Cécilia Castelli
books
The Winkle (Mollusque)
Publisher: Le Serpent à Plumes
The story is narrated by Gérard, an obese, middle-aged office worker in a town on the French Riviera, who professes to loathe the sea as he is deeply uncomfortable with disrobing in public because of his weight.
Confiding in an unspecified acquaintance, effectively the reader him-or herself, Gérard tells the story of how his friend Patrice has been turned into a winkle, perhaps as the result of poisoning, a curse, or even as the beginning of an epidemic that will soon affect the entire human race. The process has been gradual, eventually forcing Gérard to release Patrice into the ocean to ensure his survival.
Gérard and Patrice are old friends and work colleagues, who, for the past five years, have been frequenting a seaside restaurant called the Rhino. Here, they enjoy copious seafood meals thanks to a password that Patrice has mysteriously acquired – he refuses to say how – which entitles them to an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet at the low price of 15 euros, rather than the 200 or so that the uninitiated have to pay. Gérard is initially reluctant to go as he is skeptical about the deal, suspecting a scam, but to his surprise, it turns out to be entirely legitimate. Far from being the tourist trap he had feared, the restaurant is a chic venue on a small, secluded beach, offering a fine menu:
“It’s such an array that you don’t know what to choose. You’d been telling yourself that you weren’t too hungry today, but in the end, you go for the Behemoth. Just like last time. Who cares? It’s not like it’s going to cost you extra anyway. And now you’re in for a dizzying medley. It’s an orgy of mussels and crabs, sea urchins and langoustines. You mix all these characters together, because damn it, they all deserve a chance. So let’s not leave anyone out. Especially not the oysters, which retract when you sprinkle them with lemon juice. You slurp them down one by one, taking the time to savor their thick, plump flesh. And just as you set down the last shell on the side of your plate, you notice a single small clam. You hadn’t noticed it at first, nestling there among all the oysters. It’s such a beautiful, cheeky little thing. You have to give it its due. Open it up and eat it whole and raw. It won’t put up a fight. It’s a little miracle.”
« Le défilé est tel que tu ne sais pas quoi choisir. Tu te disais que tu n’avais pas très faim aujourd’hui, mais finalement, tu jettes ton dévolu sur le géant des mers. Encore une fois. Qu’importe ! De toute façon, ça ne te coutera pas plus cher. Et tu pars pour un mélange vertigineux. C’est une grande orgie entre les moules et les crabes, les oursins et les langoustines. Tu fais cohabiter tout ce petit people ensemble parce que punaise, ils en valent tous le coup. Alors, tu n’oublies personne. Surtout pas les huitres qui se rétractent quand tu les arroses de citron. Tu les aspires une par une, en prenant le temps de déguster leur chair épaisse, bien dodue. Et en reposant la dernière coquille au bord de ton assiette, tu découvres une petite palourde solitaire. Celle-là, tu ne l’avais pas remarquée tout de suite au milieu des huitres. Elle est si belle, cette coquine. Il faut lui faire honneur. Lui écarter grand la bouche et la manger toute crue ; elle ne résiste pas, c’est une merveille. »
Gérard imagines that he and Patrice will continue to enjoy this existence centered around the Rhino together for the rest of their days. Patrice has just undergone a difficult divorce, and Gérard, an eternal bachelor, feels he is supporting his friend through this dark period.
However, one day, Patrice, who is also overweight, announces that he intends to take better care of himself, and will henceforth spend his days on the beach getting exercise and eating more sensibly. Gérard is enraged by this decision, feeling abandoned and betrayed, and accuses Patrice of embarking on a foolish scheme to get his ex-wife back. Patrice denies this, and explains that he simply wants to move on; you have to learn when to let go, he says. The friends stop talking to each other.
For several weeks, Gérard sits on the terrace of the Rhino, sullenly stuffing himself as he gazes balefully at Patrice, who spends his days on the beach eating salads from Tupperware boxes and swimming in the sea. To Gérard’s mind, these are the first inklings of Patrice’s impending metamorphosis and loss of humanity.
Without the benefit of Patrice’s password, Gérard has to pay full price at the Rhino, but willfully orders extravagant amounts of food at ruinous cost to himself. He realizes he has lost sight of the true cost of food, and thinks back to his first year as a customer of the Rhino.
In a flashback sequence to this period, Gérard has been wondering how the restaurant can afford to serve the two friends such huge meals at such small cost. He suspects that the management have been serving him second-rate product. Patrice arranges a visit to the kitchen, and Gérard meets the chef, Jean-Mickey, who shows him that all the food is kept in seawater tanks and prepared fresh. He teaches Gérard the proper way to use a kitchen knife and prepare seafood. The experience opens up a new, unsuspected world to Gérard. He befriends Jean-Mickey and learns more about the workings of the Rhino: once a booming business, it has fallen on hard times, and in order to keep up appearances, the manager, the wealthy and miserly Pontel, works the staff extremely hard and pays them a pittance.
“’That must be why he began this cut-rate scheme,’ I replied. ‘So that there’d be a minimum of customers. So he wouldn’t lose face. ‘And it’s not such a bad idea,’ I went on. ‘Everyone knows that customers attract more customers. I mean, would you go and sit down in a completely empty restaurant?’
