Jacques Chessex (1934–2009)

"In spring, when this story begins, all around is lovely, with an almost supernatural intensity that contrasts with the heinous events in the town....But evil is astir. A powerful poison is seeping in."

This is a fictionalized account of a horrific crime that took place in 1942 during World War II in a small village in neutral Switzerland. Although Switzerland was neutral, there were a lot of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the population. A group of these Nazis in a small farming community lured a Jewish cattle merchant to an empty stable and brutally murdered him, dismembered him, and dumped him in a lake. The local Nazi cell members believed they would be soundly rewarded by the Nazis in Germany for doing this deed.
The author was a child in the village at the time this crime occurred, and in fact went to school with the children of some of the perpetrators.
I found this to be written in an unemotional, nonsensational manner of telling that almost did not seem to fit with the horror of the events described. But perhaps that was the intent. At the time it was published, the book generated some controversy in Switzerland about what exactly Switzerland's role in World War II was.

3 stars… (more)

It is 1903; a tiny village in the Jura mountains. Dark nights, long winters, pine forests, wolves, and for the human population a lot of solitary brooding. One morning, a horrific crime: the body of a recently-deceased girl found violated in the cemetery. Cheeks bitten off, entrails removed, breasts cut away; the vulva has been severed and eaten, with bits of cartilage and pubic hair found spat-out in a nearby bush. The perpetrator is quickly dubbed ‘the vampire of Ropraz’, and the horror spreads as two similar crimes follow in nearby villages over the coming weeks.

The public demands a culprit. And one is found – a suitably damaged stableboy, caught abusing farm animals, who has appropriately reddened, vampirical eyes and even oversized canines. There are problems, of course – there is no physical evidence that he is responsible, and he clearly lacks the facility with a knife that would have been necessary to carve up the dead bodies as they were found. But perhaps, for the purposes of community justice, these objections are not so very important after all.

This brief novella has elements of reportage, elements of horror, elements of crime procedural – but they're all in the service of painting a mood-picture of a particular type of remote community as it was just before the modern age. It is as unromantic and gloomy and sensuous a picture of the Swiss mountains as you're likely to find.

Ici on n'a pas de grands commerces, d'usines, de manufactures, on n'a qu'on gagne de la terre, autant dire rien. Ce n'est pas une vie. On est même si pauvres qu'on vend nos vaches pour la viande aux bouchers des grandes villes, on se contente du cochon et on mange tellement sous toutes ses formes, fumé, écouenné, haché, salé, qu'on finit par lui ressembler, figure rose, hure rougie, loin du monde, par combes noires et forêts.

Dans ces campagnes perdues une jeune fille est une étoile qui aimante les folies. Inceste et rumination, dans l'ombre célibataire, de la part charnelle à jamais convoitée et interdite.

[Here there are no large shops, no factories, no manufacturing – nothing but what you get from the earth, which is to say nothing. This is no life. You're so poor that you sell your cows for meat to the butchers in the city, and you make do with pigs, which you eat so much in all its forms – smoked, crackled, minced, salted – that you end up looking like one, pink face, ruddy head, far from civilisation, by forests and dark hollows.

In these hidden lands, a young girl is a lodestar for madness. Incest and, in the celibate darkness, rumination on that carnal element forever coveted and forbidden.]

Well as you can see, the writing here is fabulous. The book was released originally as part of Grasset's Ceci n'est pas un fait divers series (‘this is not a news story’), and it is in part a retelling of actual events in the village where Chessex lived until his death in 2009; he claimed to have been told the details by a cousin of that first mutilated victim. There are moments here where the prose style reminded me a little of García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping, except that this book is to be found in the fiction section and some parts, especially towards the end, must be the result of creative license. However, despite some research that showed me the case was more or less real, I could not work out exactly where the join was.

La misère sexuelle, comme on la nommera plus tard, s'ajoute aux rôderies de la peur et de l'imagination du mal. Solitaire, on surveille la nuit, ébats d'amour de quelques nantis et de leur râlante complice, frôlements du diable, culpabilité vrillé dans quatre siècles de calvinisme imposé.

[Sexual deprivation – as it would later be known – is added to the prowlings of fear and sickly imagination. Alone, you look out at the night, the frolics of love among a few of the well-off and their moaning relations, the devil's caresses, a guilt wound tight through four centuries of enforced Calvinism.]

Le Vampire de Ropraz is also remarkable for the attitude it takes towards the ‘vampire’ himself. Though the full horror of his actions is made all too clear, he is also – through a tremendous exertion of authorial sympathy – somehow accepted. Chessex at one point addresses him directly – mon double, mon frère ! – and seems to suggest that crimes like these are within him, Chessex, too – indeed that they are within all of us, waiting, perhaps, for the right conjunction of desperation, remoteness and mental perturbation to bring them out. Not a traditional horror story, but plenty to make you shiver here all the same.… (more)