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Histoires de la nuit
Il ne reste presque plus rien à La Bassée : un bourg et quelques hameaux, dont celui qu'occupent Bergogne, sa femme Marion et leur fille Ida, ainsi qu'une voisine, Christine, une artiste installée ici depuis des années.
On s'active, on se prépare pour l'anniversaire de Marion, dont on va fêter les quarante ans. Mais alors que la fête se prépare, des inconnus rôdent autour de la maison.
Laurent Mauvignier livre un roman magistral. Dans le thriller façon Mauvignier, le suspense n'est pas, ou si peu, affaire d'action. C'est une histoire de langage. Si l'un des compliments que l'on adresse fréquemment aux bons polars a trait à la concision de leur style, à l'efficacité d'une langue ramassée tout entière occupée à décrire ce qui a lieu, Histoires de la nuit mérite une pluie d'éloges pour des raisons absolument inverses.
Plus la phrase s'allonge, plus l'angoisse augmente, et plus le lecteur est attentif à ses ondulations, ses changements de rythme, ses relatives et autres volutes digressives – et plus, à nouveau, le suspense s'accroît. Une seule phrase de l'écrivain peut charrier à la fois les pensées d'un personnage, ce qu'il dit (qui échoue toujours à transmettre l'essentiel), ses déplacements dans l'espace, la lumière, tant de sensations, sans oublier, parfois, une fausse piste pour égarer le lecteur.
Certaines scènes, même pas particulièrement porteuses d'enjeux narratifs, sont ainsi étirées au maximum. Cette dilatation produit un effet étonnant, qui teinte d'étrangeté le réalisme du roman, lui donne les allures cauchemardesques d'un conte. Un conte qui pourrait être tiré de l'épais recueil Histoires de la nuit, dans lequel Marion pioche ce qu'elle lit à Ida au moment du coucher, même si ce n'est pas toujours de l'âge de l'enfant, qui en sort tremblante.
On s'active, on se prépare pour l'anniversaire de Marion, dont on va fêter les quarante ans. Mais alors que la fête se prépare, des inconnus rôdent autour de la maison.
Laurent Mauvignier livre un roman magistral. Dans le thriller façon Mauvignier, le suspense n'est pas, ou si peu, affaire d'action. C'est une histoire de langage. Si l'un des compliments que l'on adresse fréquemment aux bons polars a trait à la concision de leur style, à l'efficacité d'une langue ramassée tout entière occupée à décrire ce qui a lieu, Histoires de la nuit mérite une pluie d'éloges pour des raisons absolument inverses.
Plus la phrase s'allonge, plus l'angoisse augmente, et plus le lecteur est attentif à ses ondulations, ses changements de rythme, ses relatives et autres volutes digressives – et plus, à nouveau, le suspense s'accroît. Une seule phrase de l'écrivain peut charrier à la fois les pensées d'un personnage, ce qu'il dit (qui échoue toujours à transmettre l'essentiel), ses déplacements dans l'espace, la lumière, tant de sensations, sans oublier, parfois, une fausse piste pour égarer le lecteur.
Certaines scènes, même pas particulièrement porteuses d'enjeux narratifs, sont ainsi étirées au maximum. Cette dilatation produit un effet étonnant, qui teinte d'étrangeté le réalisme du roman, lui donne les allures cauchemardesques d'un conte. Un conte qui pourrait être tiré de l'épais recueil Histoires de la nuit, dans lequel Marion pioche ce qu'elle lit à Ida au moment du coucher, même si ce n'est pas toujours de l'âge de l'enfant, qui en sort tremblante.
608 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published September 3, 2020
302 people are currently reading
8488 people want to read
About the author
Laurent Mauvignier
30 books142 followersLaurent Mauvignier was born in Tours (France) in 1967. He graduated from the Beaux-Art (plastic arts) in 1991.
He has published several novels with the Editions de Minuit and his books have been translated in several countries, among them In the Crowd by Faber and Faber (2008). His novels try to map out reality while confronting what cannot be voiced and the limits of what can be said.
His words attempt to articulate absence and sorrow, love and lack; their endeavour is to hold back what sifts through the fingers and through the years.
Source: http://www.laurent-mauvignier.net/en/...
He has published several novels with the Editions de Minuit and his books have been translated in several countries, among them In the Crowd by Faber and Faber (2008). His novels try to map out reality while confronting what cannot be voiced and the limits of what can be said.
His words attempt to articulate absence and sorrow, love and lack; their endeavour is to hold back what sifts through the fingers and through the years.
Source: http://www.laurent-mauvignier.net/en/...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 418 reviews
March 14, 2023
And how joyful it is, in Christophe's mind and especially in Denis's, this mixture of looming revelry and looming terror
Well, let's just say that if I were nail-biter, all ten fingers would be down to the quick!
Mauvignier has done something pleasingly adroit here: he's taken the well-worn trope of the scary house invasion by hostile strangers and given it a dark literary spin purely through the stylistics of his writing.
What I mean is that the plot has been done countless times before, the characters are straight out of the stock-cupboard - and even the scenes are ones we've all known forever .
But the writing creates a glorious and productive tension between the clichés of content and the mode of telling. Using a close 3rd person which jumps into the consciousness of various characters and by eschewing the use of speech marks, this offers up an intense literary experience that puts us there experiencing the terror, the frightening brutality and psychopathy from both the inside and outside. I was thinking of a writer like Javier Marías with his winding clauses and forensic attention to details which, in a less accomplished hand, could be construed as filler but which, mysteriously, just wind the tension up to screaming level.
Personally, I felt that this was too long at around 500 pages and if I were the editor, I'd have cut the Christine story which can detract from what's going on in the main house. It's the sort of book that would benefit from being short enough to read in one or two sittings, and that shortening would allow us to watch, horror-struck, fingers over eyes and mouth, as all the things we expect come to fruition. And how clever that this doesn't try to shove in a twist or anything cheap - what Mauvignier adds to an overworked trope isn't an extension of plot - he plays that through without deviating from the script - but by wrapping it up in a literary style that proves itself as adept at ramping up the intensity as anything by more commercial writers.
I'd say this is to the 'home invasion' story what Marias is to the spy novel.
Many thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for an ARC via NetGalley
October 2, 2022
Laurent Mauvignier’s desperately uneven, slow-motion, literary thriller revisits his fictional Le Bassée, a semi-rural region of France. In what’s essentially an attempt to subvert the all-too-familiar, home invasion plot, Mauvignier tackles some weighty subjects ranging from troubled “white” masculinity, marital frustrations, and domestic abuse to class resentment, and cultural rifts in contemporary France. His “huis clos” narrative plays out through spaces of literal and metaphorical confinement. Patrice, his wife Marion and daughter Ida, and their close neighbour, once-celebrated artist Christine, live like an extended family in an isolated hamlet, close to a small town. The area has seen better days, jobs are scarce, younger generations have moved away, and Patrice is barely scraping a living from the smallholding passed down from his father. The quartet are bound together by shared, daily rituals yet separated by secrets and lies. The action takes place over two days, in the build-up to a celebration planned for Marion’s fortieth birthday, an event marred by the arrival of another in a stream of poison pen letters addressed to Christine then totally thrown off-course by the sudden appearance of three, sinister strangers.
Mauvignier’s noir-ish story’s explicitly borrowing from numerous genres, from traditional Westerns to fairy tales, and the contes cruels glimpsed in the bedtime stories Marion reads to Ida. It’s also a highly-referential, at times deliberately cinematic, piece which variously pays homage to the films of Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson and Claude Chabrol. Although Mauvignier seems to be aiming for a level of psychological depth here, I found his characters, particularly the three intruders, stereotypical, even stock, figures. There’s Christine - a perfect role for Isabelle Huppert - a wealthy, bohemian, Parisian in exile; Patrice a "doughy," brooding farmer; Marion the feisty ‘femme fatale’ with a dubious past; Ida the curiously, ‘knowing’ child; rounded off by the band of violent, resentful, working-class criminals who disrupt the hamlet’s ordered existence. Although Christine’s presumably partly informed by Mauvignier’s own art-school background.
Mauvignier choice of style marks a radical departure from standard thriller-writing conventions: his sentences are often lengthy and winding; his scenes rendered in incredible, intense detail, sometimes akin to something unfolding in real time. I thought his slow-paced approach was highly effective for at least the first half, somehow ramping up rather than defusing an atmosphere of tension and growing menace. There are pleasing touches like the David Seymour photograph that inspired Christine’s artistic career but also hints at what’s to come. But as this progressed, I became more and more impatient, the detail started to feel like unnecessary filler, the style too dense, and the twisting plot increasingly forced and crudely drawn.
