All The King's Horses

By Michèle Bernstein

Translated by John Kelsey

MIT Press

Bernstein's novel is an intriguing roman à clef that takes a satirical look at avant-garde artistic and literary life in 1950’s Paris. The first-person narrator, Geneviève, is a thinly-disguised version of the author herself. In the "Translator's Introduction," Kelsey points out that this technique allows Bernstein to become "both star and spectator of her own story." Readers get to accompany Geneviève on her social rounds, to a gallery opening, dinner at an artist’s home, a crowded Left Bank party, numerous cafés about town, and to enjoy her clever, brittle observations: "The few ex-friends I met there were precisely the ones I would have preferred never to see again." 

The plot is reminiscent of Choderlos de Laclos’s eighteenth-century novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, much as it was interpreted by Roger Vadim's movie adaptation featuring Jeanne Moreau: Geneviève is a modern Madame de Merteuil, with a charming, libertine husband, Gilles, in Valmont's role. This nonconformist wife amuses herself by aiding her husband’s romantic conquest of a vulnerable girl—a painter, Carole, just 20 years old. Shortly thereafter Geneviève herself takes a new lover, 19-year-old Bertrand, an aspiring poet. The interlocking pair of love triangles structures the rest of the story, with lovers’ quarrels, fits of jealousy, old friends and new seductions, drunken conversations, in-jokes and cultural allusions. Francophiles will appreciate references to dining at a restaurant in the rue Mouffetard, vacationing in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, reading Racine or Rimbaud. It is probably only in a French novel that one woman might compliment another by saying, "You have a pretty syntax," without being ironic. 

Odile Passot's Afterword, "Portrait of Guy Debord as a Young Libertine," is almost more interesting than the novel itself, as it compares the Situationist writer/filmmaker with his depiction as Gilles, as well as discussing the influence that classic films have had on Bernstein’s writing. What Kelsey calls Bernstein’s "ambiguous quasi-feminism" rings a little hollow to my ear, yet her account does raise provocative questions about how male and female intellectuals relate to each other in contemporary society—which may not have changed much, in some ways, since the mid-twentieth century.

Review by Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring