Anyone reading the reviews on this blog will realise that I rarely give bad reviews of books. I simply don't have enough time to read poor books and have even less time to review them. However, I have decided to make an exception in this case because apparently the book is highly regarded. And in a perverse way I did enjoy it, but only because its excessive misery and over-weening pretentiousness eventually made it amusing, even funny.
I was drawn to Cliffs mainly because it is set in Étretat, Normandy, one of my favourite stretches of coastline. I have walked along the cliffs above Étretat myself several times and when I read in the front cover that this novel "resembles a pebble from the coast of Normandy, polished and pure and yet troubled by a raging sea", I decided to read it.
I expected that the book would bring back to my mind memories of moules mariniere, glasses of Calvados, and of course those tall, white cliffs rising at each end of the promenade. However, Olivier Adams' Étretat is a very different place to mine, being the place his narrator's mother committed suicide by jumping from those cliffs one dark night, and also a place of dark obsessive memories.
On the whole, this is one of the most miserable books I have ever read. I don't mind sorrow or sadness in books, and some of my favorite novels are tragedies. But there is something about the unremitting gloom of this book which I found hard to take.
The childhood described (by the unnamed narrator) focuses on a mother with chronic depression and a distant and cruel father. All he remembers of the years before his mother's death is "a misty stream of images, most of which smell of rain and damp earth, and take me back to the house in that bleak, indeterminate town", with his mother,
"dissolving in into tears in the middle of the meal . . . her arms around us tight and her tears soaking into our hair . . . a terrible sadness invaded the space, drying out the texture of the air . . . a sadness wreathed in fog, like and endless November, froze us from inside and a lump rose in my throat for no apparent reason".
Everything is described in an overly intense way, even the most mundane of events attracting a dramatic tone out of proportion to their significance. The writing is too precious, too self-indulgent as though the author has set out to impress a creative writing class. Maybe the French like this style of writing, but for me it was more annoying than inspiring.
After his mother's death, the narrator and his brother live for four years,
"in an obsessive silence . . we haunted the house like ghosts. We escaped our exasperated father's wrath by taking refuge in our bedrooms. Sometimes our father caught us red-handed, threatening to give me a good hiding or beat me to a pulp there and then. We were never supposed to make a noise or raise our voices . . . to laugh or whisper or tickle each other . . . or talk to him about anything". "I think he wished we were dead. Dead and stuffed".
Eventually he moves to Paris where he lives in works at demeaning job and lives in vile conditions and has a girl-friend who works as a prostitute. He is haunted by his mother and often sees her on the streets of Paris. When he eventually marries he moves with his new wife to live in Étretat where he takes a job as waiter in a "seasonal straw hut". When his wife falls pregnant he strikes up a relationship with a sixteen year old girl who is staying for a month with her grandmother and eventually makes love to her ("under the roar of the waves" of course). He excuses himself by saying "I didn't know my age, my life was so small, I was just a child, I was eleven and my mother was dead, the world was bitterly cold and I was shivering".
Twenty years on he is still dominated by his mother's suicide (which must be immensely depressing for his wife Claire) and and of course revisits the site of his mother leap to her death. By this stage I was beginning to hope he would follow her example and put an end to his reader's misery. But no, instead we are treated to another self-indulgent monologue;
"Our lives are alike. Our lives are the same and blighted. We mourn the same dead and live in the company of phantoms. . . . Lost forever in the crowd, our lives fit into a thimble. However tall we stand on tiptoe, we remain smaller than ourselves. . . We cry out in the night, scream and tremble with fear".
This book is unfortunately stuck in perpetual adolescence. Although the narrator is supposed to be 31 years old, he writes and thinks like a depressed teenager. Reading it is like being stuck in a 15 year old's clammy bedroom, dirty washing on the floor, the walls hung with posters of Morrisey. I normally give up on books I really dislike but this one was so awful I felt I had to finish it to see if it could get any worse (it did). I have always found Pushkin Press completely reliable and search their catalogue regularly for any new gems. I can only think that the author's reputation in his home country convinced them that this one was worth publishing. If so, it was a mistake to think that his qualities would translate readily across the Channel.
