Le Club des incorrigibles optimistes (The Incorrigible Optimists Club)1 was met, on its publication in 2009, with a more than laudatory reception and won both the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens and the readers’ prize of Notre temps. These prizes are more than deserved. The author, first a lawyer and then a screenwriter and playwright, spent six years composing this 700-page novel, which one reads with passion and emotion.
Its central character, Michel, is a young boy who turns twelve in 1959. Through him we rediscover that generation which was bored in the strait-laced France of the years before May 1968, whose elders had, in an unbearable silence, either to take part in the Algerian War or to desert, while its intellectuals chose or chose not to open their eyes to what was being plotted on the other side of the Wall.
This coming-of-age novel, built as a long flashback to the years 1960 to 1964, is the author’s homage to the victims of Stalinism, through the history and the portraits of a little “club” of disenchanted exiles who gather regularly to play chess at the back of a café on the Place Denfert-Rochereau. All of them share, besides that “incorrigible optimism” which, for lack of anything better, keeps them alive, a heavy past on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and a despair that exile will never cure, as the quotation from Dante that closes the novel poignantly recalls:
And you shall leave behind you, as you go, All those beside whom your own life has flowed: This is the first arrow the exile’s bow lets fly. Far from Florence and from all our kin, You shall learn how hard it is to climb Another’s stairs, and how the stranger’s bread tastes bitter on the tongue.2
Le Cercle littéraire des amateurs d’épluchures de patates (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)3 has also met with justified success. Like the preceding one, it has an indirectly pedagogical aim that makes it the ideal gift for adolescents. One of its authors writes for young readers, which is perhaps the source of that freshness of pen and spirit that creates the double tone: serious for the historical passages, light for the heroine’s adventures.
This epistolary novel begins in London in January 1946: a young journalist cannot find a theme for her future book and, at the same time, is trying to fulfil a commission for an article for the Times on “the practical, moral and philosophical virtues of reading.” She has heard of a “literary circle” that brought together, throughout the entire war, inhabitants of the island of Guernsey, and she contacts them. She soon receives letters from each member of this little “club,” with reflections on their reading, accounts of their lives under the German occupation, self-portraits, confidences — the novel-in-letters lending itself well to such a discovery of differing personalities, tones and stories.
The little circle of readers met every fortnight, each presenting to the others a book he had loved, thus creating the “club”: “By dint of reading, of talking about books and of quarrelling over them, we came to bind ourselves closely to one another (…) our evenings turned into warm and lively moments. So much so that from time to time we very nearly forgot the blackness of the world outside.”
The account of the little reading circle’s birth gives the novel’s general tone well, poised between tragic elements and the struggle for daily survival: the club met for the first time not around books, but for a forbidden dinner, since all foodstuffs were confiscated by the occupier. The meal comforts the participants, who forget the curfew. On leaving, they are surprised by a patrol. One participant improvises a lie: “We were attending a meeting of the Guernsey literary circle, and the evening’s discussion was so captivating that we all lost track of time.” And luck follows: “Improbable as it may seem, the Germans permitted, indeed encouraged, the island’s cultural and artistic initiatives. They wanted to prove to the British that the German Occupation was a model occupation.”
The Circle can therefore meet each fortnight while History continues: “After D-Day, the Germans stopped sending supply ships from France, because of the Allied bombardments. So much so that they ended up as starved as we were, and killed dogs and cats to feed themselves.” Thus everyday life is evoked in each letter, from the restrictions and the famine (the first Red Cross ship docks at Guernsey in December 1944) to the various relationships that certain islanders form with the German soldiers, in a palette of relations that echoes the other novels about that era.
The worst is also evoked at the heart of the novel: in one of the letters, one of the inhabitants recounts how, in March 1944, he was sent by the Germans to the Neuengamme camp, where he joined the prisoners charged with collecting the bombs that had failed to explode during the air raids. In April 1945, he leaves with the still able-bodied men to work at Belsen, where he discovers the horror of the camps. The account then focuses on the Shoah, through the absence of one of the Circle’s participants, vanished but ever-present: “The only time books were of no use to me was when Elizabeth was arrested by the Germans for having hidden a poor Polish slave worker, and was sent to prison in France. No book could warm my heart after that, and for a long time. I had all the trouble in the world holding myself back from slapping every German I came across. (…) Elizabeth still hasn’t come back. We are worried about her. Mind you, the war hasn’t been over long, it’s still possible she’ll return. I pray, too, because I miss her terribly.”
To conclude on these two novels: their thematic similarity — a young character discovers the history of the generation that preceded his own — remains superficial. In Le Cercle littéraire des amateurs d’épluchures de patates, the evil is external to the characters, embodied by Nazi Germany; the secret finally revealed is that of Elizabeth’s fate in the Ravensbrück camp, following her rebellion against a kapo. In Guenassia’s novel, Evil is in the Soviet system, but ends up contaminating everything: the enemy is not the foreign occupier, but the brother, the close relation, oneself. The secret revealed is that of the character’s weakness, caught in the gears of the Stalinist machine.
If Le Cercle littéraire des amateurs d’épluchures de patates ends like a coming-of-age novel whose heroine evolves toward greater awareness and maturity, the ending of The Incorrigible Optimists Club belies its title. When one of the protagonists evokes the past, he concludes as much on the horror of the Stalinist system as on its porousness, when the human being cannot remain apart from the madness: “We managed to avoid no mistake. We committed them all. Nothing will be able to redeem us.” In this sense, Guenassia’s club reads as the disenchanted observation of witnesses who have seen it all, definitively exiled “east of Eden.”