Home invasion narratives have a reputation for being socially conservative, a reflection of prevailing cultural anxieties, frequently dabbling in simplistic notions of the line between order and chaos and/or a showdown between good and evil. Although Mauvignier tries to steer clear of these pitfalls, he doesn’t entirely evade them, particularly when it comes to his depiction of gender and the nuclear family. There’s also more than a whiff of cloying sentimentality pervading the final chapters. Moreover, Mauvignier’s none-too-subtle when it comes to representing mental health issues, class divides, or sexual exploitation – the scenes with Patrice and the Black “prostitutes” in the neighbouring town were especially problematic. So, for me at least, this didn’t live up to its initial promise although there were some entertaining, imaginative flourishes along the way. Translated by Daniel Levin Becker.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions for an ARC
Rating: 2.5/3
Mauvignier’s noir-ish story’s explicitly borrowing from numerous genres, from traditional Westerns to fairy tales, and the contes cruels glimpsed in the bedtime stories Marion reads to Ida. It’s also a highly-referential, at times deliberately cinematic, piece which variously pays homage to the films of Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson and Claude Chabrol. Although Mauvignier seems to be aiming for a level of psychological depth here, I found his characters, particularly the three intruders, stereotypical, even stock, figures. There’s Christine - a perfect role for Isabelle Huppert - a wealthy, bohemian, Parisian in exile; Patrice a "doughy," brooding farmer; Marion the feisty ‘femme fatale’ with a dubious past; Ida the curiously, ‘knowing’ child; rounded off by the band of violent, resentful, working-class criminals who disrupt the hamlet’s ordered existence. Although Christine’s presumably partly informed by Mauvignier’s own art-school background.
Mauvignier choice of style marks a radical departure from standard thriller-writing conventions: his sentences are often lengthy and winding; his scenes rendered in incredible, intense detail, sometimes akin to something unfolding in real time. I thought his slow-paced approach was highly effective for at least the first half, somehow ramping up rather than defusing an atmosphere of tension and growing menace. There are pleasing touches like the David Seymour photograph that inspired Christine’s artistic career but also hints at what’s to come. But as this progressed, I became more and more impatient, the detail started to feel like unnecessary filler, the style too dense, and the twisting plot increasingly forced and crudely drawn.
Home invasion narratives have a reputation for being socially conservative, a reflection of prevailing cultural anxieties, frequently dabbling in simplistic notions of the line between order and chaos and/or a showdown between good and evil. Although Mauvignier tries to steer clear of these pitfalls, he doesn’t entirely evade them, particularly when it comes to his depiction of gender and the nuclear family. There’s also more than a whiff of cloying sentimentality pervading the final chapters. Moreover, Mauvignier’s none-too-subtle when it comes to representing mental health issues, class divides, or sexual exploitation – the scenes with Patrice and the Black “prostitutes” in the neighbouring town were especially problematic. So, for me at least, this didn’t live up to its initial promise although there were some entertaining, imaginative flourishes along the way. Translated by Daniel Levin Becker.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions for an ARC
Rating: 2.5/3
March 5, 2024
Shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize US & Canada
Longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize
"Colours, at night, when they are exposed to artificial lights, are drowned in a world where they lose all the depth and power they naturally accommodate in the light of day."
What a sentence. And it doesn’t mean anything. Or does it? Sure…? Don’t give up painting for a writing career, he’d have liked to tell her. He closed the notebook and tossed it back onto the work table carelessly. Or maybe just in a manner showing the disdain the notes inspire in him, without even saying what he thinks of them, just repeating in his head that this lady had to be pretty damn pretentious to write things about what she did, as though you could both do and watch yourself doing, say and watch yourself saying, like a traveller taking notes on the way his feet sink into the snow as he climbs the Himalayas without taking the time to look up at the mountain rising before him. But for the kind of stationary travel that is painting, in a remote old house out in the middle of nowhere, where each chair, each piece of clothing, each room reeks of dog and dust and is permeated with the smells of paints and chemicals, of turpentine, what point could there be in taking notes on what she does? Is it like a diary, a log book? Do you learn things by reading it that you’re not supposed to know about her life, or about her neighbours’ life?
The Birthday Party (2023) is Daniel Levin Becker's translation of Laurent Mauvignier's Histoires de la Nuit (2020).
The novel is a 500 page literary-thriller a combination of dense prose and page-turning suspense that treads a fine line between the best and the worst of literary fiction and genre thrillers and on another day (or with a shorter book) I might have loved this. But for me, unfortunately, the novel fell on the wrong side of that line, starting with the very first sentence.
She watches him through the window and what she sees in the car park, despite the reflection of the sun that blinds her and prevents her from seeing him as she’d like to, leaning against that old Renault Kangoo he’s going to have to get around to trading in one of these days–as though by watching him she can guess what he’s thinking, when maybe he’s just waiting for her to come out of this police station where he’s brought her for the how many times now, two or three in two weeks, she can’t remember–what she sees, in any case, elevated slightly over the car park which seems to incline somewhat past the grove of trees, standing near the chairs in the waiting room between a scrawny plant and a concrete pillar painted yellow on which she could read appeals for witnesses if she bothered to take an interest, is, because she’s slightly above it, overlooking and thus observing a misshapen version of it, a bit more packed down than it really is, the silhouette, compact but large, solid, of this man whom, she now thinks, she’s no doubt been too long in the habit of seeing as though he were still a child–not her child, she has none and has never felt the desire to have any–but one of those kids you look after from time to time, like a godchild or one of those nephews you can enjoy selfishly, for the pleasure they bring, taking advantage of their youthfulness without having to bother with all the trouble it entails, that educating them generates like so much inevitable collateral damage.
I normally love this type of labyrinthine, nested sentence, but this one didn't work for me, it felt a little too random.
In terms of the pyschological thriller aspects, the novel flits between the consciousness - or more accurately the close third-person PoV - of the characters, an aspect I find a little problematic when the plot requires withheld information. I recently read a Netgalley of the forthcoming None of This is True by Lisa Jewell (my teenage daughter's favourite writer) that did the thriller aspects rather better and, while initially falling into the same narrative trap, did provide a potential explanation in a last page twist (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Here it felt the busy characters were too busy making unrealistically astute pyschological appraisals to actually think about who was who and what they planned.
So 2.5 stars rounded to 2 for me but clearly a novel that's worked well for others.
The publisher
Published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo, which is the edition I read as a subscriber, but in the US, and for the purposes of the RofC Prize, by Transit Press.
Transit Books is a nonprofit publisher of international and American literature, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded in 2015, Transit Books is committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities.
Transit Books publishes a carefully curated list of award-winning literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, essay, and literature for children. Transit authors have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and been nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Booker Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and more.
Longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize
"Colours, at night, when they are exposed to artificial lights, are drowned in a world where they lose all the depth and power they naturally accommodate in the light of day."
What a sentence. And it doesn’t mean anything. Or does it? Sure…? Don’t give up painting for a writing career, he’d have liked to tell her. He closed the notebook and tossed it back onto the work table carelessly. Or maybe just in a manner showing the disdain the notes inspire in him, without even saying what he thinks of them, just repeating in his head that this lady had to be pretty damn pretentious to write things about what she did, as though you could both do and watch yourself doing, say and watch yourself saying, like a traveller taking notes on the way his feet sink into the snow as he climbs the Himalayas without taking the time to look up at the mountain rising before him. But for the kind of stationary travel that is painting, in a remote old house out in the middle of nowhere, where each chair, each piece of clothing, each room reeks of dog and dust and is permeated with the smells of paints and chemicals, of turpentine, what point could there be in taking notes on what she does? Is it like a diary, a log book? Do you learn things by reading it that you’re not supposed to know about her life, or about her neighbours’ life?
The Birthday Party (2023) is Daniel Levin Becker's translation of Laurent Mauvignier's Histoires de la Nuit (2020).
The novel is a 500 page literary-thriller a combination of dense prose and page-turning suspense that treads a fine line between the best and the worst of literary fiction and genre thrillers and on another day (or with a shorter book) I might have loved this. But for me, unfortunately, the novel fell on the wrong side of that line, starting with the very first sentence.
She watches him through the window and what she sees in the car park, despite the reflection of the sun that blinds her and prevents her from seeing him as she’d like to, leaning against that old Renault Kangoo he’s going to have to get around to trading in one of these days–as though by watching him she can guess what he’s thinking, when maybe he’s just waiting for her to come out of this police station where he’s brought her for the how many times now, two or three in two weeks, she can’t remember–what she sees, in any case, elevated slightly over the car park which seems to incline somewhat past the grove of trees, standing near the chairs in the waiting room between a scrawny plant and a concrete pillar painted yellow on which she could read appeals for witnesses if she bothered to take an interest, is, because she’s slightly above it, overlooking and thus observing a misshapen version of it, a bit more packed down than it really is, the silhouette, compact but large, solid, of this man whom, she now thinks, she’s no doubt been too long in the habit of seeing as though he were still a child–not her child, she has none and has never felt the desire to have any–but one of those kids you look after from time to time, like a godchild or one of those nephews you can enjoy selfishly, for the pleasure they bring, taking advantage of their youthfulness without having to bother with all the trouble it entails, that educating them generates like so much inevitable collateral damage.
