There’s a famous scene in an old Soviet movie. A fancy, snobby woman rolls her eyes and says condescendingly, “Even the most backwards strata of the population now wear jeans.”
Jeans were hard to come by in the USSR, and that made them somewhat of a class marker.
I have no interest in jeans but the novel Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan awakened a chi-chi fru-fru woman in me. De Vigan is like Emmanuel Carrère. I’m starting to think it’s now a thing among French writers. They rewrite highbrow literature for the masses. It’s not a bad thing. I’m a literary critic, so it’s kind of entertaining to see an airport novel version of the writers I study professionally.
Based on a True Story offers a somewhat plodding retelling of the issue that was of great interest to highbrow writers of 60 years ago. Who is the real author of a text? Is biography always fiction? Is fiction always biography? What is the relationship between the writer and the text? Does the author fully or even partially understand their own text? Do the author’s different personas know each other? Or can they communicate like completely different people?
It’s good that the masses are catching up. I guess. I’m not the kind of a literary critic who cares much about any of this stuff. I’m into neoliberalism and the nation-state and social class. I’ve been criticized from here to the Moon for it. I’m thinking, enough with this navel-gazing. Let’s do something real. But even the popular literature today is going in the direction of navel gazing and “who’s the real author?”
De Vigan uses the fussy, highly neurotic narrative voice that has been with us since Dostoevsky. She doesn’t seem to understand that in order to be able to do it in the 21st century, you can’t be painfully earnest about it. It’s been done 5 trillion times, so you can’t act like you invented it five seconds ago. You have to be humorous about it. Use some irony. Thomas Bernhard and Horacio Castellanos Moya do this perfectly.
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