>> Portrait

An atypical French novelist

Jean-Marc Laherrère & Claude Mesplède
Trans.: Christine Tipper

 

‘My life is such a shambles that I couldn't find a black cat in a coal cellar,' Laurence Biberfeld likes to say about her beginnings as a novelist. She explains: ‘I left the nest early and immediately crashed into the nearest paving slab. I was a tramp and lived on the fringes of society for several years between Paris and Toulouse, then I passed my baccalaureate as an external candidate and then, caught up in the flow, I passed my teaching qualifications, much to my surprise. After three years of various clashes, I was awarded my diploma thanks to the imminent arrival of my first daughter. […] My chronic insubordination and poor conduct at the time meant that I was always given posts that no one else wanted, in the poorest and most isolated rural areas. […] I've always written, but I had to wait until I was thirty before I managed to put together my first novel: I'm too disorganized. One of my manuscripts spent a year with Grasset before being turned down. That was hard. I had another two children, and I continued to move house numerous times (forty to date), all over the place. I retired in 1999 to write for real, taking the necessary time. Since then I've written six crime novels.' (Dialogue with web surfers, 25 April 2005).

With her first novel, La B. A. de Cardamone (2002), Laurence Biberfeld made her conspicuous entry into the ‘Série Noire'. Since the Malaussène family much loved by Daniel Pennac, we have never met a family of such hair-raising marginalized individuals. Lisa, the main character, is a strong woman whose life is not easy. Unemployed, she raises four children, four cats and a dog. Her ex-partner, not content to have beaten her for over thirteen years, dreams of returning to brutalize her again. Her occasional partner, Sandro, is a youth worker who vainly tries to set adolescents on the straight and narrow. He is killed one night, when he had gone to fetch Cardamone, a flirty and bad-tempered fourteen-year-old pest whose main pleasure is getting on the nerves of those who try to get close to her. Despite all these trials, Lisa stays positive, keeps her smile and all of her energy. Instead of letting her self go, she pushes herself on; helps superintendent Thing (it's his name) who is investigating the death of Sandro, who turns out to be less honest than she thought; finds the strength to help out two or three other drop-outs, despite Cardamone and the threat of a murderer still at large! ‘Nothing is inevitable. We should face up to things, even in difficult situations,' could be said to be the main message of La B. A. de Cardamone. In homage to those mothers who keep on smiling despite their troubles, this first novel's main strength is in its striking dialogues, but also in the remarkable way the characters are sketched so that each touches the reader.

Her second novel, Le Chien de Solférino (2004) brings a change of tone, construction and style. Régis and Marie get married very young and have children. Fifteen years later, Régis, a man with set beliefs about women, and especially his own wife, doesn't notice that Marie, who had been raped as a young girl by her father, no longer feels any desire for him and doesn't know how to get rid of him. The drama unfolds after a meeting, without a doubt one of the most improbable that the young woman has ever had, when she bumps into an ancient Resistant fighter, alias Capitaine Ricardo, an ugly, rickety and obese fifty-year-old married fantasist. In love with each other, they decide to get rid of Régis. At this point the police get involved (a team that deals with dangerous dogs, small-time dealers and young drop-outs) and all the pieces of the puzzle come together. Laurence Biberfeld proposes an astute original variation on the classic love triangle theme¹ that, multiplying the points of view and time shifts, is full of humanity and perfectly mastered.

With her third work, La Vieille au grand chapeau (2005), she experiments with the thriller with surprising mastery. Her heroine, Tintin, a female journalist, who insists on dressing like a man, investigates illegal workers in France. By chance, she discovers that one of the immigrants, who is a carrier of Klein's hepatitis, risks triggering a widespread epidemic. Helped in her investigations by her ex-lover, Popov, she leaves to investigate in a refugee camp on the Afghan-Uzbek border where strange trafficking takes place.

She has also written, Évasion rue Quincampoix (2004). This short story narrates with humour and realism the events experienced by a Parisian adolescent living on the streets between the church square of Beaubourg and Place Saint-Michel.

The originality of Laurence Biberfeld consists of telling stories that we have never read elsewhere. She knows how to speak of everyday life by creating characters that we could pass in the street, but she always does it with a novelist's eye supported by an efficient and raw style that combines toughness and cutting humour in the form of savoury expressions.

 

 

 

Bibliography

La B. A. de Cardamone (Gallimard, Série noire n° 2660, 2002)

Le Chien de Solférino (Gallimard, Série noire n°2711, 2004)

La Vieille au grand chapeau (Gallimard, Série noire n° 2732, 2005)

Évasion rue Quincampoix (« Noir Urbain », Autrement, 2004)

Esmeralda et le zombi (in « Du noir dans le vert II », L'Écailler du sud, 2003)

 

1 Love triangle: an expression which represents a couple and a lover of one of the pair. The aim of the game is to eliminate the extra person.