Virginie Despentes, former sex worker, film director, queer icon, delivers her comment on modern-day Paris in three volumes to varying success. Set just before the Bataclan terrorist attack of 2015, we follow Vernon Subutex, once a fiercely rocking independent record shop owner famous for his parties, and best friend to the beloved pop star Alex Bleach.
Years on, Bleach has committed suicide and Subutex has fallen on hard times, homeless and sofa surfing with only one bright hope: several recordings made by before he died that must be worth a few Euros if only he can sell them to the right person. Using social media he searches for the ‘old gang’, a mishmash of porn, trans, and ferociously ‘woke’ beings, who flicker through the upper echelons of Parisian society with strange, sexual connections to terrorism and far-right groups.
As Vernon starts listening to some of Bleach’s recordings that contain weird audio waveforms that seemingly make no sense, he soon picks up DJing work at impromptu house parties for a billionaire playboy while a hunt for the recordings is taking place under his nose between journalists and the mysterious Hyena, a hardcore female investigator working for a client. As Subutex’s DJing starts to have a cult effect on anyone who parties with him, he cannot know the atomic effect Bleach’s tapes will have on those around him.
The first volume entails the setup of the story and the introduction to a huge array of fascinating characters that somehow Despentes contains and helps the reader keep track. It also has the strongest arc, leaving the reader dying for the next volume. In my case, I was so desperate I read half of it in French waiting for the English version to come out.
In the second volume, Subutex really hits rock bottom, and we spend a lot more time with the minor players, flitting between them but still weaving towards some feeling of doom or glory in the near future. The third volume was for me the most disappointing book, as we spend a great deal of time trudging through monologues from characters with bad ideas we haven’t been made to care about, and the main part of the book gets confusing as we try to keep track of who’s who and how they related to Book 1.
The portrait of modern-day Paris is brutally real, and Despentes understands intimately how the modern problems of multiculturalism and passionate side-taking have entrenched the city in a clusterfuck of its own creation, steering the debate toward fundamentalism in all its forms of cult-making in its final scenes. However, in Book 1 Despentes dug into her own life, and some characters are biographical, and this approach is lost to broad manifestos by Book 3.
When Despentes is good, she is fucking brilliant. But we don’t get enough of our eponymous hero by a mile to sate anyone who falls in love with Vernon in Book 1 to really sit well with 2 and 3, and the magical and thrilling concept of Book 2’s ending doesn’t carry, nor is it explained. Despentes could have had so much fun with it, and didn’t.
But there is a bigger problem here than just the book’s story and characterisation. I would urge any of you who speaks French to read this series in French, as despite being translated by award-winning translator Frank Wynne, it flattens in English. This is not the first time that I have found Wynne’s translations dull the allegory first intended because he chooses a weak verb or changes the underlying meaning to squeeze it into English. One example is in Despentes opening sentence regarding the windows of Paris lighting up in Book One, then darkening in the first sentence of Book 2. This foreshadowing is completely blunted in the English so that by Book 3’s station renovation opening that neat little connector is lost entirely. Sometimes Wynne’s sentences are very long and end fretfully, whereas in the French they are been pithy and strong. Surely Despentes would not have said “that’ll do” to such vagaries, noticeably in the opening pages of Book 2 where when comparing the texts, sentences have been wrung dry, losing some of the Parisian swagger Despentes installed. I was disappointed.
However, there is a lot to admire in this depiction of Paris at a fragile and violent time in its history, and surely Despentes’ portrait will live on as one of the most accurate and haunting when everyone has forgotten the yellow jackets and Bataclan for some other more senseless event yet to come.
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