#whatireadovershabbat Romain Gary/Émile Ajar's The Life Before Us, translated by Ralph Manheim (1975; New Directions, 1986)
Sometimes you read a book just so you can read another. In the never-ending quest to improve my reading French (the goal, of course, is Proust), I found the shortest “book” I could: Romain Gary’s last testament, Vie et mort d’Émile Ajar. At forty pages in the original edition, and a scant ten in a Gary reader, it’s an essay with book covers. But how was I supposed to make heads or tails of the thing if I didn’t know anything about Émile Ajar, Gary’s alter ego?
Apparently I knew enough to know there was something I didn’t know. Hence my recent decision to pick up Romain Gary/Émile Ajar’s Prix Goncourt–winning novel, The Life Before Us. Gary, already tremendously famous in France and abroad, seems to have felt hemmed in by his celebrity. The Ajar pseudonym allowed him to write without the expectations of press and fans hanging over him (I gather this information from the admiring afterword by New Directions publisher James Laughlin). That Ajar soon became wildly popular tickled Gary. When The Life Before Us won the Prix Goncourt, he became the only writer to win the prestigious award twice. It is supposed to be awarded only once to an author.
Though the novel hasn’t aged perfectly (black humor rarely does), it isn’t hard to see why it was critically lauded and commercially successful. Reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye in tone and framing, The Life Before Us is the coming-of-age story of a foul-mouthed Arab orphan boy, who lives in the slums of Belleville with his guardian, a fat, old, sick ex-prostitute and Holocaust survivor. If my language seems blunt, it’s nothing compared to the book. Told by the boy, Momo, he spares us not a single detail of his sorry, sordid life—and his vocabulary is up to the task.
It’s one of Gary/Ajar’s achievements that woven through the grotesquerie is a thread of tenderness. As the narrative progresses, that thread becomes the dominant motif. Against his own intentions, Momo more and more betrays the depth of his fear as he watches Madame Rosa sink into her illness. The cast of characters who emerge to shepherd the pair through their troubles range from comic to earnest to tragic, most of them as colorful as Momo and Madame Rosa themselves.
James Laughlin, in his afterword to the book, indicates that this tenderness doesn’t extend into the books by Ajar that followed. If anything, they evinced a kind of cruelty. Nor did Gary appreciate the life of its own that his alter ego appears to have wrested from him. The many praises showered on assisted suicide in The Life Before Us should surely have given some the clue to where Gary was headed. Five short years after the book appeared, he put a bullet in his head.
Sometimes you think you’re reading a book just so you can read another, and it turns out the book you’re reading is the one you were looking for after all. The Life Before Us has left an impression. And Gary seems like quite the character himself, an observation I assume Vie et mort d'Émile Ajar will further confirm. Maybe after make it through Proust in the original, I’ll try to brave this one again. If nothing else, I’ll improve my vocabulary. I’m sure Momo uses some words that Proust never did.
Comments