I went into The Paris Trilogy (Lumen, 2024) by French author Colombe Schneck, like someone who accesses chatroulette, that page that connected you to random webcams of strangers from around the world. You opened the website with a certain trepidation and came across some friendly Belgians eager to learn languages or, more often, a close-up of male genitals. Despite the predictability of the result, the promise of some new perspective made you return again and again to that sordid pool. Something similar happens to me with autobiographical narrative. A couple of evocative lines in a review of the trilogy were enough for me to run to buy the latest from that mysterious Parisian, a tough girl from my mother’s generation who recalled her life – finally someone managed to do it – without sentimentality or embellishment.
Colombe Schneck is not Annie Ernaux. Twenty-six years and one or two social classes separate them. Schneck, born in 1966, is the spoiled daughter of progressive bourgeoisie, as she repeatedly recalls throughout the three very short novels. Her parents encouraged her to study and express her opinion, voted socialist and believed in free love in the Beauvoir-Sartre style—that is, the father always had some lover and the mother suffered for it. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to read Schneck as a faithful disciple of the Nobel Prize winner. Like Ernaux, she summarises the key events of her life with a cold detachment, as if one more flourish would entail the risk of being self-indulgent. Like Ernaux, she describes the dissolution of youthful ambition into the disenchantment of marriage and motherhood in enumerative paragraphs that span decades and generations: “They are thirty, thirty-five, forty, heads down, shoulders slumped, silent and burdened.” Like Ernaux, she makes her typically female experience—an abortion in her teens, a long, ambivalent friendship, an intense, failed romance at 50—her raw material.
Ernaux’s humble origins and eventual declassification are a common thread in her work. For Schneck, it is her inability to achieve a kind of functional fulfillment – not to mention happiness – despite having everything in her favor. The suspicion that this impossibility is intimately linked to her sex hovers throughout her life. Her female body betrays her already at the beginning of her love life, when she becomes pregnant by a student boyfriend at 17. “What I am, a girl and not a boy, traps me.” The mirage of equality is over. But the year is 1984: Schneck’s abortion is not clandestine like the one Ernaux narrates in The event. Her understanding father accompanies her to the clinic, the procedure is quick and banal. Although no one reproaches her for anything, she will from then on carry “a kind of stain on me, made up of blood, of excrement.” Her female body is the enemy, a nuisance from which she must dissociate herself in order to become a thinking (male) mind.
Ernaux’s humble background and eventual declassing is a common thread in his work. For Schneck, it is his inability to achieve a kind of functional plenitude despite having everything in his favor.
It is not until the third section, which narrates the promising beginning and brutal dissolution of a nine-month romance, that we see the dire consequences of this dissociation. Here Schneck briefly delves into the literary genre of female abjection so worked on by Doris Lessing, Ingeborg Bachmann, or Ernaux herself. Her desire for the handsome Gabriel is as overwhelming as her inability to have any kind of control or initiative in the relationship. Her role is passive, reactive, governed by the fear of being abandoned. It is not until Gabriel takes her swimming, and teaches her the technique of the crawl stroke, that the narrator realizes that she has hands, legs, a still flexible trunk. Gabriel will soon leave her (“we are too different”) but the practice of the crawl stroke will continue. Her weekly dips in the municipal pool function as a mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath with which women purify themselves after menstruation. With each stroke of the crawl stroke, the reconciliation with the body advances.
The movie How to Have Sex, The British director Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature opens with bodies in the water. Three teenage friends bathe on a beach in Malia, Crete, at the beginning of what will have to be “the best vacation of their lives.” An hour and a half of nightmarish intensity follows: endless parties, neon lights, discos, shots, blowjobs on stage, Dantesque images that evoke the terms balconying and Magaluf. The obsession of one of them, the sweet Tara, with losing her virginity, runs through each scene like a dark premonition. Nothing could go right, and nothing does. The spectacle is nauseating, if not desolate: the bodies of young girls march like animals to the slaughterhouse, drunk, vulnerable, exposed, ignorant of themselves. It occurred to me while watching it that the girls in the film were the same age as Schneck when she suffered the first betrayal of her body, and that it took her 40 years to get into the water and find some calm. As she explains in the prologue, she soon began to overtake men in the pool. This made her feel exultant: “My breasts shrank, and my uterus stopped working.”
Anna Pazos She is a journalist and writer. Her latest book is titled ‘Matar el nervio’ (Random House, 2023).
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