I normally love this type of labyrinthine, nested sentence, but this one didn't work for me, it felt a little too random.
In terms of the pyschological thriller aspects, the novel flits between the consciousness - or more accurately the close third-person PoV - of the characters, an aspect I find a little problematic when the plot requires withheld information. I recently read a Netgalley of the forthcoming None of This is True by Lisa Jewell (my teenage daughter's favourite writer) that did the thriller aspects rather better and, while initially falling into the same narrative trap, did provide a potential explanation in a last page twist (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Here it felt the busy characters were too busy making unrealistically astute pyschological appraisals to actually think about who was who and what they planned.
So 2.5 stars rounded to 2 for me but clearly a novel that's worked well for others.
The publisher
Published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo, which is the edition I read as a subscriber, but in the US, and for the purposes of the RofC Prize, by Transit Press.
Transit Books is a nonprofit publisher of international and American literature, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded in 2015, Transit Books is committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities.
Transit Books publishes a carefully curated list of award-winning literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, essay, and literature for children. Transit authors have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and been nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Booker Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and more.
May 2, 2023
4.5, rounded up.
I'm as surprised as anyone how much I enjoyed this, since it features my number 1 bête noire in literature - convoluted, paragraph-long run-on sentences. It actually took me several tries to even get through the first page, which features a first sentence of about 300 words. But once I got into the groove, I found I could navigate such quite well, and even though the 500 pages cover less than 24 hours of a single day in minute detail - I was more or less rivetted all the way through to the Tarantino-esque bloody finale.
Comparisons have been made to Haneke's film 'Funny Games', and they are apt - but in reality 'home invasion' plotlines date back at least as far as 'The Petrified Forest,' and probably even longer. Here, there are many intricate reasons why the three antagonists show up in the small French hamlet, seeking the wife of a fat, bewildered farmer, and it is the slow-burn of learning that backstory that keeps one going. Not at all surprised the smooth translation was longlisted for the Booker International, and indeed, albeit not having read any of the other contenders, a bit miffed it didn't go any further.
PS. The original French title is 'Histoires de la nuit', which literally means 'Stories of the Night', which is both more appropriate and wouldn't cause confusion with the Pinter play - so weird they chose 'The Birthday Party' instead.
I'm as surprised as anyone how much I enjoyed this, since it features my number 1 bête noire in literature - convoluted, paragraph-long run-on sentences. It actually took me several tries to even get through the first page, which features a first sentence of about 300 words. But once I got into the groove, I found I could navigate such quite well, and even though the 500 pages cover less than 24 hours of a single day in minute detail - I was more or less rivetted all the way through to the Tarantino-esque bloody finale.
Comparisons have been made to Haneke's film 'Funny Games', and they are apt - but in reality 'home invasion' plotlines date back at least as far as 'The Petrified Forest,' and probably even longer. Here, there are many intricate reasons why the three antagonists show up in the small French hamlet, seeking the wife of a fat, bewildered farmer, and it is the slow-burn of learning that backstory that keeps one going. Not at all surprised the smooth translation was longlisted for the Booker International, and indeed, albeit not having read any of the other contenders, a bit miffed it didn't go any further.
PS. The original French title is 'Histoires de la nuit', which literally means 'Stories of the Night', which is both more appropriate and wouldn't cause confusion with the Pinter play - so weird they chose 'The Birthday Party' instead.
September 28, 2022
I found Mauvignier's way of writing to be a bit over the top. In a way I'd say it was over written and you have to seriously focus to keep track of what is happening as the sentences lead you off in tangents and are on a mission to create a forbidding atmosphere. After a while this became a bit tiring.
An ARC gently provided by author/publisher via Netgalley
February 4, 2023
Jon McGregor calls this book a ‘slow-motion thriller’ and it’s spot on. It is a French literary novel, with long, flowing sentences covering just one, terrible day in over 500 pages.
It is set in an isolated hamlet of three houses in rural Central France, where farmer Patrice has taken the day off to prepare a surprise party for this pretty wife who turns 40. When he returns home from shopping he discovers his daughter and neighbour are being held hostage by three men he has never seen before.
It takes some time to get used to the style and then some more to finish it, but it fits and pays off as the tension builds up. It felt like watching one of those tense French movies set in a room with conversation around the table. I also had to think of Saturday by Ian McEwan.
It is set in an isolated hamlet of three houses in rural Central France, where farmer Patrice has taken the day off to prepare a surprise party for this pretty wife who turns 40. When he returns home from shopping he discovers his daughter and neighbour are being held hostage by three men he has never seen before.
It takes some time to get used to the style and then some more to finish it, but it fits and pays off as the tension builds up. It felt like watching one of those tense French movies set in a room with conversation around the table. I also had to think of Saturday by Ian McEwan.
July 19, 2023
Blew me away.
The horror/thriller genre is not my usual go-to, and the writing in this novel does not at first feel like that of a horror novel. The writing is beautiful, it is meandering, it is sometimes mesmerizing and sometime sharply stark but always evocative. And it is taught -- stretching each moment to its deepest and fullest and longest extremities -- far longer than it is almost possible for the reader to bear. Which is exactly what causes this beauty of literature to be as horrific as is possible.
The story takes place over less than two days. But the tension begins on page one and only increases as the pages turn. Everything in this novel feels as if it is unfolding in slow motion and in an increasingly confined space. I couldn't look away; I couldn't stop turning the pages; the words had me trapped.
There are only a small number of characters, whom we come to know through the portions they each narrate and through other characters' narrations about them. First we meet Christine, who is a 69-year old eclectic and quasi-reclusive artist. Her neighbors are the Bergogne family: 47-year old farmer Patrice, his wife Marion for whom everyone is throwing a 40th birthday party, and their 10-year old daughter Ida. They all live in the hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, where the third house is presently vacant. Soon there are three bad guys. Then there are Marion's two co-workers.
Mauvignier's novel makes Alfred Hitchcock look like an amateur. We know from the start that something bad -- perhaps very bad -- is going to happen; but what that bad thing will be, and when that bad thing will be, and why that bad thing will be, and how exactly bad & for how long it will last -- honestly the story is unrelentless in stretching the answers to these questions for as long as possible.
There are no supernatural forces or monsters at work here. This story is terrifying precisely because all of the monsters are just regular people, with their regular secrets & vengeances & ghosts they carry around from their pasts.
This story was originally published in French and I read it in English translation and I cannot imagine how it could possibly have lost anything in translation. Hurrah for both author and translator.
The horror/thriller genre is not my usual go-to, and the writing in this novel does not at first feel like that of a horror novel. The writing is beautiful, it is meandering, it is sometimes mesmerizing and sometime sharply stark but always evocative. And it is taught -- stretching each moment to its deepest and fullest and longest extremities -- far longer than it is almost possible for the reader to bear. Which is exactly what causes this beauty of literature to be as horrific as is possible.
The story takes place over less than two days. But the tension begins on page one and only increases as the pages turn. Everything in this novel feels as if it is unfolding in slow motion and in an increasingly confined space. I couldn't look away; I couldn't stop turning the pages; the words had me trapped.
There are only a small number of characters, whom we come to know through the portions they each narrate and through other characters' narrations about them. First we meet Christine, who is a 69-year old eclectic and quasi-reclusive artist. Her neighbors are the Bergogne family: 47-year old farmer Patrice, his wife Marion for whom everyone is throwing a 40th birthday party, and their 10-year old daughter Ida. They all live in the hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, where the third house is presently vacant. Soon there are three bad guys. Then there are Marion's two co-workers.
Mauvignier's novel makes Alfred Hitchcock look like an amateur. We know from the start that something bad -- perhaps very bad -- is going to happen; but what that bad thing will be, and when that bad thing will be, and why that bad thing will be, and how exactly bad & for how long it will last -- honestly the story is unrelentless in stretching the answers to these questions for as long as possible.
There are no supernatural forces or monsters at work here. This story is terrifying precisely because all of the monsters are just regular people, with their regular secrets & vengeances & ghosts they carry around from their pasts.
This story was originally published in French and I read it in English translation and I cannot imagine how it could possibly have lost anything in translation. Hurrah for both author and translator.
June 29, 2023
4.5 rounded up
Excellent literary thriller. Propulsive writing, long winding sentences, drawn out plot that just raises the tension.
Excellent literary thriller. Propulsive writing, long winding sentences, drawn out plot that just raises the tension.
April 12, 2023
The Birthday Party is a clear indication that Europeans have a way of doing things which separate them from the rest of the world.
I’ll explain myself.
