Black Forest

by Valérie Mréjen, Katie Shireen Assef (Translator)

A man decides he is old enough. A woman returns early from a lovers' retreat to a bottle of pills at home. And how should you explain the nuances of contemporary Paris to your mother, twenty – five years dead? Valérie Mréjen 's Black Forest is a book of mourning that isn't morbid or sentimental, but rather an elegant and wryly humorous brace against the void. With a paradoxically detached intimacy, Mréjen follows death's dark and twisted path through the lives it touches, wringing out every possible meaning — or non–meaning — along the way. A writer at the height of her career who draws comparisons to Georges Perec and Nathalie Sarraute, Mréjen has cemented her status as an auteur with a singular voice, guiding us through the Black Forest of ghosts that populate her subconscious.

Genres: France, Fiction, Novella, French Literature, Translated Fiction, Literature

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2012

About the author

Valérie Mréjen, née en 1969 à Paris, est une romancière, plasticienne et vidéaste française. Elle développe son travail à partir d'événements du quotidien, de détails cruels et burlesques de l'existence, de souvenirs, de lieux communs ou de malentendus.

Ses œuvres ont été présentées dans de nombreuses expositions en France comme à l’étranger. Une rétrospective a eu lieu à la galerie du Jeu de paume1 en 2008.

Reviews

[Adam Dalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really moving, insightful, short book about the coincidences that lead to death, about the minor ripples that bring about the end of things. It reminds me most of SUICIDE by Édouard Levé (which I preferred), but it has a touch of Chris Marker films with its detached narrator and its focus on the mundane. It drags a bit at times, because the short paragraphs are more interesting than the long - the deaths outshine the plot - but this is a pleasure.

[Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

[ paperback ]

A matter of fact collage of death with a reoccurring glimpse into a potentially flawed (but everyone is) mother-daughter relationship.

[H · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short, immensely powerful book about the traces the dead leave behind for the living, and how their “stories were somehow linked to those who’d told them.” It’s up there with José Revueltas’s THE HOLE and Willem Frederick Hermans’s AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE on the list of books under 90 pages capable of knocking the wind out of you.

[anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

i get the intent and i want to like this but what a shame. it was very hard to follow, a bad kind of jumbled writing that's meant to be stream of consciousness? but for this i don't feel very appreciative of how it was supposedly challenging the reader to put two and two together.

[Solange te parle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Structure originale, mais selon moi inaboutie. La somme des morts en devient presque comique. Parfois de très belles phrases, mais l'ensemble reste terne.

[Caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this slim volume at a bookstore/ bar/ coffeeshop featuring underrepresented voices and titles in translation shortly after the sudden death of my sister's lifelong best friend, a person dear to me as well. These anecdotes on death's unexpected, random strikes on other families, including the author's mother, were oddly comforting. The snippets are funny, touching, surprising, and a good reminder that not a single day is guaranteed. I also enjoyed the stark, punchy writing style: Mrejen was a multimedia artist before turning to writing. Very fast read if you can find this unapologetic book.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm still trying to make up my mind about how Mréjen exactly processes and relates to death. One blurb I saw somewhere said it was neither sentimental nor cynical and while I agree with the former, it feels a bit harder to agree with the latter. The repetition of seemingly random, highly specific, and just barely on the edge of absurd deaths cataloged in Black Forest feel slightly cynical or provocative, but that may just be the vestiges of bourgeois fears attached to death.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Curiously aloof, yet still strangely engaged, much like Peter Handke's seemingly detached even indifferent characters, the narrator of Valérie Mréjen's Black Forest recounts a series of deaths, offering a kind of jeweled omnibus of ways to die, in a classy, glassy prose recalling miniaturists par excellence Lydia Davis, Michael Martone, and Robert Walser—think Six Feet Under via Renata Adler's Speedboat.

[Lemma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t hate it but I certainly didn’t like it.
The translator describes “the peculiar intimacy of this writing that never once reaches for pathos”, the latter half of which is apt. It’s hard not to ask “why did she bother writing this thing if she doesn’t want any of it to be emotional?” The “novel” is a series of tiny tragic vignettes that occasionally overlap; there are plenty of books in this style and they don’t tend to be anything special. Their writers seem to believe that certain aesthetic trappings are important to Literature, but have no interest in whatever depth or novelty might spring from them and perhaps subconsciously be convinced that simply by being tragic the events themselves are sufficiently evocative, with the result that you might feel like you’re reading a deep and serious book but it’s basically camp. Maybe it’s part of the point- if there is one- that the deaths themselves are thoroughly everyday and unmemorable, but even if you pick this up out of a macabre itch, you won’t be at all satisfied. It’s too safe to have an audience among the sorts of people who would consider it.
I had a similar disappointing experience earlier this year with Fleur Jaegy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, which I don’t think I bothered to review or rate because like this one it just didn’t leave an impression; that being said I think I liked that book a little more.
The writing is decent but not stylish. There’s nothing egregious to complain about. But you miss very little by skipping it.

