THE MARTINS
DAVID FOENKINOS (tr. Sam Taylor)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: ‘Go out into the street and the first person you see will be the subject of your next book.’
This is the challenge a struggling Parisian writer sets himself, imagining his next heroine might be the mysterious young woman who often stands smoking near his apartment...instead it’s octogenarian Madeleine. She’s happy to become the subject of his book—but first she needs to put away her shopping.
Is it really true, the writer wonders, that every life is the stuff of novels, or is his story doomed to be hopelessly banal? As he gets to know Madeleine and her family, he’ll be privy to their secrets: lost loves, marital problems and workplace worries. And he’ll soon realise he is not the impartial bystander he intended to be, but a catalyst for major changes in the lives of his characters.
Told with Foenkinos’s characteristic irony and self-deprecating humour, yet filled with warmth, The Martins is a compelling tale of the family next door which raises questions about what it means to be ‘ordinary’, and about the blurred lines between truth and fiction.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I don't think most Anglophone readers are aware that "Martin" is the most common surname in France. In the US, the equivalent title would be "The Johnsons," our commonest surname. The joke being established, let's look at these bog-standard, government-issue, salt of the earth just folks. (I could probably pack a few more epithets onto that sentence, but I'll resist.)
Does everyone have a novel in them? As a former literary agent who read endless forests of murdered trees invested in the attempted proof of this nostrum, I'd say, "sorta...kinda...it depends...".
In attempting to prove this is a truth not merely a truism, an author sets himself the challenge in the first paragraph of the synopsis. He tricks himself into believing today will be the day he gets to talk to the alluring woman who smokes in front of the travel agency on her breaks.
"Ha ha ha," says Melpomene, reaching past her laurel wreath for the Mask of Tragedy. Following his self-imposed rule, he must interview an old woman pushing her shopping home. As any seasoned reader knows, here comes the punchline: Mme Madeline Tricot ("Mrs. Cotton") was once in the fashion industry in a small position thus has stories about Lagerfeld et alii being horrible to each other and everyone else.
Score! Or...is it? See, Mme Tricot is sliding into dementia. Her daughter, whom he meets immediately upon going home with Mme Tricot,is naturally very protective of her mother. Thus we're launched into an exploration of modernity, celebrity "culture," and the absurdities of aging...why extend the lives of the old relentlessly and pointlessly if all you're going to do with them is ignore and/or belittle them?...through the lens of The Martins, France's any/every/body family.
Why I enjoyed the read was that Author Foenkinos commits to the bit. He keeps our narrator saying he's reporting alone while, in fact, he's embroiled with the Martins. As a nod to his disingenuous self deletion while in fact performing self insertion, Foenkinos peppers the text with authorial footnotes explaining, justifying, in short intellectualizing, our narrator's many choices. Foenkinos treats us to the narrator's rocky relationships with the people he's trying to make into The Martins, his characters; we read the narrator's account of being termed a con man and an emotional vampire, accusations he, reluctantly, acknowledges carry some truth in their hurtful rejection.
Changing from novel, to non-fiction, to memoir, to metafiction in turns, The Martins is a charming and entertaining exploration of the overlooked, the unconsidered, the devalued, as full and satisfying subjects for our attention. It thus shines a searchlight on the tendency of modern storytelling to ignore simpleness in favor of simplicity. Making their own lives easier by inventing Big!Important!Amazing! people whose lives and doings have only the depth of a narrative purpose, Foenkinos implicitly accuses himself and other authors of avoiding the incredible richness with its immense labor of La Comédie humaine, to cite an ancient example. We're ever less likely to get to know, really know, the people around us, even our own family members as this novel quite clearly demonstrates.
