Read hundreds of old French squibs, found them fun
News briefs from 1906 a surprisingly literary way to tell a story
From the Toronto Star, July 27, 2008

Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon, translated by Luc Sante, NYRB Classics, 171 pages, $18

I'll keep this short. Felix Feneon would have wanted it that way. A Parisian anarchist, dandy and literary editor born in 1861, Feneon was at his most eloquent when saying as little as possible. Novels in Three Lines is a collection of what newspaper editors used to call squibs -- very short news items, similar to the sentence fragments that populate modern cable news crawls. The book collects more than 1,000 news items (what the French call faits divers) printed in Le Matin in 1906, all anonymously written by Feneon.

Century-old one-liners from French fishwrap might sound like a shaky premise for a book, but these true-life tales of murder, revenge, suicide, deceit and religious strife feature the fine carpentry of a literary stylist. For translator Luc Sante (author of Low Life and Kill All Your Darlings), these faits divers "demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humour, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage."

Feneon's watchmaker intricacy is such that it takes far longer to read Sante's contextualization then it does to sample a few of the actual jottings. Here is a handful:

  • Emilienne Moreau, of Plaine-Saint-Denis, had thrown herself in the drink. Then she leaped four floors. Still alive, but she'll reconsider.
  • An unidentified maker of paste jewels from the third arrondissement was fishing in a boat with his wife at Mezy. She fell. He dived. Both gone.
  • A merchant of Courbevoie, M. Alexis Jamin, who had had enough of his stomach troubles, blew his brains out.
  • A young brunette in a black tailored suit, whose delicate undergarments were monogrammed M.B.F., was fished out at Saint-Cloud bridge.

    Resembling a police blotter with almost no ink to spare, these executive summaries are always short, and often nasty and brutish. Taken en masse, they form a set of cautionary tales reminiscent of Der Struwwelpeter -- the classic nineteenth century German children's book where bad behaviour earns cruel rebuke.

    Writer and editor E. B. White once said that "Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim." Feneon is an equally exacting grammarian, but his commas and semicolons tend to puncture the victim with a dry, detached and macabre wit.

    A long-overlooked set of historical fragments, Novels in Three Lines takes the moral and social temperature of early 20th century France. Feneon sometimes resorts to a curious turn of phrase to describe things that today could be said more plainly. So, instead of abortionist, Felicie De Doncker is described as "proficient at quelling the birthrate." And Marie Jandeau is not a prostitute (or worse, a socialite) but instead "a pretty girl known to many citizens of Toulon."

    The book suggests that the suicide rate was once much higher: plenty of laudanum, kerosene and phosphorous are ingested, and depressed people leap into the Seine, refusing rescue attempts. Acid is also thrown into the faces of adulterers with a frequency that can only be describing as alarming. A battle over the separation of religion and public education reappears, along with ongoing thefts of telephone and telegraph cable.

    While the telegraph is now obsolete, the frequent appearance of sins both deadly and stupid reminds us that human nature remains a fairly stable piece of software. Less comforting still is seeing the final chapter of someone's life reduced to a few lines in a newspaper -- surely even the bleakest protagonist deserves a few paragraphs. Granted, that which is left unsaid can communicate more than the words on the page, as Hemingway demonstrated with his infamous six-word short story ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.")

    But for anyone who has pondered their inevitable obituary, Feneon's blipverts suggest that not every life yields a complex, hard to summarize narrative, a thought as unsettling as death itself.

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