[PageGoblin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was so very confusing

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 - just bunch of people dying and killing themself

[Saida Dahir · Rating 4 out of 5]

absolutely haunting and beautiful. thank you ella for the book. i love you forever.

[Elodise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Challenge pour les auteurs français : essayer d'écrire un livre de plus de 150 pages.

[Angela Woodward · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strange, quiet little book, that despite being numerous accounts of deaths, has a sweet steadiness and a wonderful eye. It can be read in one sitting, and is a novel only in a very French sense. It reminded me of one of my all-time favorites, Norman Lock's Grim Tales.

[Sara]

No rating for right now. I have no idea what I just read. 😳

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

How many people have you seen die or heard about or read about? For most of us that figure will be in excess of six million the vast majority of whom we never knew; anonymous hes and shes and theys. In the midst of life we are in death. They’ve been saying (and singing apparently) that since the 1300s and yet death never becomes familiar.

What I liked about James Herbert in The Rats is the way he spends the first few chapters of the book introducing us to a succession of characters—Harris the teacher, Paula and Mike and baby Karen, Guilfoyle the gay salesman and his protégé Francis—and devotes sufficient time to make us curious about and interested in them … and then he kills them. It is simple and effective. And it teaches us a lesson, that for death to be meaningful it really helps for it to be personal. Some people have a real problem slaughtering an animal once it’s been given a name and there’s a reason for that. How many times have you read in a newspaper “Yesterday a man died after falling from Scammonden Bridge,” “Yesterday a man died of shotgun wounds in Sydenham,” “Yesterday a man died in a motorcyclist crash on the York Road in Dun Laoghaire,” “Yesterday a man died after being caught in 'dangerous waters' off a crowded beach near the exclusive Sandbanks resort at Poole, Dorset”? It’s hard to care. And yet that’s what Valérie Mréjen is trying to do here. To give death back its kick. Not by being graphic but by looking at death’s effect on us. Not every death will matter to us but every death should matter to someone.

There is no story to this book as such, no beginning, middle and end in the traditional sense, rather what we’re presented with—and it takes a bit of getting used to—is a series of, for want of a better word, vignettes. Many end with a death. Others are reflections on the loss of someone known to the ever-shifting narrator. None are named, in fact the only names I recall seeing in the book are that of a cat and a painting. All we have are pronouns and this is where I think the exercise fails although not completely. It just makes it incredibly hard to see the connections between the sections because there are overlaps but try to imagine watching, say, Romeo and Juliet where no one calls anyone else by a personal name; it would make the balcony scene problematic for starters.

In her note at the end of the book the translator talks about “the seamless shifts in tense, register and point of view that run through this novel, yielding more oddity and ambiguity”:

My greatest challenge in translating Forêt noire was, without question, finding the right way to carry that strangeness over into English, and striking the delicate balance between vagueness and precision—and, by extension, between formal distance and emotional immediacy—that gives this writing its subtle dissonance.

It’s this odd balancing act that, at times, makes this book harder to read than it needs to be. For example:

Not long before that, they’d found out while reading the newspaper from back to front that their old professor, who must have been lonely and deeply depressed, had also put an end to his life, that he’d made the same final gesture as a filmmaker he admired and to whom he had devoted a book.

Why keep the filmmaker’s name a secret? Might it be Raymond Depardon or Ernst Lubitsch perchance? And, honestly, would either of those be your first and second choices? I always come back to the same question when authors do non-traditional things: What’s gained by this? Usually I find it’s a trade-off and more is lost than gained and I found that here.

Despite its oddness and continually shifting directions there was something at work here more than mere artifice though. This paragraph really jumped out at me and, hey, no one actually dies in it:

CLASS PHOTOS TOLD MUCH THE same story: pictures of generations of schoolchildren—lined up by height, either seated or standing, by a photographer who could gauge their dimensions with a quick glance but who also, according to certain students who resented being stuck with the little kids when they were just as tall as the others, sometimes flubbed it—told the story of how their paths would diverge and lead off in unknown directions. Those smiling, glum-eyed or grimacing children who waited somewhat dubiously for a bird to pop out of the camera, who posed in front of chestnut trees and brick facades with identical windows, all those perfectly aligned faces told you, one by one, that they would have totally disparate and unrelated destinies; that some would lead calm, uneventful lives, while others would suffer terrible fates, fall seriously ill, mourn several loved ones, or, on the contrary, would find themselves blessed with luck and opportunity, would settle abroad, move to the countryside, take over the apartments and businesses of their parents in the neighbourhoods where they grew up. Seeing all those eyes looking straight ahead, the contours of faces brought together for a moment by an accident of geography and the fact that they were about the same age; seeing the silhouettes of children who played together for now but would lose touch far sooner than they imagined, you could be quite certain that in just a few years it would be impossible to reassemble the exact same group. You’d wonder, too, how they might have changed in appearance or manner, which ones you would still recognize, and which would have become other people entirely.