The Birthday Party takes place in a farmhouse in a French hamlet. The family consists of father, Patrice, mother, Marion and their child Ida. Also there is the neighbour Christine, who is close to the family. Unfortunately the love between Patrice and Marion is dying and Patrice is conscious of that. In order to rekindle any flame, he decides to hold a surprise party for Marion’s fortieth.
As things are being set up three men hijack the party and keep the family hostage. Throughout their stay we understand the motives behind this disruption, which in turn, reveals deep secrets about each family member. This builds up to a shoot out.
As one can see The Birthday Party is about the hidden lives we have and that it takes tragedy to bring them out. The book also delves into the many layers of the human psyche and how we all react in troubled times.
Plotwise The Birthday Party is not dissimilar to American author Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel bel Canto: A party is disrupted, the bad guys are semi comical, there are thrilling moments but it also a book about hidden pasts.
HOWEVER
Mauvignier’s book contains 200 pages of pure exposition. He takes ages to build up the characters and their way of life. Then there are pages and pages of deep analysis of the characters – the delinquent Stutter, Patrice’s shady past, Marion’s actions. Each motive and thought is dealt upon with the rigor of twenty sessions at a high end psychiatrist. Not to mention the long sentences. It all is a tiring book.
Patchett on the other hand, is direct goes to the action quickly and manages to examine her characters thoughts without wasting any time and still keep the thrill factor high.
I’m not saying that one way is better than the other but we Europeans tend to faff about in both literature and film. As for my personal feelings about The Birthday Party, I felt that for a 500 page book, it wasted too much time on exposition, while the actual story worked well.
I’ll explain myself.
The Birthday Party takes place in a farmhouse in a French hamlet. The family consists of father, Patrice, mother, Marion and their child Ida. Also there is the neighbour Christine, who is close to the family. Unfortunately the love between Patrice and Marion is dying and Patrice is conscious of that. In order to rekindle any flame, he decides to hold a surprise party for Marion’s fortieth.
As things are being set up three men hijack the party and keep the family hostage. Throughout their stay we understand the motives behind this disruption, which in turn, reveals deep secrets about each family member. This builds up to a shoot out.
As one can see The Birthday Party is about the hidden lives we have and that it takes tragedy to bring them out. The book also delves into the many layers of the human psyche and how we all react in troubled times.
Plotwise The Birthday Party is not dissimilar to American author Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel bel Canto: A party is disrupted, the bad guys are semi comical, there are thrilling moments but it also a book about hidden pasts.
HOWEVER
Mauvignier’s book contains 200 pages of pure exposition. He takes ages to build up the characters and their way of life. Then there are pages and pages of deep analysis of the characters – the delinquent Stutter, Patrice’s shady past, Marion’s actions. Each motive and thought is dealt upon with the rigor of twenty sessions at a high end psychiatrist. Not to mention the long sentences. It all is a tiring book.
Patchett on the other hand, is direct goes to the action quickly and manages to examine her characters thoughts without wasting any time and still keep the thrill factor high.
I’m not saying that one way is better than the other but we Europeans tend to faff about in both literature and film. As for my personal feelings about The Birthday Party, I felt that for a 500 page book, it wasted too much time on exposition, while the actual story worked well.
October 5, 2025
So you just gon bring me a birthday gift on my birthday to my birthday party on my birthday with a birthday gift
November 26, 2020
Un thriller aux ailes de grande littérature, dont le suspense se maintient grâce à la technique narrative de Laurent Mauvignier, qui s’étend à travers de longues phrases dont les va-et-vient et l'usage minutieux du détail, prolongent la tension de l'intrigue, parvenant ainsi à garder le lecteur collé aux plus de six cents pages du livre.
C’est pourquoi Jérôme Garcin, dans sa critique dans L’Obs, a décrit le roman comme « pouvant être du Stephen King, revisité par Claude Simon ». Mais c'est inexact. En principe parce que King est un auteur à succès (de best-sellers pour un certain type de lecteur), dont je reconnais que je n'ai jamais lu, car son travail ne m'intéresse pas du tout. Le grand Claude Simon, par contre, aurait construit un roman entièrement différent, avec les mêmes éléments d'intrigue, et serait sûrement entré dans les limites de la mémoire d'une manière beaucoup plus convaincante.
Mais mis à part cela, le roman est bon dans le genre auquel il appartient, dont les chances d’excellence sont assez réduites par la façon dont l’intrigue prédomine et la tension est maintenue. Et c’est exactement là que l’auteur brille et le rend beaucoup plus intéressant qu’il ne pourrait l’être en principe. Histoires de la nuit semble très différent des autres romans de Mauvignier que j'ai lus et franchement, il n'atteint pas la hauteur de Des hommes, qui est mon préféré. Et juste pour finir, il suffit de dire que c'est aussi une surprise et une première fois, de voir un thriller dans le catalogue des mythiques Éditions de Minuit.
C’est pourquoi Jérôme Garcin, dans sa critique dans L’Obs, a décrit le roman comme « pouvant être du Stephen King, revisité par Claude Simon ». Mais c'est inexact. En principe parce que King est un auteur à succès (de best-sellers pour un certain type de lecteur), dont je reconnais que je n'ai jamais lu, car son travail ne m'intéresse pas du tout. Le grand Claude Simon, par contre, aurait construit un roman entièrement différent, avec les mêmes éléments d'intrigue, et serait sûrement entré dans les limites de la mémoire d'une manière beaucoup plus convaincante.
Mais mis à part cela, le roman est bon dans le genre auquel il appartient, dont les chances d’excellence sont assez réduites par la façon dont l’intrigue prédomine et la tension est maintenue. Et c’est exactement là que l’auteur brille et le rend beaucoup plus intéressant qu’il ne pourrait l’être en principe. Histoires de la nuit semble très différent des autres romans de Mauvignier que j'ai lus et franchement, il n'atteint pas la hauteur de Des hommes, qui est mon préféré. Et juste pour finir, il suffit de dire que c'est aussi une surprise et une première fois, de voir un thriller dans le catalogue des mythiques Éditions de Minuit.
May 22, 2023
Really interesting as a study in how to build tension. Mauvignier's got a lot of great tricks. One of them even goes back to the first work of French literature, The Song of Roland, in the way the narrative stops time to go back and revisit a moment from another angle. I also liked how it withheld information and slowed down time, especially in the first half of the book, to really make the intrusion so much more threatening because you share the family's confusion, you don't know why they're here and you don't know what they're capable of. Though at times it got a little bit frustrating (huge chunks of text with an often annoying syntax and plenty of repetition), I really appreciated it and was on the edge of my seat for most of the novel.
But who was sending Christine the letters? We never find out.
But who was sending Christine the letters? We never find out.
December 11, 2022
Mauvignier writes ferociously, provocatively, and with tenacity. It’s riveting stuff. My first by him, and I’ve become an instant fan. I will certainly check out his other (translated) works.
He masterfully draws the reader into a parochial French hamlet - an unremarkable world - sleepy and soporific. We almost taste the boredom and sense of nothingness. Nothing ever changes. Nothing dramatic ever happens.
And then he hits us with a hammer blow: sleepy rural charm is replaced by a high-octane thriller to rival any set in the heart of Paris.
My only criticism is that I found the book too long at 500 pages, diluting the tension slightly.
My thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions and NetGalley for granting this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.
He masterfully draws the reader into a parochial French hamlet - an unremarkable world - sleepy and soporific. We almost taste the boredom and sense of nothingness. Nothing ever changes. Nothing dramatic ever happens.
And then he hits us with a hammer blow: sleepy rural charm is replaced by a high-octane thriller to rival any set in the heart of Paris.
My only criticism is that I found the book too long at 500 pages, diluting the tension slightly.
My thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions and NetGalley for granting this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.
October 8, 2023
Splendida sorpresa . Mauvigner scrive un romanzo mondo che offre molteplici livelli di lettura : dalla presunta stagnazione rurale al thriller psicologico .
Una narrazione microscopica, creata da descrizioni , flashback e pensieri capaci di creare una lettura totalmente immersiva ( siamo ai livelli della Tartt ).
La caratterizzazione dei personaggi è fenomenale , nulla viene lasciato al caso , il detto è il non detto si fondono in un connubio perfetto.
L’autore ha la stessa capacità di Haneke con le sue pellicole , il risultato è notevole .
Da leggere senza ombra di dubbio . Sono davvero curioso di recuperare anche i suoi precendeti lavori .
Una narrazione microscopica, creata da descrizioni , flashback e pensieri capaci di creare una lettura totalmente immersiva ( siamo ai livelli della Tartt ).
La caratterizzazione dei personaggi è fenomenale , nulla viene lasciato al caso , il detto è il non detto si fondono in un connubio perfetto.
L’autore ha la stessa capacità di Haneke con le sue pellicole , il risultato è notevole .
Da leggere senza ombra di dubbio . Sono davvero curioso di recuperare anche i suoi precendeti lavori .
