affectless in its precise regularity, and her unwillingness to let her books unfold in any sort of predictable pattern. Here, these unpredictable patterns play out despite formulas of both genre (noir) and of her own recurring sensibilities (a teeming cast of personal misfortune as a kind of very sad vast mechanical system). Which is to say that this prefigures her even finer Nevermore. I once wrote that Beckett's Watt seemed as if it had been written for sad robots, but I'm practically convinced that Redonnet (who acknowledges a debt to Beckett) is herself a sad robot. But as I said, this does not indicate that her words have no power to move humans; they just move them in odd ways.

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great title, but I refuse to make of something that isn't. Reading this was not exactly a complete waste of my time, but nearly. Present was the gratuitous Redonnet sex scenes, again nonchalantly played out by passive women used by violent men. A bit of compassion glints through a few of the lines, but love is rarely made viable. Far too many names basically listed (and deceased) to keep more than one or two straight. Redonnet might just as well have entered her material in two columns side by side, listing the verbs she engaged within these confounding actions beside each character's name. This little novel is nothing to write home about, unless somebody smarter than I am knows something I do not. Quite a disappointment after enjoying her earlier trilogy.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a strange book, filled with detached violence and bizarre repetition. At first, I thought that we were dealing with a f-p narrator who is much more reliable and sane than the narrator of Splendid Hotel. Yet, by the end, after parallel murders of near twins, parallel suicides, parallel deaths, and parallel sexual episodes, I wondered if our narrator was not in fact much more disturbed and unreliable than the fascinating hotel owner and her sisters. Indeed, at one point I wondered if Mia was completely crazy, with the circular violence and loneliness occurring only in her head.

Another off-putting aspect of the narration is the cycling in and out of characters, known only by a single name (I am assuming prénom, though who can tell), all moving in a world of quasi-celebrity, and yet none distiguishable from any other. These names mill through Mia's life and narrative, mixing freely with memories from her past, family members and friends, and characters and episodes in books and films. No one seems to be able to separate out their actual lives from the movies they are making, or the books they have written, or the books they are hoping to write, or the characters they have played as actors.

I think this is deliberate: Mia moves through the crowd of identical but different friend-strangers, surrounded on all sides by death and violence and loss, and she is profoundly lonely. Indeed, she signals to us early on that her life is flat and shallow and solitary and sad:

C'est Ma qui m'a appris à ne pas paraître ce que je suis. Quand elle était très malheureuse à cause de sa vie gâchée par madame Irma, elle se montrait toujours souriante et élégante comme une hôtesse de l'air, le métier qu'elle aurait voulu faire après danseuse. D'une certaine façon, je lui ressemble.

Her life turns out just as sad as you imagine it will. Perhaps the lesson in this is that if you pretend to be a brain surgeon so that people will find you interesting, it is no mystery that you cannot find real human connection and genuine love. Certainly Mia can't, though I think we are meant to empathize with her, and recognize the brain surgeon in ourselves.

On the whole, I think Splendid Hotel is a better book; anybody looking to read a little Marie Redonnet would most likely be better off there than here. Still, this story is worth reading for those already aboard the Redonnet train.

[derek allard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not her best (too many characters, perhaps?) but still has some awesome moments with her declarative sentence style I so adore.

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short little poem of a book, it follows a novelist, Mia, as she deals with a sudden death in the family that leads into a vast conspiracy involving real estate and media moguls and MORE deaths of all her closest friends and family.

The weird thing is - the big conspiracy and mob actions are related entirely in sumarizations of dialogue with other characters - the main character expresses no interest and does no investigating. It's like the mystery is completely outside of her.

The title "Candy Story" is what grabbed me. Candy is the name of a song in the story, and also a fictional role played by an actress who is killed. Mia gets called "Candy" by the men who make love to her, and all the love-making is remarkably passive, usually described as a man shoving her into the ground and then having his way.

I don't quite get it, I confess, but there were lovely, lyrical passages of description. I thought it was interesting to read a novel that broke so many 'rules'. It avoided action, it slips between past and present tense every paragraph or so, and dialog is rarely given except as summary.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I keep expecting that finally Redonnet might be a bit of a letdown. I'd left this one until last because it somehow seemed least promising. Wrong. It's excellent, a fine fit with the Triptych and with Nevermore. I'd still start with the Triptych, and would still say that, if you're set on reading only one novel of hers, it should be Rose Mellie Rose. But this one packs a powerful punch, despite how quiet and melancholy it is.

[cori · Rating 4 out of 5]

in this one Marie Redonnet is really like what if everyone u had a recent fling with died like magnets as the lighthouses around u one by one succumb to automation <3

[Ava Hausner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird, but good