The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Dans le train, by Christian Oster
reviewed by Warren Motte

Christian Oster. Dans le train. Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002. 159 pp. €11.90.

The narrator of Christian Oster’s ninth novel, Dans le train (In the Train), is a man with a train to catch. Frank likes taking trains—any train at all; it doesn’t matter to him. More particularly, he takes trains in order to meet women, hoping eventually to find one who might agree to spend the rest of her life with him. Perhaps it’s something about the rhythm of the train that inspires Frank: I think I can, I think I can. . . . Anne, for her part, is taking a train from Paris to Gournon in order to bed a novelist who happens to be on a book tour there. But of course after Frank meets her on the train, his plans for Anne are quite different.

Solitary and lonesome like many of Oster’s protagonists, Frank is a very diffident hero at best. He is plagued with an acute consciousness of his own shortcomings as a social being. He is likewise cursed with an introspective spirit, and the coldly critical gaze he casts on the least of his actions is the source of a great deal of comedy in this novel. For despite his best intentions, Frank is no Lothario. The courtship he pays to Anne is a slavish, stumbling one; and the likelihood of Frank crossing the finish line seems dim. Yet he is nothing if not steadfast. Patient, true, and sincere in his love, hope springs eternal in Frank’s benighted breast. Undoubtedly, once in a very blue moon, the world rewards human qualities such as those.

Oster plays maddeningly (and most delightfully) on those very qualities in his novel, trifling with his reader’s patience, straining his reader’s credibility, testing his reader’s semiotic desire. He hopes that we will take Frank’s quest upon ourselves, making it our own. It’s a stretch, though, as Oster himself is the first to realize. Frank is not like us—or so we would dearly like to believe. His quest is a classic one nonetheless; and the travel topos in which it is cast is equally classic. Surely, Dans le train is not the Odyssey, nor The Canterbury Tales, nor yet Don Quixote. But it borrows elements from all of them, reconfiguring them in parodic fashion. What results from that process is a novel that is much like Frank himself. Dans le train argues that romance, whether it be the passion or the literary genre, is not entirely dead in our culture; that both stories and journeys respond to fundamental human needs; that the ordinary upon examination can prove to be extraordinary; and that every dog—however abysmally cynical we may be about such things—must at last have his day.