The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Faire l’amour, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
reviewed by Warren Motte

Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002. 179 pp. €13.00.

The first sentence of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s latest novel offers a scene that is chilling enough for anyone: “I had filled a flask with hydrochloric acid, and I always carried it with me, thinking that one day I would throw it in somebody’s face.” The narrator of this tale, anonymous like Toussaint’s other protagonists, doesn’t have anyone particular in mind. But the principal candidate would seem to be Marie, his companion of seven years. He and Marie are falling out of love, violently and ineluctably. For her part, Marie opines that one day he will throw the acid in his own face; and the narrator is forced to admit that this is not beyond the realm of possibility. Chekhov once suggested that if there is a shotgun on the wall in act 1, it had better go off in act 3, and this shotgun will be fired, too—but not quite in the direction we might have expected.

Faire l’amour (Making Love) is Toussaint’s seventh book for the Editions de Minuit, in a career inaugurated in 1985 with the quirky and splendid novel La Salle de bain (The Bathroom). This tale is darker than any he has told in the past. The absurdist qualities that Toussaint has always put on display in his writing are present here, but they are considerably leavened by the grimness of the problem with which the narrator and Marie grapple. The story is set in Tokyo, where Marie, a fashion designer, has been invited to exhibit her latest collection. For good or for ill, the narrator has come along for the ride. It is a Tokyo beset by cold, by snow, and by darkness, both literal and spiritual. Jet-lagged and ill, abstracted from the banality of their everyday life in Paris and the anesthetic habits of the quotidian, living for once face-to-face, these two people are forced to come to terms with the fact that neither loves the other in the way that they once did: “We loved each other,” says the narrator, “but we could no longer bear to be with each other.”

The earthquakes that recur with regularity during their stay in Tokyo serve only to remind this couple of the seismic nature of their own relationship. Catastrophe comes in many different shapes, of course, and Toussaint speculates incisively on how people react to disaster, whether that disaster be natural or personal. Love is a telluric force, he argues. If the earth moves when people make love, it can move just as powerfully when love is unmade, too.