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Novel cover "Dans le ventre de Klara" by Régis Jauffret — Novel cover “Dans le ventre de Klara” by Régis Jauffret

[For the presentation of this book published in French, I did my best to translate some sentences in English, but a professional translation would have better reflect the quality of Régis Jauffret’s writing].

“In July 1888, around Saint James’s Day, Uncle made me pregnant”. So begins Régis Jauffret‘s novel “Dans le ventre de Klara” (In Klara’s Belly) , that master of punchlines and synthesis. The Klara in question is Klara Hitler, who at the time of the story is carrying within her an Adolf Hitler already capable of infusing her on occasion with visions of the disaster he would orchestrate years later.

The author has found a unique way to position Klara’s terrible premonitions in the text. They are suddenly imposed in the midst of the mother-to-be’s daily reveries, often right in the middle of a paragraph or sentence.

In this tale of fact and fiction, the wife must stay in her place and hope for nothing. The writer has Klara say: “I’m afflicted with the mania of hoping for something other than my fate“. The husband decides everything. The local church’s confessor would love to have as much control as the spouse, but this proves more difficult than expected. The husband and abbot are a good example of the excessive power they wield over women in this era. A military officer with little combat experience who dictates his conduct to his wife as if she were a soldier, and a fanatical abbot who imposes the arbitrary rules of a sickening religion, enslaving women and imposing his dogmas on couples from a distance.

Back cover of the novel "Dans le ventre de Klara" by Régis Jauffret — Back cover of the novel “Dans le ventre de Klara” by Régis Jauffret

Speaking of God and women, the author writes: “A Christian woman must bear children, help to populate the Earth He has given us as a theater for our sins”. And when Klara finds herself back in the confessional and being chastised by the priest: “Far from the voice of Christ gone, it was now Abbé Probst who was busy putting me through the wringer of language. Sentences as long as straps. Words as heavy and blunt as bludgeons. Subtle, sharp words, in places bristling with reddened spikes. Punctuation like broken glass […].” You get the idea…

I particularly appreciate Régis Jauffret’s writing, having read many of his works, including “La ballade de Rikers Island“, “Le dernier bain de Gustave Flaubert“, “Papa” and the three volumes entitled Microfictions, published respectively in 2007, 2018 and 2022. He even won the Goncourt short story award for the 2018 edition.

Régis Jauffret explains the intention behind his latest novel in a video on Youtube, if you’re interested in digging deeper into the subject.

Happy reading!

Click on the link for other novels on my blog.

Title: Dans le ventre de Klara

Author: Régis Jauffret

Publisher: Récamier

ISBN : 978-2-38577-057-0

Both Sorj Chalandon, in his novel “Enfant de salaud”, and Régis Jauffret in “Papa” try to grasp the enigmatic personality of their father. Sorj Chalandon’s father is said to have been a Resistance fighter and a traitor at the same time, while Régis Jauffret’s father is said to have been filmed coming out of a Gestapo interrogation session, terror on his face. Where does the truth lie? Who are these fathers really?

In a previous text, I presented the book “Enfant de salaud”. Now it’s the turn of the novel “Papa” by Régis Jauffret.

As one might expect with Régis Jauffret, the writing style differs radically. The author is the winner of the Goncourt short story prize (2018) for his novel “Microfictions 2018”. His sense of synthesis, black humour and even cynicism makes this return to the father’s past a literary as well as historical adventure. The reader quickly understands that the author takes pleasure in presenting his discoveries. He even adds a bit of fiction when necessary.

True to my habit when it comes to Régis Jauffret, I will present his book through selected quotes. Indeed, the interest of the book lies as much in the content as in the way Régis expresses himself to enlighten his subject. Here are a few quotes (translated as best as possible) that may help to grasp the tone of the book:

“I took communion.

Someone pointed out to me on the way out that I wasn’t a believer.

– That’s right, a wafer or chips.

I smiled, but after this blasphemy I was not very happy. When you have been educated religiously, you always keep the terror of God in the back of your mind”.

“He had just had a stroke which, far from handicapping him, seemed to have cheered him up”.

“She told me that the moisture had blown away the veneer [of the coffin]. All that was left was a box of blackened boards. I wasn’t in a good enough mood to call the funeral home lady to invoke the eternal guarantee that such metaphysical products undoubtedly enjoy”.

“One of those happy memories that make you feel good that you never went to a gun shop to buy something to shoot yourself in the head”.

“Alfred was instructed to clench his teeth during coitus without sighing, while she remained as stoic as when the dentist teased one of her molars with the tip of his drill without anesthesia”.

“Through the vast copper bell of a gramophone perched on a pedestal whose statue had been stolen, Édith Piaf shouted ‘J’ai dansé avec l’amour’ (I danced with love) while the cries of the martyrs rose from the basement”.

“Writing about oneself is a form of incontinence”.

“We are condescending to deaf people without status or talent, but we prefer to deal with them sparingly. When you haven’t seen them soon enough to have hidden behind a construction machine or a bulky man, you greet them from afar as you walk away”.

“If I had not seen these images, you would have remained in the sewers of my memory”.

“If I last as long as Madeleine, I will be a centenarian who will unexpectedly ruminate on his father in his dried-up brain like a currant while an orderly built like a colossus swings my emaciated body in the air to change my diaper”.

“Pitiful descendant of protozoa that have become multicellular beings with brains, humanity has no reason to show off”.

“It is heroic in times of war to assume the role of the executioner, even if it means being wrong sometimes, because in extreme situations doubt never benefits the accused”.

“He talked from morning to night. Anyone he met on the street was showered with language like a careless person on a pier on a stormy day by a surge of water. In his office, everyone was soaked. So much so that people ran away from him, but he always managed to find someone who was kind enough to let himself be flooded”.

“I never heard him talk about his day either. The weather had been fine, it had snowed, it had rained, a chamois had crossed the trail in a tail, a man hit by a storm had burst into flames, a lady had fallen into a crevasse while singing a cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach”.

“During this time, Jean-Jacques and Honoré undertook the sisters red as blue meat to find themselves in the presence of two boys whose pants in the fashion of the time moulded the genital apparatus of which they dreaded in advance the sting”.

Click on the link for other novels on my blog.

Title : Papa

Author : Régis Jauffret

Editions : Roman/Seuil, 2020.

ISBN : 978-2-02-145035-4