Jean-Mi gave me a look. ‘Well, no,’ he said
It seemed that this time, I was the one teaching him something. And I’d finally learned the secret of the Rhino. A good day’s work.”
« Je lui ai répondu : c’est surement pour ca qu’il a mis en place cette histoire de tarif réduit. Pour avoir un minimum de clients. Ne pas perdre la face.
Et puis, c’est pas si stupide, ai-je continué… Tout le monde sait que le client attire le client. T’irais t’asseoir, toi, dans un restau complètement vide ?
Jean-Mi m’a regardé, ben non, qu’il a dit. On aurait dit cette fois-ci que je lui apprenais quelque chose. Et moi, j’avais enfin perce le secret du Rhino. J’avais gagné ma journée. »
While accompanying Jean-Mickey to the fish market one morning, Gérard spots a rowing boat, the Paolina II, that brings to mind a painful memory from his loveless childhood. It was onto this boat’s predecessor that some classmates once tricked him and cast him adrift, forcing him to throw himself into the sea.
Over the five years since his first visit to the Rhino, things have changed: Jean-Mickey has left without a word – another betrayal, in Gérard’s eyes – and Patrice has decided to go on his diet, and so, after several weeks of his near-suicidal and ruinous binge, Gérard, dining at the terrace of the Rhino, decides that this will be his last meal there. Coincidentally, as he sits dozing, he is casually insulted by a passing group of young men, and as he gets up to confront them, he bumps into a young waiter, sending his tray flying and causing his phone to fall through the floorboards. Gérard later helps the waiter retrieve the phone, and under the floor, he finds an old wallet filled with francs – a currency which, he realizes, the waiter is too young to remember, having no doubt been born after the introduction of the Euro to France.
Having decided to stop frequenting the Rhino, Gérard goes to join Patrice on the beach to make peace. He envisions a transformation of his own, noting that the weight his friend has lost over the last few weeks, he has gained. However, despite Patrice’s entreaties, he refuses to swim, and resents the time Patrice spends in the water, which he will in hindsight come to see as a further symptom of his friend’s transformation. Once again, he feels abandoned.
In due course, Patrice meets a woman, Danièle, with whom he becomes romantically involved. Gérard naturally feels even more betrayed and left out, though he is of course outwardly courteous to her. They spend an evening out together and Gérard is introduced to Cindy, a friend of Danièle’s, and though she seems attracted to him, he pays her little heed, fixating instead on Patrice and Danièle’s courtship. Patrice drinks too much and the group is thrown out of a Karaoke bar after he is sick; Gérard will come to think of his inability to hold his drink as a further stage in his transformation.
The next day, Gérard sees the couple disporting on the beach, Patrice back and forth in the waves on the shore.
One evening, Patrice, Danièle, Gérard and Cindy go to the movies, and by now Gérard is convinced of his friend’s transformation, thinking that he smells and is losing his teeth, although none of the others seem to notice this. Afterwards, Patrice and Danièle take their leave, and Gérard follows them back to Patrice’s home, where he fancies that he can see Patrice devour the woman through the window. However, she emerges after a few hours.
Gérard pays Patrice a visit, and now sees that the man’s transformation to sea snail is almost complete: he can barely communicate and moves clumsily. Gérard is horrified and tries to keep him alive by placing him in a fish tank, but eventually realizes he must let go of his friend and release him into the sea.
Gérard later finds Danièle, who has frantically been looking for Patrice everywhere, and spends the day with her, telling her that Patrice has fallen out of love with her and has moved on. As he moves to kiss her by way of consolation, she gives him an electric shock – she has turned into a jellyfish. Persuaded that he is somehow causing anyone who touches to turn him into a sea creature, Gérard releases her into the sea too.
Reflecting over the events of the past few years, Gérard begins to construct an elaborate theory about what has happened, involving a conspiracy by Pontel, the Rhino’s manager, who he suspects is also responsible for the Jean-Mickey’s abrupt disappearance. Gérard confronts Pontel in the kitchens of the Rhino, and Pontel is transformed into an octopus. Gérard manages to kill the creature using the advice of the chef, by plunging a knife between its eyes.
It finally becomes clear that the person to whom Gérard is telling the story is also his latest victim, a person he has turned to for help and inadvertently transformed into a blue crayfish. Now, in the rowing boat Paolina, he is about to release the crayfish into the sea.
“Take care, little lobster. Go and live your life, down among the crabs. And be careful of anything that lives on the surface.
I’ve told you everything. I’ve shown you what I really am.
I go red. Sometimes, when I look at myself in the mirror, I blush a bright red, as red as a lobster.”
« Fais gaffe, petit homard. Vis ta vie, rejoins les crabes. Et méfie-toi de tout ce qui vit à la surface.