March 12, 2024
The sun is shining, I'm finally able to take time for myself, and it's a good day all around. I'm so behind but I'll be catching up soon.
The full post is here (absolutely no spoilers, unlike the blurb on the back of my edition, which really torqued me):
https://www.readingavidly.com/2024/03...
I've described this book to friends as a demanding novel due to its style, but once you get used to the way it is written, it becomes unputdownable. It's also a story that eventually began to fry my nerves until the last page, and I have to admit that more than once I was beyond tempted to just take a peek to make sure everything came out okay. I didn't, of course, but I really, REALLY wanted to. I've seen this book described as a "thriller," a genre I don't particularly care for, but here it serves more as a vehicle that allows for examining human nature under extreme duress.
The story covers two days in the lives of four people who live in a small hamlet in France, in a cluster of three homes not very close to anyone else. During the first day, the author allows his characters to go about their business of every day life while allowing the reader a glimpse into the tensions that exist among them, while in the second he moves them into full-on crisis mode. The action is slow and very controlled, with the narrative moving from character to character without wrecking the reading flow as the pressure intensifies from moment to moment. The back blurb notes that the story is a "deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves," which it is in part, but I see it more as an intense character study examining lives that are already on the edge as they become pushed into a situation well beyond their control.
Labeled as a "gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present," it's easy to understand why this book has been described by so many readers as a thriller -- it is definitely a nailbiter, and I have to say that the author does a fine job of leaving the answer to the key question of "why" all of this is happening until almost the very end, a factor that keeps the pages turning. The Birthday Party may be frustrating for some people who like swift action, or who don't particularly care for long, streaming paragraphs, but as I noted earlier, once I got the reading rhythm under my belt I did not want to put it down. I do think though, for reasons I won't get into here, that whoever decided on the English title should have used the translated original, as it makes so much more sense and adds another layer of depth to the story as a whole.
Recommended, for sure.
The full post is here (absolutely no spoilers, unlike the blurb on the back of my edition, which really torqued me):
https://www.readingavidly.com/2024/03...
I've described this book to friends as a demanding novel due to its style, but once you get used to the way it is written, it becomes unputdownable. It's also a story that eventually began to fry my nerves until the last page, and I have to admit that more than once I was beyond tempted to just take a peek to make sure everything came out okay. I didn't, of course, but I really, REALLY wanted to. I've seen this book described as a "thriller," a genre I don't particularly care for, but here it serves more as a vehicle that allows for examining human nature under extreme duress.
The story covers two days in the lives of four people who live in a small hamlet in France, in a cluster of three homes not very close to anyone else. During the first day, the author allows his characters to go about their business of every day life while allowing the reader a glimpse into the tensions that exist among them, while in the second he moves them into full-on crisis mode. The action is slow and very controlled, with the narrative moving from character to character without wrecking the reading flow as the pressure intensifies from moment to moment. The back blurb notes that the story is a "deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves," which it is in part, but I see it more as an intense character study examining lives that are already on the edge as they become pushed into a situation well beyond their control.
Labeled as a "gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present," it's easy to understand why this book has been described by so many readers as a thriller -- it is definitely a nailbiter, and I have to say that the author does a fine job of leaving the answer to the key question of "why" all of this is happening until almost the very end, a factor that keeps the pages turning. The Birthday Party may be frustrating for some people who like swift action, or who don't particularly care for long, streaming paragraphs, but as I noted earlier, once I got the reading rhythm under my belt I did not want to put it down. I do think though, for reasons I won't get into here, that whoever decided on the English title should have used the translated original, as it makes so much more sense and adds another layer of depth to the story as a whole.
Recommended, for sure.
March 31, 2023
Guys! Ten books in and I may have finally found a winner from the #internationabookerprize longlist.
This is one of those books that's best to go in without knowing anything - even a reaction could be a spoiler. I was honestly scared of this one because the idea of a 'slow thriller' sounded like an oxymoron, the length, and that first sentence. I feel like the first sentence is legendary now. Don't let a paragraph long sentence put you off 😅 Once this book grips you, you won't even notice. Everything just starts to flow.
The pacing in this was amazing, at almost 450 pages I never found it to drag. Mauvignier knows how and when to dole out enough cliffhangers to keep you going. The writing was the best part for me though, this isn't a dialogue heavy book. Instead you're in each character's head, switching between them seamlessly. The movement between characters thoughts and the past and present was masterful. In doing this he elevates characters from their usual tropey one-dimensionality into characters with more complex thoughts and backstory.
I hate to oversell this, but I just had so much fun reading this (reading along with a group of friends definitely adds to it). I felt exhausted at the end because I had to hurry and find out what was going to happen next. There's a payoff to the slow burn in the beginning. This was a wild ride.
This is one of those books that's best to go in without knowing anything - even a reaction could be a spoiler. I was honestly scared of this one because the idea of a 'slow thriller' sounded like an oxymoron, the length, and that first sentence. I feel like the first sentence is legendary now. Don't let a paragraph long sentence put you off 😅 Once this book grips you, you won't even notice. Everything just starts to flow.
The pacing in this was amazing, at almost 450 pages I never found it to drag. Mauvignier knows how and when to dole out enough cliffhangers to keep you going. The writing was the best part for me though, this isn't a dialogue heavy book. Instead you're in each character's head, switching between them seamlessly. The movement between characters thoughts and the past and present was masterful. In doing this he elevates characters from their usual tropey one-dimensionality into characters with more complex thoughts and backstory.
I hate to oversell this, but I just had so much fun reading this (reading along with a group of friends definitely adds to it). I felt exhausted at the end because I had to hurry and find out what was going to happen next. There's a payoff to the slow burn in the beginning. This was a wild ride.
August 18, 2023
Selecionado na Longlist do International Booker Prize 2023.
Há algum tempo que não começava a ler um livro e a experiência não fluía tão perfeita, agarrando-me, e clamando por mim sempre que dele me desligava. A escrita de Mauvignier faz lembrar Proust no modo como estende as frases de modo lírico, mas simultaneamente causal, ativando o nosso desejo por querer saber mais, e assim não conseguir parar de ler. O tema é a narrativa clássica de crime e mistério do ataque, a meio da noite, a uma casa de família por um grupo de malfeitores. Mas a forma não segue o género, é antes literária em profundidade, com uma escrita elaborada e erudita que acaba por criar uma experiência de leitura muito particular.
As personagens são apresentadas por dentro, Mauvignier cria uma descrição interior intensa de Patrice e Marion. A exposição das suas fragilidades é tão verosímil que se torna impossível não sentir uma enorme empatia. Já o mundo escolhido, a ruralidade da província francesa, garante um universo coeso pelo isolamento, assim como oferece um substrato mais humilde e honesto às personagens.
O ponto fundamental do romance assenta no uso de frases longas que constroem parágrafos longos, que por sua vez Mauvignier utiliza para estender o suspense. Ou seja, aquilo que queremos saber vai sendo mantido em suspenso, porque vamos sabendo mais e mais coisas sobre as pessoas e os lugares. Por vezes, acontece um certo desespero porque queremos acelerar a leitura, e não queremos saber mais sobre aquela personagem ou aquele espaço. Mas na generalidade funciona bem, porque o autor tem uma capacidade impressionante de observar e descrever no detalhe muito do que passaria normalmente despercebido pelo enfoque apenas no enredo. Não será para todos, já que a trama que se esgotaria em 140 páginas num normal romance thriller, aqui é estendida por 640 páginas.
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
Há algum tempo que não começava a ler um livro e a experiência não fluía tão perfeita, agarrando-me, e clamando por mim sempre que dele me desligava. A escrita de Mauvignier faz lembrar Proust no modo como estende as frases de modo lírico, mas simultaneamente causal, ativando o nosso desejo por querer saber mais, e assim não conseguir parar de ler. O tema é a narrativa clássica de crime e mistério do ataque, a meio da noite, a uma casa de família por um grupo de malfeitores. Mas a forma não segue o género, é antes literária em profundidade, com uma escrita elaborada e erudita que acaba por criar uma experiência de leitura muito particular.
As personagens são apresentadas por dentro, Mauvignier cria uma descrição interior intensa de Patrice e Marion. A exposição das suas fragilidades é tão verosímil que se torna impossível não sentir uma enorme empatia. Já o mundo escolhido, a ruralidade da província francesa, garante um universo coeso pelo isolamento, assim como oferece um substrato mais humilde e honesto às personagens.
O ponto fundamental do romance assenta no uso de frases longas que constroem parágrafos longos, que por sua vez Mauvignier utiliza para estender o suspense. Ou seja, aquilo que queremos saber vai sendo mantido em suspenso, porque vamos sabendo mais e mais coisas sobre as pessoas e os lugares. Por vezes, acontece um certo desespero porque queremos acelerar a leitura, e não queremos saber mais sobre aquela personagem ou aquele espaço. Mas na generalidade funciona bem, porque o autor tem uma capacidade impressionante de observar e descrever no detalhe muito do que passaria normalmente despercebido pelo enfoque apenas no enredo. Não será para todos, já que a trama que se esgotaria em 140 páginas num normal romance thriller, aqui é estendida por 640 páginas.