It lends this entertaining read a special poignance, and makes the only slightly veiled warning to our distracted selves sting a good bit more. Multilayered meditation on storytelling, stories, the tragedy and comedy of ordinariness, and the need to attend the moment you're in: A very twenty-first century kind of a read. One I recommend to almost everyone except those in the throes of divorce or breakup, or the recently bereaved.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SECOND BEST
DAVID FOENKINOS (tr. Megan Jones)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: A witty, moving international bestseller about a 10-year boy whose life is shaped forever when he loses out on the role of Harry Potter.
It's 1999. Martin Hill is 10 years old, crazy about football and has a minor crush on a girl named Betty. Then he makes it to the final 2 in the casting for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
In the end, the other boy is picked for the role of a lifetime. A devastated Martin tries to move on with his life. But how can he escape his failure, especially when it's the most famous film series in the world? As Martin grows up, he finds every aspect of his life is invaded with a sense of failure and missed opportunity, and he struggles under the weight of the life he isn’t living.
This bittersweet comedy is full of surprising truths and touching moments, as its unforgettable character discovers that sometimes, the lives we wish we’d led might not be all they’re cracked up to be.
An international publishing sensation, Second Best has been adapted for stage and won the hearts of hundreds of thousands of readers.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Published in 2022 in its original French and brought out this week by Pushkin Press after their acqusition of Gallic Books, this is a wonderful meditation on the idea of "almost" as it defines us. Our Western culture valorizes "winning," defined as gaining an objective, fulfilling a need to see ourselves in those who exceed or transcend averageness, mediocrity; this is invidious. By definition, there are more who do not "succeed" or "excel" than those who do; the bar moves ever farther from the mass in the middle, and we are subtextually told we're not as good as, as deserving as, as successful as the few that excel.
Capitalism 101 there...create scarcity from abundance, then keep the abundance away from the maximum number of people.
Being on the outside of the circle, then being uprooted from the normalcy of his life before tragedy of s familial sort scars him further, Martin is a kid who's asked to bear social burdens way above his paygrade. Similar circumstances have crushed adults (famously Pete Best, though the comparison is unfair and inexact) into tailspins more intense than Martin's. Adolescence is hard enough...putting this on top...well, it's no wonder Martin begins to fanatically and fearfully avoid the cultural juggernaut that was Pottermania.
Not terribly successful, that. With the expected consequences.
Watching a talented, not exceptional, adolescent fall into psychosis was uncomfortable to read. Martin imagines...carefully note verb choice...people are laughing at him, judging him, thinking of him as second best, because this epic piece of bad luck befell him. This is, to an adult, clearly imaginary; also clearly missing that most painful of adolescent lacks: Perspective. Watching Martin stumble and bumble his way through what could have been a very good career indeed turned into a prison of self-doubt and fantasy...well...it's rough for me as a reader to soldier on, resonating as I do to his terrible, ongoing struggle. Reading the rumination, by definition repetitive, of someone caught in their mind's cruelest trap...what might have been...is, no matter how brief (only 200-ish pages), quite an ask for entertainment.
Author Foenkinos was inspired to write this story by an interview with the film in question's casting director who recounted the process of anointing Daniel Radcliffe as Potter in contrast to another boy who didn't have some quality Radcliffe did. I do not know if that other child was ever named in any other venue. I certainly hope not. Bad enough to lose out; worse to be known as the loser. The story moves at a slow pace because rumination is not susceptible to the plot drivers that keep us flipping pages. It is an interior novel, this, one that says "here we are in this head and here we stay" which isn't quite the same thing as a récit, but really closely related. In both there is a relentless inward gaze. It gets wearing.
That this would make a very interesting French film is undeniable; it's purported to have been adapted to the stage, though I can't find any official source that mentions this. I can barely imagine how Foenkinos is getting away with mentioning Potter at all without The Lawyers℠ being all over him like vultures on a gut-cart for not paying Warner Bros. a cut. (Maybe he is; I kinda doubt it.)
What I found troubling is the way this examination of fame culture was presented in its downside was pointed but never pointed out. I'm not sanguine about the readers attracted to the story getting a sense of resolution from the ending. It's why I'm only offering four stars for a five-star idea.
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