The Propagandist - Cécile Desprairies

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The Propagandist

by
Cécile Desprairies

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Propagandist
Author:	Cécile Desprairies
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2023 (Eng. 2024)
Length:	192 pages
Original in:	French
Availability:	The Propagandist - US
	The Propagandist - UK
	The Propagandist - Canada
	La propagandiste - Canada
	La propagandiste - France

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

French title: La propagandiste
Translated by Natasha Lehrer

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Our Assessment:

B+ : fascinating and well-told tale

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Le Figaro	.	5/10/2023	Isabelle Spaak
World Lit. Today	.	1-2/2025	A.-C.Carls

From the Reviews:

"Desprairies’s language is laced with Faulknerian violence. She skips from minute observations to real-life language laced with colloquialisms, colorful epithets, and cultural references. Natasha Lehrer’s translation fluidifies the narrative by reorchestrating sentences and paragraphs and eliminating tautological phrases. This, however, somewhat dulls the flavor of the text and abridges the author’s turns of thought, especially when French cultural references are scrambled into images more suitable for an English ear. Overall, the smooth translation does justice to a Greek drama of emotional entrapment and release." - Alice-Catherine Carls, World Literature Today

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

The Propagandist is narrated by Coline, and begins with childhood memories of her mother Lucie, and the female relatives that regularly gathered in their household in the mid-1960s, when the narrator was a young child -- "an atmosphere that resembled a gynaeceum", the young child an observer of a strange, mystifying world. This sense of childish incomprehension and confusion, about the behavior of these adults and what things mean, fittingly sets the foundations for the novel as a whole then as the narrator explores and reveals more of what she learnt as an adult about her family's -- and especially her mother's -- past, and as she to make sense of it.
Lucie is an intelligent and very strong-willed woman; she stands out from the rest of the gynaeceum-group in being married (to her second husband) and having been an outstanding student, complete with an advanced education, including a law degree. She was a country girl awarded a scholarship to attend "one of the most elite high schools" in Paris -- but found herself mocked by her Parisian classmates there:

She quickly shed her accent. But she would have her revenge. her schoolmates, from well-to-do families, were almost all Jewish. She had found her target. Lucie would have the last laugh.

       Aged twenty-one she met the great love of her life, Friedrich. An Alsatian, he was: "Born German during World War I, he became French two years later, after the armistice; aged twenty-three, he became German again, after the annexation of Alsace in July 1940". He enthusiastically got behind the German Reich-ideals; indeed: "Friedrich was more German than the Germans, more Nazi than the Nazis". Embracing race-theory fully, Friedrich worked towards becoming a biologist -- and: "Lucie and Friedrich's ambition was nothing less than to conquer the world -- biologically".
       The couple married and lived in an apartment that had belonged to to a 'departed' Jew -- declared "vacant for a just and true cause" by the occupying authorities. Together, the couple's: "mission in life was messianic; their task was to educate the French to embrace National Socialism". Of course, things didn't work out; when it was clear the Germans were headed to defeat, Friedrich hoped to throw his lot in with the American; Lucie had her doubts, given his all-too clear Nazi sympathies and activities, but he headed to Normandy in October 1944, hoping to to "inveigle an introduction" to an American camp commander but winding up killed instead.
       Friedrich remained the great lost love of Lucie's life -- something her second husband, and the father of her children, Charles accepted and put up with. Just how besotted she remained is clear from the fact that she continued to make pilgrimages to his grave, and named her first-born Frédéric:

He might as well have been called Friedrich Junior. Lucie liked to sweep his blond hair back and dress him in lederhosen, Austro-Bavarian leather sort pants. Friedrich Junior was a dream child, in both senses: He was perfectly behaved, and he fulfilled Lucie's fantasy, though she would have far preferred for him to have been fathered by Friedrich.

       In the most amusing observation in the novel the narrator also notes that: "At least I was not named Frieda, but I might as well have been".
       The narrator fills in biographical detail, from both the time before her birth -- the collaborations of, especially, Lucie, but also various other family-members -- as well as in the decades afterwards, when the past was largely shushed-over ("everyone was convinced that if things remained unspoken they did not exist"), even as so much -- not least the basic attitude -- still bubbled through. Considerable space is also then devoted to another relative, the narrator's great-uncle Raphaël, who thrived also under the Occupation -- and then managed to enjoy an illustrious post-war career without his collaborationist past haunting him much (except in the form of a letter which Lucie claimed to have and threatened to blackmail him with). As the narrator notes: "The chameleon effect is a constant in my family".
       The Propagandist is presented as a novel but clearly closely based on the author's own family. The narrator's one mention of her name -- Coline -- is practically a throwaway-line, just to keep up the pretense, while Raphaël's life is described in such detail that he is easily recognizable as Gabriel Dussurget, best-known as longtime director of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. Yet while the novel begins with the narrator -- i.e. presumably the author's -- childhood memories, later sections present scenes and even extensive dialogue from before her birth -- which, from all we learn about the family members, she could hardly have learned so directly from them; at best bits might have been pieced together, but much is surely best-guessed fiction that the author offers based on what information she has been able to gather -- leaving the whole floating somewhat oddly between documentary and fiction.
       The pieces of Lucie's fascinating life presented here are often jaw-dropping -- from friendship with Céline to the cover of Life (as she had a brief American stint after the war as well) --, as there is an incredible wealth of material here. This, along with strong, strange, perverted character of Lucie, is, unsurprisingly, a lot that the narrator understandably struggles to come to any sort of grips with.
       When she has the family deciding how to present themselves as the war comes to a close, Lucie is presented giving strict instructions as to what the family members are to do and how they should behave (including: "No one is ever to utter a word of German" -- though apparently Lucie is the only one who knew the language) and Raphaël interjects: "This is pure fiction, You should be writing novels". And, indeed, elsewhere the narrator also notes that: "Lucie wove endless fictions and used other people to her own ends". Yet, of course, it was also a real life.
       Truth here -- and it seems safe to assume that practically all of this is, basically, true -- is stranger than fiction, and so the one problem with the book is that it is presented as fiction. Not even really as a roman à clef but as the most thinly veiled of fictions -- and yet with some thick layers of fictional technique (the dialogues the narrator imagines, above all, but also the reactions and interactions among the characters that she did not herself witness). It is an impressive, vivid picture, well-supported by the narrative voice and approach -- even the back and forth across time works well -- but still sits somewhat uneasily between fact and fictional refraction.

- M.A.Orthofer, 28 December 2024

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Links:

The Propagandist:

New Vessel Press publicity page
Swift Press publicity page
Seuil publicity page
Points publicity page

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of French literature
Other books from New Vessel Press

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About the Author:

French author Cécile Desprairies was born in 1957.

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