Spinning out on the streets of Paris

Cushla McKinney reviews Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes, published by Quercus/Maclehose Press.

Virginie Despentes has a reputation for politically and socially confrontational work, such as the pornographic and violent Baise-Moi and Apocalypse Baby, and the first instalment of the Vernon Subutex trilogy — a profanity-filled novel whose characters’ obsession with sex, drugs and nostalgia for their punk rock youth evoke The Young Ones in middle-age minus the comedy — is no exception.

The titular Vernon Subutex (a name I repeatedly misread as Subtext) is a former record-store owner who has spent the past few years selling his possessions on E-Bay, watching online porn and relying on wealthy friend popstar Alexandre Bleach to pay his rent when finances get tight.

The novel opens just after Alex overdoses and the story, such as it is, follows Vernon’s slow descent to the Parisian streets pursued by people who want to get their hands on the only items of any value he still owns: three videos that Alex recorded just before his death. His main purpose is to introduce the reader to the people that cross his path, a litany of angry, ugly stereotypes that run the spectrum of social, political and sexual identity; from a wife-beating Marxist revolutionary-in-waiting to a hedonistic futures trader sickened by the cultural habits of the poor to a neo-Nazi champion of the common (French)man.

Although Despentes has been criticised for allowing her characters to express extremely misogynistic and racist views, it is naive to believe that such beliefs do not persist in society, and she generally leaves them to condemn themselves by their words and actions. Furthermore, it is fascinating to see the connections between them slowly coalesce as the novel progresses and it is a credit to her skill as a writer that it is compulsively readable. My main problem was not what was in the story but what is not.

Despite being described as "A mind-blowing portrait of contemporary French society", Subutex could just as easily be down and out in London or New York as in Paris.

This may be a deliberate choice by Despentes to universalise her social critique, but given the novel ends with Subutex experiencing an epiphany in which his identity expands to encompass the entirety of Paris, I think this is unlikely. Alternatively, it may reflect translator Frank Wynne’s decision to adopt an Anglophonic rather than a Francophonic linguistic tone (for example by converting an idiomatic French phrase into an equivalent English one).

It remains an area of active debate whether it is the translator’s job to conform to the letter or the spirit of the original but my feeling is that, as Ros Schwartz puts it: "a good translation doesn’t colonise the work but preserves the joys and beauties of its ‘otherness’ without resorting to weird foreignisation", and this is precisely what I found lacking.

I could not help feeling something may have been lost in translation.

- Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.

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