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
May 24, 2023
imagine if rachel cusk wrote funny games
March 27, 2023
The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier will test your patience. Nothing happens till the book reaches the last 250 pages or so. A lot happens – a lot more than we can imagine and Mauvignier takes us through lives in a hamlet, with such unassuming clarity and nonchalant writing that as a reader you feel removed and involved at the same time – if that can ever happen while reading a book, and yet it did happen to me.
The Birthday Party takes place in the present time, hurling back into time, traversing happiness, and melancholy, only for the characters to tumble into unbearable catastrophe. Patrice, a farmer in a French hamlet, is out on an errand for his wife Marion’s 40th birthday. Their daughter Ida is on her way home from school to get a cake ready with their solitary artist neighbour Christine. In seconds, or rather what seems pages and pages, Christine and Ida get taken hostage by intruders. Why did this happen? What was the reason? Who is behind this? Is it connected to Patrice, Marion, and Christine’s past?
There is a lot to cover to get to the answers. Long winding paragraphs, each character and their experiences are fleshed with great care, the translation by Daniel Levin Becker is busy – all over the place, given how the original is – till the reader finds a rhythm and pace to the chaos that is about the unleash itself, both on the reader and the characters.
The Birthday Party is so much more than what meets the eye. A book about families, about should the past really matter when it comes down to it, about what we have done that cannot be undone, about the evening itself, about what we truly know when it comes to those closest to us, and what lays beneath – quietly, silently, most dramatically, waiting to explode.
The Birthday Party takes place in the present time, hurling back into time, traversing happiness, and melancholy, only for the characters to tumble into unbearable catastrophe. Patrice, a farmer in a French hamlet, is out on an errand for his wife Marion’s 40th birthday. Their daughter Ida is on her way home from school to get a cake ready with their solitary artist neighbour Christine. In seconds, or rather what seems pages and pages, Christine and Ida get taken hostage by intruders. Why did this happen? What was the reason? Who is behind this? Is it connected to Patrice, Marion, and Christine’s past?
There is a lot to cover to get to the answers. Long winding paragraphs, each character and their experiences are fleshed with great care, the translation by Daniel Levin Becker is busy – all over the place, given how the original is – till the reader finds a rhythm and pace to the chaos that is about the unleash itself, both on the reader and the characters.
The Birthday Party is so much more than what meets the eye. A book about families, about should the past really matter when it comes down to it, about what we have done that cannot be undone, about the evening itself, about what we truly know when it comes to those closest to us, and what lays beneath – quietly, silently, most dramatically, waiting to explode.
January 17, 2024
I enjoyed this tale of home invasion in a small French hamlet. The prose is beautiful and leisurely paced but it keeps you on edge. It's a fine example of psychological literary thriller done right. The characters are well-developed and everyone has a secret, which keeps you guessing until the end. Mauvignier masterfully builds tension and the novel gets progressively darker as you read. I would recommend this book to the fans of psychological suspense and literary fiction.
January 6, 2024
The violence of domestic life is perhaps the most insidious kind, the warm comfort of home twisted into something malignant and cruel. It is this perversion of the familiar, the sudden revelation of that which you thought you knew as something entirely foreign, that is most horrifying.
The truth behind "The Birthday Party" is revealed only in the book's final act. The vast majority of its 500-page length unspools slowly, but not without a simmering tension. Your heart rate goes up along with the page number, but it happens so gradually that you're unaware of it until you feel your heart ricocheting off your rib cage.
It's so deceptive, the pace with which the events play out, because they do so at such a leisurely pace that you're lulled into a feeling of something like comfort. It doesn't feel right for a thriller to progress so slowly, I thought while reading, This thing would be better if it were 100 or more pages shorter.
I'm not entirely persuaded now that this book wouldn't have benefitted from being shorter, but I also have my doubts that the final 50-100 pages would have been as effective as they are if not for the fact that, by the time we get there, we're half asleep. Not out of boredom (these pages are never boring), but because the events unfold at a pace similar to that of regular domestic life so that we're pulled into them by our own complacency and compliance ... which is perhaps the point.
There's a misogyny behind the events of "The Birthday Party" that's echoed in the spectacular fifth season of "Fargo" currently airing on FX — the toxic belief that women are subservient to men and that any sort of physical intimacy or exchanged vows give men ownership over women for life. Not that these men need a reason, since sex and marriage simply serve as cheap ways of validating what they already believe is their natural right of ownership over all women, everywhere.
The real horror comes from understanding that this sort of misogyny is baked into the system. No, women no longer have to receive permission to obtain a divorce and marital rape is now considered a crime in much of the world (though even in those countries where such misogyny is no longer tolerated, these advances are disturbingly recent), but misogyny is still widely evident in social standards, professional environments, and media depictions.
Mauvignier's thriller does what its American counterparts repeatedly fail to do. He envelops us in a compelling story that's thrilling, but is also firmly grounded in reality. In doing this, he goes beyond cheap thrills to reveal the rot that still corrodes much of modern society.
Turning the final pages, you feel an increasing sense of suffocation. The tension's so thick it's hard to breathe. For millions of women, this feeling pervades their domestic lives. For many of them, the suffocation is all too literal.
The truth behind "The Birthday Party" is revealed only in the book's final act. The vast majority of its 500-page length unspools slowly, but not without a simmering tension. Your heart rate goes up along with the page number, but it happens so gradually that you're unaware of it until you feel your heart ricocheting off your rib cage.
It's so deceptive, the pace with which the events play out, because they do so at such a leisurely pace that you're lulled into a feeling of something like comfort. It doesn't feel right for a thriller to progress so slowly, I thought while reading, This thing would be better if it were 100 or more pages shorter.
I'm not entirely persuaded now that this book wouldn't have benefitted from being shorter, but I also have my doubts that the final 50-100 pages would have been as effective as they are if not for the fact that, by the time we get there, we're half asleep. Not out of boredom (these pages are never boring), but because the events unfold at a pace similar to that of regular domestic life so that we're pulled into them by our own complacency and compliance ... which is perhaps the point.
There's a misogyny behind the events of "The Birthday Party" that's echoed in the spectacular fifth season of "Fargo" currently airing on FX — the toxic belief that women are subservient to men and that any sort of physical intimacy or exchanged vows give men ownership over women for life. Not that these men need a reason, since sex and marriage simply serve as cheap ways of validating what they already believe is their natural right of ownership over all women, everywhere.
The real horror comes from understanding that this sort of misogyny is baked into the system. No, women no longer have to receive permission to obtain a divorce and marital rape is now considered a crime in much of the world (though even in those countries where such misogyny is no longer tolerated, these advances are disturbingly recent), but misogyny is still widely evident in social standards, professional environments, and media depictions.
Mauvignier's thriller does what its American counterparts repeatedly fail to do. He envelops us in a compelling story that's thrilling, but is also firmly grounded in reality. In doing this, he goes beyond cheap thrills to reveal the rot that still corrodes much of modern society.
Turning the final pages, you feel an increasing sense of suffocation. The tension's so thick it's hard to breathe. For millions of women, this feeling pervades their domestic lives. For many of them, the suffocation is all too literal.
May 14, 2023
Somewhat annoying. I appreciated the angle it tried to take but it didn't really work for me. The narration felt kind of childishly withholding, and then when it would reveal something it didn't feel like it was really worth hiding/delaying, including the big "secrets" of the couple and why the men are at the house. The narration is divided between 1. functional descriptions of what's going on externally, which never really has a sticky/tangible quality and led to me kind of glossing over a lot of it, and not feeling rewarded enough to really pay attention to rhythm/sound or insight or some other kind of takeaway and 2. little threads of philosophical musings ("because it also seems the dogs have been howling every night since forever, for centuries, as though the barks you hear are only the echo or the continuation of the barks and warnings of the first dogs raised as lookouts, as though over centuries spent surveying paths, roads, trails, the dogs' dogs, the dogs sired by the dogs' dogs, haven't had time to take the threats lightly, to turn away from them, and they still must to repeat the ancestral warning of a danger or a threat to come") or ruminations on existence/the stuff of life. These latter pieces are about average. Something like See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid has a similarly dilated/long-sentence style, but provides ample rewards on both a tangibility/sentence level and a philosophical/intellectual level. Maybe I'm just growing increasingly skeptical of long-sentence novels--it often seems like a crutch or stylistic smoke bomb; I've found myself increasingly gravitating toward something like Hotel Splendid by Marie Redonnet or the fiction of Fleur Jaeggy, which feel like they far more successfully burrow to the core of the narrative concerns through short, slashing sentences, rather than running around in giant, winding $1 sentences to bring back 75 cents in change. There's one trick the book does at the end where, 35 pages from the end, the book tells you seven shots are going to be fired. Why does it need to tell us that? Why not just have it play out in real time? It's a pretty cheap--or at least uninteresting--tactic that feels emblematic of the shortcomings of the whole novel: it's all kind of fine, but the way that it's breathlessly in love with itself started to seem pretty hollow after 450 pages.
