Last week I finished Le Sang des Sirènes, a crime / thriller novel by French author Thierry Serfaty. At 250 pages and fairly large typeface, it was a quick read. I completed it over the course of 10 days in my usual evenings and weekends pattern. The book was published in 2000 and the plot is centered around industrial espionage and immunology research (intrigue around the hunt to find and profit from a cure for AIDS). Some combination of the modern publication date, my history working at a pharmaceutical company, and my having read a lot of French crime literature likely explain the fact that nearly all the vocabulary was familiar to me. I noted 24 novel words in the first 100 pages or so and then decided just to finish the book without pencil in hand.
This is Serfarty’s first novel. Although it won that year’s Prix Polar for best crime novel from the Festival Polar de Cognac and launched Serfarty’s successful literary second career as an novelist and television screenwriter (he originally trained as a doctor), I didn’t think much of the book.
Le Sang des Sirènes starts with an innovative framing. The prologue is a first person narrative where we meet Jan Hellberg, a recently murdered Danish immunologist. He tells us that, as a scientist, he doesn’t believe in reincarnation. Still, the fact remains that he died in a car crash, and then a spirit – named “Life” – came to him and showed him a mysterious hand sabotaging the brakes hours before. So he’s forced to reconsider his views on the hereafter.
Life offers him the chance to relive the last 6 months of his life in order to discover who had arranged his murder. However, he won’t have any power to change the course of events, and he won’t be able to remember the future details of his life as he retraverses those 6 months. He’ll only be able to remember this bargain he’s made with Life, and to pay closer attention to who might have wanted him dead and acted on that motive. Then he can at least die with the solace of knowing who killed him and why.
I really liked the prologue. Witty, introspective, fresh. Unfortunately, everything goes downhill from there. The main character never really gets developed, and the other characters are cardboard at best. There’s an awful lot of telling and not showing. The pacing is erratic, with long science explanations interspersed with breakneck reversals: “person X is good – no wait, they’re evil – just kidding, good after all.” Many of the Dan Brown novels and their emulators (e.g. The Da Vinci Code) suffer from these same flaws, and feel like they are conceived as movies that happen to have been packaged as novels. It doesn’t surprise me that Serfaty went on to write television screenplays. Also, the cellular biochemistry explanations fall wide of the mark. They add nothing for the reader who knows the material, and I can’t imagine they are satisfying or interesting to the reader who hasn’t seen this since high school.
Le Sang de Sirènes had been sitting on my shelf unread for several years. The price printed on the back is «98,00 F TTC» : 98 pre-euro French francs, all taxes included (recall that the Euro was launched in 1999, but existed only as an invisible currency until coins and banknotes appeared in 2002). I purchased it for $1 from the French Cultural Center of Boston at one of their semi-annual book sales. There are no library markings on it, so I conclude that it was a member donation rather than a library de-acquisition. I’m glad to know that the FCC librarians didn’t think this was worth purchasing in the first place. It’s the sort of book one might imagine picking up in an airport before a long flight and being glad of the in-air diversion. Amusingly, I found nestled in the back a boarding pass stub for an Air France flight 062 from Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris, to LAX, Los Angeles. It includes the name of the passenger, but «la pudeur» restrains me from outing them here.
I’m actually being too hard on the book. It was good for reinforcing vocabulary and for practicing automaticity generally. I noticed several words from my previous post on Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien show up in this novel. So I don’t regret starting or finishing the volume. But I won’t be seeking out other works by Serfaty.
One detail remains: how could a book with these flaws win a literary honor like Prix Polar for best crime novel from the Festival Polar de Cognac? For that, I think one needs to understand the French cultural phenomenon of «La rentrée littéraire». Several years ago a teacher shared with me this video from ARTE. It’s worth a watch:
In short, the French seem to love contests and competitions, and there is a tradition of literary prizes that dates back to the start of the 20th century. The earliest and most prestigious of these is the Prix Goncourt, but many others soon followed. Every fall there are a couple of months of closely watched announcements of various books and authors progressing to the next stage for candidate novels for this or that award. The final winners are announced in time to take full advantage of Christmas sales. The winning books are all displayed with red paper bands wrapping them and shouting the name of the award.
Perhaps more so than in the US (or perhaps not), there’s more than a whiff of theater and self-dealing involved with these awards. The judges are typically authors, and frequently select winners that work with the same publishing houses as themselves. But moreover, the whole thing is as much about marketing as it is about merit. As a result, there is a proliferation of awards and everyone is a winner. In the specific field of crime novels, there are some two dozen annual contests, and many give multiple awards.
In the future, I may trust the recommendations emanating from Cognac more for choosing my brandy than for choosing my reading material.
Here’s the list of unfamiliar vocabulary words I noted:
Word Notes
- une guimbarde is a rare word with multiple meanings. It can denote a musical instrument (a “Jew’s harp”), an old junky car, a 17th-century two-step dance, or a small plane used by a carpenter (a rabot !). In this book, it meant a car. The word frequency was fairly stable in the Google Books corpus at 1 in 20 million from 1800-2000. Then it experienced a sudden jump in between 2003 and 2012, rising to about 1 in 4.5 million, where it has stayed since. Alas, I don’t know which of the meanings has reemerged.
- lésiner means to skimp or cut corners. It’s been getting steadily more frequent for 200 years. I looked into the possibility that it was connected to the English “lazy”, but the etymologies are completely different.
- tonitruer is “to thunder”, both in the meteorological sense and in the metaphorical sense of speaking loudly and with anger. Curious that the language has both «tonner» and «tonitruer» with apparently the same meaning. I’m not sure if they carry different connotations.
Common words, uncommon meanings
- emprunter means “to borrow”, of course, and is routinely a beginner word for the classroom. But it can also mean to take a route or a path to get around: «J’emprunte les escaliers qui mènent à mon bureau.»
- jurer commonly means to swear, either in the sense of “avow” or in the sense of “curse”. But it can also mean “to clash” or “to conflict”: «l’élément qui jure dans un ensemble harmonieux».
- la chaussée derives from the word «chaussure», “shoe”. The verb «chausser» means to put shoes on someone or something, like a horse. It can also mean to put tires on a vehicle, which I find a pleasant and consistent evolution of the word. But as a noun, «la chaussée» is a roadway, carriageway, highway, or more generally the pavement. This of course is related to the expression for the ground floor of a building, the «rez-de-chaussée».