Moi, j’ai tout dit. Je me suis montre tel que je suis. Je suis rouge. Devant le miroir, je suis rouge parfois et alors, je deviens crustacé. »
OPINION
The novel’s central theme is overconsumption, cleverly using the Rhino’s business model to illustrate the issue: Gérard and Patrice dine at the restaurant at bargain prices thanks to a password that can be obtained by no other means than sheer privilege. However, the true cost of their feasts is met by an underprivileged class, the poorly paid, toiling restaurant staff, who are constantly under the cosh of a demanding, intrusive manager. This stagnant arrangement is clearly unsustainable, but for now it serves to keep up the appearance of a successful business in the hopes of attracting further customers.
It is significant that once Gérard finds out that this is how the system works, it never occurs to him to challenge it. The only reason he has been keen to find out in the first place is to ensure that the seafood served to him at the restaurant is fresh and of the best quality; that his friend the chef is suffering as a result is of no concern, since from his point of view, this system is entirely satisfactory
Gérard’s central flaw is his naïve belief in the permanence of situations when they are to his benefit, resulting in a complete inability to accept change. When we first encounter the character, obese, awkward, painfully aware of his corpulence, he elicits sympathy, even admiration: here is a man whose greatest joy in life is the time he spends enjoying the odd meal with his closest friend, whom he is supporting through a difficult time in life. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that this dynamic exists only in Gérard’s mind: time has passed and Patrice’s wounds have healed. He wants to move on with his life, ending the situation around which Gérard has based his entire existence.
Gérard’s reaction exemplifies the worst excesses of modern Western civilization: he jealously embarks on a gluttonous spree he can impossibly afford, even though he is aware of the ruinous consequences. At one point, he even tells himself that he has been eating so much seafood that he is on the verge of causing an environmental disaster; though he is joking, the observation has a serious undertone. When he comes to the end of his spree, he resolves to change, but this is a practical impossibility for him.
When he rejoins Patrice, his real hope is that things will return to the way they were, and once it is clear that he has lost his friend to change, he lashes out by murdering anyone he blames for ruining the status quo. However, his eternally self-justifying nature is such that he is unable to accept the full responsibility for his actions, and imagines instead that they are in fact magically turning into sea creatures. In his delirium, he sees each of his victims turn into the animal he thinks reflects their nature: Patrice, who has spent so much time in the sea and hanging onto rocks, becomes a winkle; the diaphanous Danièle becomes a jellyfish; and the manager Pontel, who Gérard reimagines as the manipulative boss of a vast criminal enterprise, turns into an octopus, wielding a knife with each arm, which is only defeated after an illusory epic battle.
The novel changes pace in its second half, moving its focus from the mechanics of overconsumption to Gérard’s frantic and destructive response to the unwelcome changes in his life. Although it would have been interesting to see the inescapable downfall of the Rhino’s unsustainable business model, it is necessary to concentrate on Gérard’s true nature. His monstrous hypocrisy, continuous self-victimization and refusal to adapt to new circumstances end up damaging everyone around him as he looks to perpetuate a situation that has run its course rather than look to the bright, new future that might come with the hapless Cindy, whose advances he entirely ignores as he fixates on destroying Patrice and Danièle’s happiness.
The novel is written in Gérard’s voice, which veers from the lyrical to an occasionally whining and self-pitying tone. Often, the delivery is harsh and unemotional, as might be expected of a fundamentally unpleasant and self-serving narrator describing a grotesque and horrific series of events. The issues that the story grapples with – overconsumption, inequality, environmental damage, even the patriarchy – are alluded to rather than explicitly stated: it is the rigid mindset that causes and perpetuates them that is being described here, rather than a practical solution being offered.
For all this, there are frequent notes of humor: Gérard is not only narrating the story, he is actually talking to the reader in a familiar way, and in the end, as the butt of a kind of stylistic practical joke, the reader even becomes a character of the novel as Gérard’s final victim, transformed in his eyes into the rare, electric blue crayfish. Sometimes, comedy arises from simple human frailties and vanity. On two occasions, gentle fun is poked at the French affectation of naming children after Hollywood stars: the chef Jean-Mickey, it turns out, is named after the actor Mickey Rourke, though those around him immediately associate the name with Disney’s mouse; and as things turn out, Gérard’s blind date Cindy really goes by the far more prosaic Francine Dumoulin
In my view, this is an engaging and well-told story with a vivid sense of time and place, offering a glimpse of the French Riviera that is not the province of the rich and famous, but of the ordinary people who live and work there, an unusual and refreshing setting. It’s especially striking how the character of Gérard, a man of about fifty, is squarely placed in his time: he remembers being forbidden to watch the film Jaws as a boy, and becomes nostalgic on finding a wallet filled with francs – indeed, his age and attachment to the past are a driving force of the story. Each of the novel’s small cast of characters fills a very specific function in painting the portrait of a flawed and fascinating main character and the complex relationship of two friends. Its central themes are universal and contemporary, and should find an echo with a broad public: in addition to the obvious issues of overconsumption and sustainability, it deals directly with the subjects of food, body image and metamorphosis.
For a first novel, Castelli has found a strong and original voice (though it may still need some honing) and is clearly passionate about the craft of storytelling. As events unfold, there’s the sense of an almost Paasilinna-like shaggy dog story being told that is very pleasing: this is bull-by-the-horns writing that is actually about something.