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the complete review - fiction

Babylon

by
Yasmina Reza

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

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Our Assessment:

B : decent humorously-dark slices of contemporary life

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  German critics all annoyed by her just doing her usual stuff

  From the Reviews:

• "Aber bei Reza wird aus der Mücke (beziehungsweise dem Hühnchen) natürlich gleich wieder ein Elefant. Überraschend ist nur, dass die Eskalation dieses Mal nicht im spannungsreichen Modus der Konversation stattfindet, sondern recht unprätentiös direkt in eine brachiale Tat mündet (...) Der Rest der Handlung setzt sich aus verschiedenen Versatzstücken einer klassischen Kriminalgeschichte zusammen. (...) Erzählt wird das alles in einem unbestechlich präzisen Ton. Aber was fehlt, ist die Pointe. Dass ein Bio-Hühnchen zum Ehemord führt, ist ja nicht mehr als morbider Sarkasmus. Was dahinter an Gesellschaftskritik steckt, erschließt sich nicht recht. (...) Überzeugend wird dieser Roman erst jenseits von Rahmenhandlung und Dialogszenen." - Simon Strauss, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "Hingegen bleibt in Yasmina Rezas Roman nichts, auch nicht das Geringste im Unsichtbaren. Sie zerrt alles ans grelle Licht, sie benennt jede Einzelheit, damit auch gewiss nichts im Zweideutigen verharren kann. Sogar dort, wo sie nur raunt und vage Andeutungen macht, geschieht es lediglich um des Effektes willen: Sie zeigt dem Leser, dass sie etwas weiss, was sie an dieser Stelle noch nicht gleich preisgeben möchte." - Roman Bucheli, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "(I)n Reza’s work, characters have always been inclined to go too far, to act out the impulses most of us keep in check. And so a middle-class set-piece takes on the color of a tale by Georges Simenon. Reza is the bard of bourgeois, neoliberal angst." - Erica Wagner, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Une nouvelle fois, et avec un brio mêlé de tendresse, ce qui confère à ce livre un charme certain, Yasmina Reza scrute l’étrange étrangeté des choses. (...) Il y a du vaudeville dans le petit théâtre romanesque que dresse ici Yasmina Reza. La romancière lance la mécanique implacable dès les premières pages" - Eléonore Sulser, Le Temps
  
  
• "Jedoch stellt sich unweigerlich die Frage: Was will uns die Autorin eigentlich sagen ? (...) Von solchen (fragwürdigen) Botschaften sind bereits die anderen Yasmina-Reza-Bücher voll. Man kennt sie jetzt allmählich." - Tilman Krause, Die Welt
  
  
• "Yasmina Reza könnte eine bedeutende Romanautorin sein, wenn sie nicht jedes Mal, um die Handlung ins Rollen zu bringen, eine Klamotte schreiben würde. Dabei schafft sie Figuren, die von ihrer seelischen Tiefe her für ganz andere Erfahrungen gerüstet wären, aber dann lässt sie sie doch wieder nur auf einer Bananenschale ausrutschen." - Ijoma Mangold, Die Zeit

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:

       Babylon does center around a 'big' event -- someone gets killed -- but it's far from your usual mystery or thriller. Narrated by sixty-two-year-old Elisabeth Jauze, what happens does also lead to her life being examined, by officials, "with ridiculous zeal" -- which, as she sees it, amounts to: "a ridiculous determination to manufacture a false picture"; in a sense Babylon is an attempt, in much more relaxed manner, to present the actual reality. Babylon is more about the lives, and their milieu, than the murderous act (and the after-act(s) that follow); Elisabeth not only doesn't lead with it in her account, but for quite a while barely does more than hint at what happened: the first mention that something terrible happened comes with a casual mention of someone who: "had heard about the drama in our building and was obviously hungry for the details". Elisabeth will give the details, but she takes her time getting there.
       Elisabeth introduces herself and then sets her small-world stage in a roundabout way. She seems to be feeling her age, wondering where it all went wrong: "I can't say I've figured out how to be happy in life", she admits -- sounding as much puzzled as regretful. She's not miserable, but she does look back a bit longingly on her freer-seeming youth. She works -- as a patent engineer -- at the Pasteur Institute (a job title that: "means nothing to people and I no longer try to describe it in any appealing way"), and she's long been married, apparently reasonably happily, to Pierre; they have a grown son, Emmanuel; she's also still close to her sister.
       Elisabeth organized a 'Spring Celebration', a party in their apartment to mark the beginning of spring. It's clearly not the kind of thing she did often -- she realizes she has too few chairs and even glasses for the crowd she has invited, for example -- but she organizes everything, and it's a more or less pleasant evening -- "It was actually a good party", she thinks, when all is said and done -- with a mix of friends, family, and colleagues, comings and goings, flirtations and arguments.
       Among those invited to the party are upstairs neighbors Jean-Lino and his wife Lydie. Jean-Lino is yet another character whose life didn't work out quite as he planned: he opened his own restaurant, but it failed, and he now handled: "after-sales support on home appliances" for a store-chain (it's this simple, devastating summing-up of a life, in barely more than an aside, that Reza does so well). His first wife left him after the restaurant failed, but he found love again -- though was left with the disappointment of never having had a child. He desperately tries to be a part of Lydie's grandson's life, but the obnoxious little tyke isn't having much of that. (There's also an unpleasant cat to deal with.)
       Claustrophobic Jean-Lino doesn't take the elevator, and Elisabeth also takes the stairs, so they run into one another occasionally, and a relationship of sorts developed; "I developed some affection for Jean-Lino Manoscrivi", she admits. The couples don't really mix and aren't exactly on familiar terms, but Jean-Lino did proudly invite her and Paul to come hear Lydie sing once, and so Elisabeth has them over for the party as well.
       While the party does go reasonably well, there are a few slightly unpleasant moments, as some of the guests don't mix so well -- but it's hardly more than one would expect at any larger gathering of people. There is one incident that gets a bit uncomfortable, but even if feelings are hurt it doesn't seem horrific. And yet the consequences ultimately are. The party comes to an end, Elisabeth and Pierre clear up and go to bed -- and soon later are woken up with the rather unsettling news that there's been a murder.
       What follows is something of a comedy of errors -- including Pierre's decision not to call the police, followed by his going back to sleep (he did have quite a bit to drink, but this still is rather hard to believe). Elisabeth, meanwhile, decides to be helpful, entangling herself in a situation that gets a bit out of hand. Predictably, efforts at corpse-disposal do not get very far, and eventually the authorities show up and take the more or less clear cut situation into hand. Except it's not entirely clear-cut, and requires a bit of a cover-story if Elisabeth is to avoid being found complicit in at least some of what happened (as, in fact, she is).
       Elisabeth handles the situation calmly enough, with an almost amused detachment -- as is indeed the case for almost her entire account. Memories and pieces of the past come up, and life also goes on in its same old ways after the murder -- as, for example, Elisabeth's mother dies (something readers learnt before they hear about the murder). The sense of absurdity -- of everything from life in general to this particular situation -- is nicely redoubled in the final scenes of the book, which include a recreation of what happened that fateful night, history play-actingly repeating itself: not first as tragedy then as farce, but in fact as both, both times.
       It's her mother's home health aide who is curious about what happened, early on, before Elisabeth has revealed anything, and when Elisabeth doesn't satisfy her curiosity she recounts some family tragedy she heard about -- complaining then to Elisabeth:

What I don't like is, they tell you all that and then afterwards it's total silence. You hear the story over all the radio stations and then zero. They lure you in and then they slam the door in your face.

- M.A.Orthofer, 17 August 2018

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Links:

• Seven Stories Press publicity page
• Flammarion publicity page
• Folio publicity page
• Hanser publicity page
• S.Fischer publicity page
• Adelphi publicity page
• Anagrama publicity page
• De Bezige Bij publicity page

• A Bookish Type
• asinochinonlegge (Italian)
• Asymptote
• Le blog de Francis Richard (French)
• Bouquivore (French)
• La Cause Littéraire (French)
• Cultweek (Italian)
• Deutschlandfunk (German)
• Deutschlandfunk Kultur (German)
• Diacritik (French)
• Le Droit (French)
• EsteticaMente (Italian)
• L'Express (French)
• Falter (German)
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)
• El Imparcial (Spanish)
• infoLibre (Spanish)
• Jüdische Allgemeine (German)
• lesefieber.ch (German)
• La Nacion (Spanish)
• Neue Zürcher Zeitung (German)
• Panorama (Italian)
• El Placer de la Lectura (Spanish)
• Pleine Vie (French)
• La Règle du jeu (French)
• Der Spiegel (German)
• Stuttgarter Zeitung (German)
• Süddeutsche Zeitung (German)
• Sul Romanzo (Italian)
• Der Tagesspiegel (German)
• Télérama (French)
• Le Temps (French)
• Tribune de Genève (French)
• Trouw (Dutch)
• Tzum (Dutch)
• 20minutes (French)
• de Volkskrant (Dutch)
• Die Welt (German)
• Die Zeit (German)

• See the complete review's Yasmina Reza page

• Adam Haberberg
• 'Art'
• Conversations after a Burial
• Dawn, Dusk or Night
• Desolation
• The God of Carnage
• Hammerklavier
• Life x 3
• Nulle Part
• The Unexpected Man

• See the index of French literature at the complete review
• Index of Prix Renaudot-winning works under review

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About the Author:

       French author Yasmina Reza, born in 1959, achieved her first great success with the play 'Art'. She has also written fiction and screenplays.

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© 2018 the complete review

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