November 11, 2020
Dans le hameau perdu des Trois filles seules, deux des trois maisons sont habitées. Dans la première vit Christine, peintre un peu excentrique, solitaire, mais très proche de ses voisins, la famille Bergogne. Patrice Bergogne est éleveur ; il vit une relation de couple tristounette avec sa femme Marion, dont il est fou amoureux, jeune femme secrète qui lui témoigne trop peu d’affection. Ce qui unit le couple c’est la petite Ida, enfant joyeuse et très mature qui embellit les vies de Patrice, Marion et Christine. Chacun des adultes participe à l’éducation de l’enfant : Christine fait son éducation artistique, Patrice est la figure rassurante et complice d’un père qui se débat dans les difficultés financières du monde agricole pour assurer un confort à sa femme et à sa fille ; Marion apprend à sa fille, dans les effrayantes Histoires de la nuit qu’elle lui lit le soir, que les méchants existent mais qu’il suffit de vaincre sa peur pour les terrasser.
Au début du roman, Patrice accompagne Christine à la gendarmerie, où elle dépose plainte contre des lettres anonymes de plus en plus menaçantes. Cette menace latente donne le ton du roman, situé sur quasiment 24 heures.
Le jour J, Patrice, Christine et Ida préparent une fête surprise à Marion, à l’occasion de son quarantième anniversaire. Mais les choses ne se passeront pas comme prévu…
On pourrait croire que plus de 600 pages avec unités de temps et de lieu et des phrases interminables ça parait long ; et bien non, le roman se lit dans l’urgence, la tension étant extrême. Il essaie bien, Laurent Mauvignier, avec ses longues phrases de nous faire ralentir, mais c’est difficile tant le suspense est grand.
Malgré cette frénésie d’avancer dans la lecture, il faut absolument savourer comme il se doit l’écriture extraordinaire de Laurent Mauvignier ; une écriture élégante, riche en images, qui décortique les pensées des protagonistes, avec une profondeur d’analyse brillante.
Un grand coup de cœur pour ce rural noir sous tension !
Au début du roman, Patrice accompagne Christine à la gendarmerie, où elle dépose plainte contre des lettres anonymes de plus en plus menaçantes. Cette menace latente donne le ton du roman, situé sur quasiment 24 heures.
Le jour J, Patrice, Christine et Ida préparent une fête surprise à Marion, à l’occasion de son quarantième anniversaire. Mais les choses ne se passeront pas comme prévu…
On pourrait croire que plus de 600 pages avec unités de temps et de lieu et des phrases interminables ça parait long ; et bien non, le roman se lit dans l’urgence, la tension étant extrême. Il essaie bien, Laurent Mauvignier, avec ses longues phrases de nous faire ralentir, mais c’est difficile tant le suspense est grand.
Malgré cette frénésie d’avancer dans la lecture, il faut absolument savourer comme il se doit l’écriture extraordinaire de Laurent Mauvignier ; une écriture élégante, riche en images, qui décortique les pensées des protagonistes, avec une profondeur d’analyse brillante.
Un grand coup de cœur pour ce rural noir sous tension !
February 3, 2023
I wasn’t sure for the first 50 pages whether I wanted to undertake the commitment to ride the wave of these luxurious, looping, digressive and musical sentences. I couldn’t look away, though, as the tension inexorably builds in this high intensity novel. Brilliant narration and equally brilliant translation. Don’t be put off by its length.
March 16, 2023
I just lost a day of my life reading this book. It’s a mediocre thriller with a lot of big words.
March 22, 2023
This one turned out to be a bit of a letdown. I definitely enjoyed it and it kept me engaged throughout its 450 pages, mainly due to the delicious prose, which is the book's biggest strength by far. Mauvignier writes in lovely, winding sentences that twist in and out of various character's minds throughout the novel quite deftly. Unfortunately, he used this ornate prose to convey a story that left me cold.
The plot is pretty much a stock home invasion plot. As the book progresses, the reader is made privy to more and more secrets about the characters' pasts. This slow unwinding of backstory kept me reading, but I found myself disappointed over and over with the revelations--revelations that mostly landed with a dull thud instead of the sound of glass shattering. The mom has a past, where she was into drugs, sex work, and had a violent boyfriend? Heard it before. The violent ex-boyfriend blames the mom for his imprisonment and has returned for his revenge? Bit of a yawn. He's got a mentally unstable brother who is a loose cannon and has never gotten the respect he feels he deserves? Come on, Laurent, you've got to give me something here. The most embarrassing part was the classic, "I didn't realize my life was so good and I wasn't able to embrace it because I didn't feel I deserved it due to my troubled past" epiphany that Marion experiences near the end. It all felt too pulled from a human emotions 101 textbook, and I needed some deeper, more complicated, or subtle emotions from these characters.
I see the tension of the novel described as a strong suit by many reviews. There was tension, but as these revelations continued to fall flat, I found the tension ratcheting down throughout the novel--and I'm pretty sure that's not how it was supposed to be. I honestly did not find the brothers very intimidating. Yes, of course, being held at knife/gunpoint by a trio of unstable jerks is going to inherently be scary, but they just didn't have personality. They were just "the scary guys who take you hostage." There was no Anton Chigurh character--maybe too high a standard as one of the most interesting and terrifying villains ever, but there was nothing even remotely close. The villains could have been cardboard cutouts and would have served more or less the same purpose. Ultimately, I think part of the lack of tension was that I genuinely didn't care much if anything bad happened to these characters. Since their personalities and back stories were so generic, the book could have ended up with all kinds of murder and carnage and I think I would have just put the book down and gone, "oh well." (Which is basically what happened, without saying to whom the murder and carnage applies.)
The one character whose point of view I did really like was Ida's, the daughter. I thought Mauvignier did a great job of inhabiting how a ten-year-old would interpret and interact with the world around her. Although, I will say she was pretty equanimous for the situation she found herself in.
At the end of the day, this book was worth it for the beautiful prose, I just wish Mauvignier would have applied it to a worthier subject, or put more effort into the psychology of his characters. Maybe I'll read something else he's written and see if he applies that talent to subjects I may connect with more.
The plot is pretty much a stock home invasion plot. As the book progresses, the reader is made privy to more and more secrets about the characters' pasts. This slow unwinding of backstory kept me reading, but I found myself disappointed over and over with the revelations--revelations that mostly landed with a dull thud instead of the sound of glass shattering. The mom has a past, where she was into drugs, sex work, and had a violent boyfriend? Heard it before. The violent ex-boyfriend blames the mom for his imprisonment and has returned for his revenge? Bit of a yawn. He's got a mentally unstable brother who is a loose cannon and has never gotten the respect he feels he deserves? Come on, Laurent, you've got to give me something here. The most embarrassing part was the classic, "I didn't realize my life was so good and I wasn't able to embrace it because I didn't feel I deserved it due to my troubled past" epiphany that Marion experiences near the end. It all felt too pulled from a human emotions 101 textbook, and I needed some deeper, more complicated, or subtle emotions from these characters.
I see the tension of the novel described as a strong suit by many reviews. There was tension, but as these revelations continued to fall flat, I found the tension ratcheting down throughout the novel--and I'm pretty sure that's not how it was supposed to be. I honestly did not find the brothers very intimidating. Yes, of course, being held at knife/gunpoint by a trio of unstable jerks is going to inherently be scary, but they just didn't have personality. They were just "the scary guys who take you hostage." There was no Anton Chigurh character--maybe too high a standard as one of the most interesting and terrifying villains ever, but there was nothing even remotely close. The villains could have been cardboard cutouts and would have served more or less the same purpose. Ultimately, I think part of the lack of tension was that I genuinely didn't care much if anything bad happened to these characters. Since their personalities and back stories were so generic, the book could have ended up with all kinds of murder and carnage and I think I would have just put the book down and gone, "oh well." (Which is basically what happened, without saying to whom the murder and carnage applies.)
The one character whose point of view I did really like was Ida's, the daughter. I thought Mauvignier did a great job of inhabiting how a ten-year-old would interpret and interact with the world around her. Although, I will say she was pretty equanimous for the situation she found herself in.
At the end of the day, this book was worth it for the beautiful prose, I just wish Mauvignier would have applied it to a worthier subject, or put more effort into the psychology of his characters. Maybe I'll read something else he's written and see if he applies that talent to subjects I may connect with more.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 3, 2023
اگه ۱۵۰ صفحه کمتر بود خیلی بیشتر لذت میبردم. بااینحال، ایدهش رو دوست داشتم.