School photos are something we’ve all had taken and, of course, we’ll have lost touch with virtually everyone we’re pictured with and yet we knew them and if we learned, as I did a few years back, that one of our classmates had suffered an untimely death you can’t not been affected. You don’t know them, you never really knew them but they’re not total strangers.

This won’t be a book for everyone and you might even feel dissatisfied by the time you reach the end—if you even have the patience to make it all the way through—but I doubt you’ll have read it and not feel something even if you find yourself struggling to put a name to that something.

[Jonas Specktor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beguiling , darkly humorous and quite moving journey through the twisting roads of death and the subconscious. This slim novella contains a lot of depth. Looking forward to hopefully seeing more of Mréjen's work in translation in the near future (I suppose I ought to learn French.)

[Marie Elaine Toth-Zufall · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t think this book was a bad book, but I don’t think it was for me. The whole story feels like it is told from a cold distance, what little story there is. Some of the small details were lovely in a way, but at times it felt little more than take on weird obituaries in a newspaper.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hell yes this book about death is beautiful, haunting, unforgettable

[Vani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5 stars

Imagine yourself flipping through a newspaper and coming across the obituaries page. You see photos of people, many old, some young. Most of us usually glance at the photos and turn the page. But what if you stopped and looked at them? Really looked at them and thought about the lives they led, the people they knew, and most relevant to this book, how they died? Reading this book feels like getting short glimpses into their lives and deaths.

I took weeks to finish it, reading a page or two every night and sometimes going days without opening it at all. Some stories are a just a few sentences long; the longest is about 3 ebook pages. The stories feel emotionally removed somehow and can be confusing because none of the characters have names, but the last line usually delivers a punch to the gut.

[Courtney Bagby · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous short story; between an outing in Paris with her mother’s spirit, we are told stories of death. The translation is beautifully done, I wish I could read French well enough for the original version. The writing style is like a garden in the way that each death is presented like a flower blooming before you, sometimes odd, many times tragic, and often times relatable to pain we have felt with loss ourselves. What a wonderful gift the writer and translator have with words to have conveyed such a deep topic with a beauty and warmth and understanding that death will never be understood.

Had a two month drought from reading and I’m delighted that I kick off the last three months of reading with this.

[Courtney Leblanc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ironically pleasant little book about death and the footprints it leaves on us all in the smallest ways possible. While my grandpa’s, uncle’s and friend’s immature/ expected deaths were beyond devastating and hard to cope with personally I also have vivid memory of people I barely knew..... from a girl in my kindergarten class being murdered by her dad to a boy in college who was hit by train. This shit is real and rarely expressed like this as a short story novel. Well done.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book focuses in on death and the people it touches, skipping from one death to another death, all of which live in the author's subconscious. It’s short at about 80 pages and has some interesting prose, but it is quite a confusing read and actually quite dull at times. This short book does not enthuse me enough to write more.

[Adrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short journey into the banality and triviality of death. From suicide to babies drowning in an inch of water, Black Forest reminds the reader that life is fragile and easily snuffed out. The only downside is how abrupt and short some of the stories are ranging from a few sentences to a short paragraphs but never really fleshed out. I wanted more.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25 stars

I'm not sure I buy this as a novella. It's more like a collection of loosely connected flash fiction. Which is fine, it just felt a little insubstantial in the end. Mréjen is clearly a talented writer though, and I would be interested to read something else by her.

[KB · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a lot about this to admire but ultimately the ever shifting protagonist and the effort to figure out if there was any kind of unifying thread in this novel other than death wore me out. My guess is it’s better in French.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cover, and title, perfectly describe what you will find within it.

[reljie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

it was a really interesting read and, surprisingly, quite hard to put down! though i found it really hard to keep up with the characters since none of them had names.

[Katie Josephine · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5
This felt so disjointed for me. Though the writing was beautiful and the theme poignant I found myself struggling to push through the book, and it’s only 80 pages.

[a.d. · Rating 3 out of 5]

a moving anatomical study of death