Mwphistophelian Moralist
THE PROVERB AND OTHER STORIES (287 pp.) —Marcel Aymé—Atheneum($4.50).
The painter Lafleur finds that he has little appetite and less hunger after a day spent working on his canvases. He even gains weight. Then a hungry Parisian low-life discovers the secret; he stares at a Lafleur painting for half an hour and practically belches from such gorging. Somatically speaking, the paintings can be eaten. Lafleur’s “nutritive period” works skyrocket from 12,000 francs to 10 million. Even one of his “starvation period” paintings “radiates the equivalent of a small glass of milk.” As the press and art critics rave, the public riots for its share of edible art. Lafleur is bureaucratized as a French national resource. But when the nutritive fad is played out, a Lafleur painting is about as valuable as a leftover brioche.
Vive la Différence. In this and other tales in this short-story collection, Marcel Ayme propels the reader down Alice’s rabbit hole into a strange and satirical wonderland full of the perverse intractabilities of human nature. They illustrate his conviction that art and life tug in different directions, and celebrate that tension with a gusty “Vive la différence!”
In The Life-Ration, cards of “living time” are issued to people according to their degree of uselessness. The part-time lifers must undergo a state of nonbeing or “temporary death” each month. As a result, they live their lives more fully than the productive fulltime lifers, who become sullen drudges. Moral: it is not the length but the breadth and depth of life that matters.
Adept as he is at sleight-of-hand tales, Aymé is even better at psychological feet-of-clay stories. The title piece, The Proverb, is about a boy who has been brought up to worship his father but also fears and dislikes him. One day the father insists on writing a school essay for his son. The teacher openly ridicules the effort as a piece of rhetorical bombast, gives the boy the lowest mark in the class. On tenterhooks, the proud father asks his son the grade. Tempted to deflate the stuffy old humbug, the boy lies instead and tells him that he tied for the highest mark. With subtle and touching sensitivity, Aymé indicates that the boy has taken the first important step toward manhood —to forgive one’s father.
The Dark Is Light Enough. Other notable stories include Backwards, a knockdown farce that deflates the modern millionaire’s cringing devotion to liberal cliches; Josse, a tale of venomous and elderly siblings caught in a snarling web of dependence; and The Boy Martin, in which a corrupt young whippersnapper discovers that his elders are even snappier and far more corrupt.
Marcel Aymé, 59, is never seen out of doors without dark glasses, which rather befits a Mephistophelian moralist. Hell may be badly paved but it is well lit.
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