March 30, 2023
Jeeeesus that was an absolute wild ride. I thought I wasn’t going to like it at first because it’s unbelievably slow, but then when you get used to the pacing and things actually start to happen it is so tense! You are just dying to know what’s gonna happen next!
There’s some films I could compare this too but I won’t because it will spoil a huge aspect of the book. What I like about this is that the main plot isn’t revealed on the blurb so when it starts happening it’s really exciting.
The last 50 pages were amazing and I couldn’t put it down. I think a lot of people will struggle with the slow pacing and long complicated sentences in this one but it’s so worth the pay off. The end was really satisfying. I’d be happy for this one to be shortlisted actually because I went from not liking it to being obsessed.
Keep going with this if you’re bored as the slow build up of tension is part of the experience.
There’s some films I could compare this too but I won’t because it will spoil a huge aspect of the book. What I like about this is that the main plot isn’t revealed on the blurb so when it starts happening it’s really exciting.
The last 50 pages were amazing and I couldn’t put it down. I think a lot of people will struggle with the slow pacing and long complicated sentences in this one but it’s so worth the pay off. The end was really satisfying. I’d be happy for this one to be shortlisted actually because I went from not liking it to being obsessed.
Keep going with this if you’re bored as the slow build up of tension is part of the experience.
December 17, 2024
"So it had taken a place like that for him to finally find her, irony of fate, twist of fate, hell of a good show by chance, doing things so nicely after so nicely undoing them."
Firstly, I can see how people may be turned off by the long and winding sentences of Laurent Mauvignier in taking what may seem like too long to get to the point. Secondly, after finishing The Birthday Party, I don't know how or why there aren't many other books that are both as sprawling, existential and theatrical. It was easy to fall into this world with his words and creeping into the minds of each of the four main characters. At times I thought this is what it would look like if someone like Fosse wrote a Tarantino-directed film. With intellectual sidebars, discussions about sex, aging and art along with some surprising twists with several vividly grotesque scenes.
"She knows this, she seeks the moment where it's the painting that sees her, that moment where the encounter occurs between herself and what she's painting, between what she's painting and herself, and of course this is something she doesn't share."
Set in a small rural hamlet in France about a day in the life of a family and their neighbour Mauvignier's use of a smaller cast of characters, and his style of prose, brought me as a reader extensively into profound territory amongst the family and the neighbour. To me, the neighbour, Christine is one of my favourite literary characters I have read this year. I simply could not get enough of the writing about her mind, her thoughts, and the accumulation of her artistic experiences and resilience.
The payoff, and not just the final scenes, was so worth the wait due to the way that Mauvignier creates tension and empathy. There were some moments of real dark humour, melded with poetically lush prose, a memorable cast of persons, wonderful world-building, some action and all-around amazing writing and story. The Birthday Party is based around a surprise 40th birthday party in the family, and I can say that I was beyond surprised by how much I enjoyed every passage front to back. This book is a definite five-star read for me.
"The present matters more than a past that doesn't exist any more than a cinder in the eye alters reality: it's the vision that changes, the eye that burns, that fills up with tears, but that's it, the world itself hasn't changed. She is the way she is, the past doesn't change anything."
"Of course it's too much, even while living through it she thought it was impossible to live through-she's always known how to forget things like that, how you bury them inside yourself so you don't suffer them anymore, how you barricade yourself from the inside and how childhood invents hiding places locked up tighter than closets, and now, here, an adult life later, even though everything has changed and she doesn't even remember much from this childhood that she's denied the way one denies a shameful relative, she chooses this stubborn silence that gags her as much as it protects her."
"She lets herself get swept up and surprised by the images that come to life at her fingertips, she also knows inspiration never comes to anyone by chance and that you have to work, read, look, think, reflect on your work and, once the intellectual work is done, only then do you learn how to forget it, annihilate it, learn how to let go and allow this thoughtful conceptual world to be overrun by something that comes from beneath it, or beside it, that makes the painting surpass what you'd planned for it, when all of a sudden the painting is more intelligent, more alive, and crueler too, much of the time, than the person who painted it."
"A heart that sighs has not what it desires."
"Sweetheart, if a dragon bothers you, just knock his teeth out."
"She let herself be overcome with tears she wouldn't have thought she could still shed ever since she finished crying over love that didn't last, over success that didn't last, over youth that didn't last, over the nastiness around her that did last, of course, and hardened, casting off all restraint; the hardness against which she measured up, the hardness of indifference and of humiliating words directed at this body and this face which the years were dismantling with perverse precision, the hardness of this art world that trampled over all the efforts she'd made, all the conviction and ardor she'd put into it, that with the same jubilation trampled on years of her work because of a negligence if which she'd been guilty, maybe and that had served as an excuse to torpedo her and drive her to abandon everything, everything she'd had to pay above and beyond for only to find herself, at the end of her road, with disillusionment and bitterness her only companions, which had lasted, and grown inside of her. And now she understands how it all fossilized and hardened in her because she didn't know how to look it in the face, how everything calcified in her; and she releases herself from all of this, yes, by crying, tears, an abundance of tears at Ida's disarming and unbearable innocence."
Firstly, I can see how people may be turned off by the long and winding sentences of Laurent Mauvignier in taking what may seem like too long to get to the point. Secondly, after finishing The Birthday Party, I don't know how or why there aren't many other books that are both as sprawling, existential and theatrical. It was easy to fall into this world with his words and creeping into the minds of each of the four main characters. At times I thought this is what it would look like if someone like Fosse wrote a Tarantino-directed film. With intellectual sidebars, discussions about sex, aging and art along with some surprising twists with several vividly grotesque scenes.
"She knows this, she seeks the moment where it's the painting that sees her, that moment where the encounter occurs between herself and what she's painting, between what she's painting and herself, and of course this is something she doesn't share."
Set in a small rural hamlet in France about a day in the life of a family and their neighbour Mauvignier's use of a smaller cast of characters, and his style of prose, brought me as a reader extensively into profound territory amongst the family and the neighbour. To me, the neighbour, Christine is one of my favourite literary characters I have read this year. I simply could not get enough of the writing about her mind, her thoughts, and the accumulation of her artistic experiences and resilience.
The payoff, and not just the final scenes, was so worth the wait due to the way that Mauvignier creates tension and empathy. There were some moments of real dark humour, melded with poetically lush prose, a memorable cast of persons, wonderful world-building, some action and all-around amazing writing and story. The Birthday Party is based around a surprise 40th birthday party in the family, and I can say that I was beyond surprised by how much I enjoyed every passage front to back. This book is a definite five-star read for me.
"The present matters more than a past that doesn't exist any more than a cinder in the eye alters reality: it's the vision that changes, the eye that burns, that fills up with tears, but that's it, the world itself hasn't changed. She is the way she is, the past doesn't change anything."
"Of course it's too much, even while living through it she thought it was impossible to live through-she's always known how to forget things like that, how you bury them inside yourself so you don't suffer them anymore, how you barricade yourself from the inside and how childhood invents hiding places locked up tighter than closets, and now, here, an adult life later, even though everything has changed and she doesn't even remember much from this childhood that she's denied the way one denies a shameful relative, she chooses this stubborn silence that gags her as much as it protects her."
"She lets herself get swept up and surprised by the images that come to life at her fingertips, she also knows inspiration never comes to anyone by chance and that you have to work, read, look, think, reflect on your work and, once the intellectual work is done, only then do you learn how to forget it, annihilate it, learn how to let go and allow this thoughtful conceptual world to be overrun by something that comes from beneath it, or beside it, that makes the painting surpass what you'd planned for it, when all of a sudden the painting is more intelligent, more alive, and crueler too, much of the time, than the person who painted it."
"A heart that sighs has not what it desires."
"Sweetheart, if a dragon bothers you, just knock his teeth out."
"She let herself be overcome with tears she wouldn't have thought she could still shed ever since she finished crying over love that didn't last, over success that didn't last, over youth that didn't last, over the nastiness around her that did last, of course, and hardened, casting off all restraint; the hardness against which she measured up, the hardness of indifference and of humiliating words directed at this body and this face which the years were dismantling with perverse precision, the hardness of this art world that trampled over all the efforts she'd made, all the conviction and ardor she'd put into it, that with the same jubilation trampled on years of her work because of a negligence if which she'd been guilty, maybe and that had served as an excuse to torpedo her and drive her to abandon everything, everything she'd had to pay above and beyond for only to find herself, at the end of her road, with disillusionment and bitterness her only companions, which had lasted, and grown inside of her. And now she understands how it all fossilized and hardened in her because she didn't know how to look it in the face, how everything calcified in her; and she releases herself from all of this, yes, by crying, tears, an abundance of tears at Ida's disarming and unbearable innocence."
Displaying 1 - 30 of 418 reviews