Laurent Carpentier

Laurent Carpentier is a free lance journalist and has participated in the creation of the first French information agency on the Environment (AIE). He writes regularly for Le Monde Magazine. Les Bannis (the banished or exiled) is a novel published in 2015 and I was attracted to picking it off the library shelf by its classy looking front cover.

The subject chosen by Carpentier for his novel is his family. He makes a fiction out of a biography of his family, writing stories about individual members in no particular order, but well enough structured so that the reader can follow the storyline and gradually get the impression of the family as a whole. A jewish family; some of whom were politically active in the communist party, which did not bode well for various family members during the German invasion of France in the second world war. The book covers five generations of the family and on reflection it would have been useful to have a family tree, but I can understand why this was not considered appropriate because of the fictional structure of the novel. I got a little lost with who was who, but this did not prevent my enjoyment of the individual stories, and anyway I got the impression they were not a close knit family, no grand family reunions.

There is the story of Jaques: scientist and communist party member who was arrested and shot by the Nazis. Carpentier glides smoothly between first and third person story telling, so giving his characters a modicum of life of their own. André; Jaques brother fled to Spain and his sister Arlette hunkered down in Nice taking the name Carpentier. Jaque's mother Alice is rounded up by the representatives of the Vichy government, she feels too old and set in her ways to attempt to flee, even though she is warned that they will be coming for her. She is one of many that takes the fateful train journey to the concentration camps. Jean nicknamed Jeannot is the next generation, he studies medicine and meets his future wife Raymonde selling copies of L'humanitée (left wing journal) outside the medical school. He joins the communist party working his way up to a position of leadership, but a putsch in the Party after the Soviet coup d'état in Czechoslovakia sees him banished from the party. He is an old man when we meet him again beginning to suffer from Alzheimers, he is welcomed back into the fold with a ceremony to give him back his Party card.There is Mathis who in a way banishes himself, by becoming a shepherd in a remote part of the South of France. He and his partner scrape together a living in a run down hamlet. One day Mathis finds a red balloon in the woods on his way to the pastures attached to it is an invitation to spend a night in a luxury hotel. What to do?

The book starts with Maurice who is living in poverty, he has not long to live and after visiting the grave of his own dead daughter has a car accident; he is in hospital and reflects on members of his family that starts a train of thought that threads the novel together. His partner is Fine and she lives to be a hundred years old. A presence in the family, but one that never gets to express her point of view. Laurent Carpentier expresses his story largely through the male members of the family and in a final chapter neatly brings the story to a full circle when he himself searches in a dream like expedition to find something in the snowy wastes of a wood near where he is staying, a memorial stone perhaps.

The Carpentier family is an interesting subject for a novel, certainly individual members of the family have interesting histories and Laurent Carpentier tells them well. His own emotional involvement is held back until the final chapter, letting his characters tell their own stories. There are perhaps not quite enough stories for the length of the novel, I found the story of his own grandfather: Henri's life in the Marais district of Paris showing some strain. Overall, however there was enough here to keep me interested and I am glad I was seduced by the front cover to pick this one off the shelf and so 3.5 stars.… (more)