Transl. English (Australia) by Nathalie Pavec and Jean-Marc Victor
Patrick White is to date the only Australian author to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This collection of six short stories, some of which are similar to short novels, and which he originally published in English in 1974, had until now remained unpublished in French.
Almost fifty years after their publication, these texts have lost none of their human and social relevance. There is a ferocious satire of a self-satisfied middle class, but also of those who aspire to the same bourgeois reflexes. These stories, which transport us from Australia to old Europe, deliver a sharp study of human quirks, cowardice and daily pettiness, which find their most biting expression in the vitriolic painting of conjugal relations. The writing is dense, chiseled and proliferating, full of unexpected inventions, collisions and shortcuts.
As always with White, the grotesque sits side by side with drama, and the uncompromising gaze he casts on his characters does not prevent compassion for these vulnerable beings, shot through with contradictory desires: there is always a moment when the social veneer cracks, where the mask of respectability and the cloak of inhibition crumble, revealing the inner cracks, the great pains, the doubts and the weaknesses. The reader therefore oscillates constantly between laughter and emotion, and many characters hold up to him a striking mirror of himself, because their little arrangements with reality, their shortcomings and their aspirations are also ours.
In fact, White practices with art the mixture of genres and combines satire with a metaphysical questioning, carried by moments of revelation which seem to emerge from the most banal, even the most sordid daily life. Then come bursts of lyricism, an epiphanic and generous lyricism, in which we recognize the heritage of the great modernist writers.
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The collection includes six short stories:
“A Woman’s Hand”
A couple, Harold and Evelyn Fazackerley; a longtime friend of the husband, Clem Dowson; and Nesta Pine, friend of the wife, woman of good family but without income, who excels in cooking and as a lady companion. Is Clem gay? Is Nesta a lesbian? Can these two love each other and unite their loneliness? So many questions that preoccupy Evelyn, whose feelings towards each other are far from clear… The destinies of these four characters will intertwine and reveal the other side of the story. supposedly idyllic in the Fazackerleys, jealousies and unfulfilled desires, class superiority and pettiness, death instincts and life impulses. In a way, Clem and Nesta represent for each of the Fazackerley spouses the image of what he or she could have become, in a past before marriage, when everything was still possible. And the tragic fate of this other couple will ironically reveal the fact that the value and strength of a relationship does not rest on the sanction of years or society.
“Full Belly”
Athens under the Occupation. A family of the Greek intelligentsia whose good times are long gone are literally starving to death in a freezing apartment shared by several generations. Will we eat anything other than the meager dandelion broth concocted by the faithful maid? Old aunt Maro has settled the matter by refusing to eat so as not to be one more mouth to feed, while her sister Pronoë clings at all costs to the idea of survival, and their nephew Costa pretends for having forgotten the promise of a brilliant career as a concert performer which was offered to him before the war. How far can the pride that prevents us from accepting alms go, and what compromises are we capable of when the desire to have a full belly is strongest? An expedition by the starving young pianist through the streets of Athens will bring him a brutal response. But what are all these beings in distress really hungry for?
“The Night the Prowler”
The story begins on the morning of a tragic night in the Bannisters’ family home. A stranger broke into the bedroom of the girl, Felicity, and raped her before committing some abuse in the living room and disappearing. What could only be a sordid news item first gives rise to a social satire, where the maternal figure is beaten with joyful ferocity. Then, we switch to the point of view of the girl, whom we follow in a nocturnal drift through the city, from closed parks to deserted pavilions, where she will dynamite everything, blow up codes and social frameworks, and , in a way, happen to itself. Going from improbable encounters to solitary explorations of forbidden places, Felicity reconstructs her story, unlearns good manners and propriety, and shatters the pretenses of a society confined in its fears and inhibitions.
So it is the story of a radical emancipation, which will end in the lair of an old man in seclusion, abandoned by all and especially by himself. In spite of himself, he will bring Felicity to a final epiphany. An epiphany on a bed of garbage.
“Twenty Five”
In their house in the suburbs of Sydney, ideally located at the edge of a freeway, the Natwicks spend their time watching the cars go by from the top of their checkerboard-tiled veranda. Ella is discreet and submissive, Royal invalid and tyrannical. Every evening at twenty past five, their comfortable and narrow boredom is punctuated by the regular passage of a stranger at the wheel of a pink car. But Royal is not eternal, and Ella’s frustration so intense, her desire to be reborn so intense, and at the same time so grotesque, that a providential breakdown of the pink car in front of the gate of the pavilion, at five twenty past a certain evening when the routine is jammed, will upset in a flash the dreary daily life of Ella, she who is thirsty for new sensations, a thirst of which she does not suspect how much she exceeds her.
“Sicilian Vespers”
Guts hanging from a nail, a mangy old lion roaring in its cage, a decor of palazzi and churches crushed with heat, and a hotel populated by Dutch and French: this is the Sicily in which two tourist couples meet, one Australian, the other American. Strange encounter in a foreign land: The Simpsons find themselves in the back of the Shacklocks’ car for two expeditions in the Sicilian countryside, both agreeable and ironic in the face of this mismatched duo: Clark, a fat, talkative and confident American. he, and his wife Imelda, with intriguing discretion, as if entrenched behind a face that looks like a creamy yellow squash. But a toothache invites itself to the program, like a grain of sand in a well-oiled machinery, and dislocates the two couples, putting Ivy Simpson at a distance from her husband despite all the desire she has to share her suffering. From fortuitous encounters to inexplicable impulses, Ivy and Clark will find themselves on the mosaic floor of one of the chapels of the cathedral of San Fabrizio, in the midst of the celebration of vespers, after a fall in slow motion, suspended between horror and hilarity, nausea and fever. carnal, apocalyptic damnation and Dionysian illumination. “Sicilian Vespers”, or toothache as a symptom of an inner evil that old Europe has awakened.
“Cockatoos”
In a residential area of Sydney, cockatoos gradually appear, coming from who knows where, first one, then two, then a hundred, then more, until their presence becomes the center of conversation, disturbing neighborhood and reveals secrets, desires and grudges. Birds fascinate, annoy, bring people together, make people talk. They lead Olive and Mick, this couple who have not spoken to each other for years, to finally dare to break the silence. They take young Tim on a nocturnal expedition to the heart of the nearby park. They trigger outbursts of love and urges to kill.
There is almost something Birds of Hitchock in this story, in the concern that colors the description of cockatoos and in the disruption of human lives induced by their appearance. They come and go, approach and flee, without revealing what they might be the name of in the poor kingdom of humans that they only brush with their wings.
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