Brodeck's Report [Kindle Edition]

It is after the Second World War, but Claudel's descriptions often call to mind a more ancient world of monumental, gnarled villagers; and the way he writes about scenery evokes now some illuminated manuscript, now paintings by Brueghel. The village is not named, but we are obviously in Alsace: the villagers have German names, and they use words in a twisted (invented?) German dialect.

Brodeck is one of them, but, unlike the others, he is far from monumental. He is timid and quivers with anxiety after his appalling experiences in a concentration camp from which he had recently returned. (There are hints, never made explicit, that he was of Jewish origin.) He has an insignificant job reporting to the local administration on the state of the local paths and streams, fauna and flora.

The villagers have murdered a man who had come to the village from Outside and whom from the beginning they had called the `Anderer' [sic - the Other], and later, more ominously, the `Fremder' [Foreigner]. Brodeck had not been present at the murder, but because he is a reporter, the villagers force him to write a report for the mayor of the village to pass on to the authorities. He had not been present because he was himself something of an Outsider, having been brought to the village as an orphan child soon after the First World War, and then having returned to it from the camp when those who had denounced him to the Germans had presumed him dead. (Just how much of an Outsider or `Fremder' he has always been considered emerges later.) It is clear from the start that the task he has been given is dangerous: for before he can carry it out, he has to question himself and others about the circumstances which had led to the murder.

He zigzags back and forth between shards of memory. Many of course concern the enigmatic Anderer who had been seen sketching or writing things into his notebooks, but who hardly ever spoke. The tension that builds up around him grips not only the villagers, but the reader also.
Other memories recall Brodeck's horrifying past experiences: the inhumanity of men in the mass, a murderous city riot, life and death in the camps. We learn how the villagers had behaved under the occupation of the Germans, who are referred to throughout as `Fratergekeime' [brother brood? because they spoke the same language?]: the betrayals of frightened collaborators, willing collaborators, penitent collaborators. None of them can now bear to see the truths about themselves.

Brodeck recalls oppressive heat and freezing cold (the weather often plays the part of a chorus), smells of cooking, of smoke, of farm animals, of ordure, of decaying corpses and of perfumes. There is his love - its pathos becomes clearer as the story progresses - for his wife, his young daughter, and for the wise old woman who has looked after him as nurse and housekeeper ever since she had brought him as an orphan to the village.

There are some near-surrealistic incidents, and passages rich in similes and symbolism. A haunting work of art.

There is a question mark at the end of that title for my review. I'm not sure. Beautifully written in a soft spoken voice without a real hint of bitterness or anger - after being dealt a life-hand that would leave most of us cringeing in a corner or railing against the injustice of it all. A story that unfolds with some subtelty towards its enevitable beginning. You always sorta know what's about to be revealed just before it is.
I loved this book, although the ending was a little anticlimatic. I had built my expectations too high. It is the story of a man and his village, the war and its aftermath, a stranger and the consequences of his arrival. It is the telling of the story and the journey of the man (Brodeck) that holds me spellbound. Very readable, full of horrific images that succeed in being thought provoking rather than gratuitous. It is one man's experience and the consequences of a Stranger's arrival, his impact on post war village life. It may not sound that great but, believe me, it is. Haunting

Writing about the Holocaust and its legacy is necessary but difficult. Writing about those events in fictional form is doubly difficult - the writer risks aestheticising, and so trivialising, a subject that must not be trivialised. This task becomes more difficult still with every passing year, as memory erodes and the Second World War retreats into the realm of legend.

Philippe Claudel has chosen to approach these matters obliquely. Brodeck's Report is a novel that is not quite a fable. The country it describes is recognisably that of the Franco-German border territories in the years before and after the Second World War, but it is never named as such. The people are neither quite French nor quite German; the victims of atrocity are not quite Jews, not quite gypsies, not quite refugees. The stranger whose arrival in Brodeck's isolated village precipitates an avalanche of guilty suspicion is a carnivalesque figure whose manner and dress suggest at first only that he has come from very far away: how far away, and from where, is left to each villager, and each reader to decide.

Claudel has managed to avoid the bathos of realism and the abstraction of fable. Brodeck's Report shifts between modes almost seamlessly, in search of a truth that is a true likeness rather than a photographically accurate transcription. The book is seamed with images of doubleness, as Claudel explores the situations of those who survived and did not survive the camps, and those who survived - but in a sense did not survive - the occupation.

Comparisons with Kafka are reasonable, but in the end a little misleading. I would suggest a greater affinity with the novels of the under-appreciated Julien Gracq. In English, the only comparison that seems apt is with the work of W.G. Sebald, though in the last analysis I find Sebald to be the superior artist. Nonetheless, this book is a considerable work of art.

Four stars only for the slight flatness of the translation.