ClaraLafontaineisa warphotographerwho specialises in portraits of Vietnamveterans.Her pictures focus on their eyes to reflect the horror they have seen. Her work gains international celebrity, but only Paul Marleau understands the fixation which has driven her since childhood. When they were adolescent lovers she told him the story which has haunted both of their lives and shaped their parallel destinies.
Despite her French name, Clara is the daughter of a Bavarian doctor who served in the German army on the eastern front during the second worldwar.TheLafontainesare descended from Huguenots forced to fleemassacreinFrance,buta recurring theme of Clara's Tale is the historicalcyclebywhichvictim becomesvictimiser,abusedchild becomes adult abuser, and childhood innocence is only a delayed detonation of violence. Clara's father witnessedthe execution of Jewish children in the forests of Ukraine. His friend, an officer implicated in the atrocities, years later leads his own two children intoaforestneartheirBavarian village and strangles them.
This is the story Paul first learns in 1963 from Clara when he visits the same village as a 16-year-old on holiday from Paris. She is of his age and they share what will become a lifelong affinity, an uncomfortable and intuitive understanding of what it means to be corrupted as indirect witnesses ofevil.ThisalsoexplainsClara's obsessionwithhercamera.From childhoodshehasbeenoperating instinctively as a kind of crime scene photographer, but it can only be an abstract branch of forensics when she tries to aim her lens into the soul of blackness without a flashgun.
Paul identifies with the compulsion to revisit the scenes of violent crimes. When Clara comes to visit him later in Paris he arranges their meeting at a corner of the Luxembourg Gardens. It is the precise spot where the body of his father was found stabbed in 1958. Nokillerwasfoundandpolice assumed that robbery was the motive. Paul has always suspected some connection with his father's pro-Algerian politicalconnectionsfollowinga wartimerecordasa fighterforthe French Resistance. The irony is that despite the nickname of "Philip" which friends have given him after Raymond Chandler's private detective character, this Marleau is no investigator. Paul is more like Marlow in Conrad's Heart Of Darknessand,likeClara,hefinds himself engaged on an involuntary mission to confront evil. He becomes asculptor,transferringrepressed violencetohammerandchiselon stone to create an art that commemorates suffering and brutality.
Pierre Peju has chosen an immense block of material from which to try to sculpt. Many chips must have hit the floor to produce such a compact novel, considering it covers a period from 1941 to 1999, with a further chapter projected three decades into the future, referencing a historical spiral from Nazi occupation of Russia and France and 1950s French repression in Algeria, to the 1968 student riots in Paris and Israeli occupation of Palestine.
His original title translates as TheOgre Who Smiles, and although translator Euan Cameron has preferred the personalised,feminisedandmore marketableClara'sTaleforhis rendering in English, this is a distortion of a narrative largelytoldinthefirst personbyPaulMarleau, and unrepresentative of a story which is much more a Grimms' tale.
The smiling ogre appears in a prologue and epilogue, and as the subject of one of Paul's sculptures. But the motif is unsatisfactorily facile as an embodiment of the spirit of evil when set against the sharper edges ofPeju'spoliticalandhistorical framework. It is only too easy to see why his translator has tried to adjust the focus to Clara, one of the novel's more successful realisations, but this only serves to underline a serious weakness in Peju's handling of his ambitious theme.
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