The Mystery of Henri Pick

by David Foenkinos

  Delphine preferred to change the subject, so she told them about the novels she’d brought with her. With the advent of new technologies, there was no longer any need to lug manuscripts around in her suitcases during the holidays. She had about twenty books to read during August, and they were all stored on her e-reader. They asked her what those novels were about, and Delphine confessed that, most of the time, she was incapable of summarizing them. She had not read anything memorable. Yet she continued to feel excited at the start of each new book. Because what if it was good? What if she was about to discover a new author? She found her job so stimulating, it was almost like being a child again, hunting for chocolate eggs in a garden at Easter. And she adored working on the manuscripts of the authors she published. She had reread The Bathtub at least ten times. When she loved a novel, the choice of keeping or deleting a comma could make her heart beat faster.

  9

  The weather was so beautiful that evening that they decided to eat dinner outside. Frédéric set the table, and took a slightly ridiculous pleasure in feeling useful. Writers are so happy at the idea of performing a household chore. They like to counterbalance their airy wanderings with something concrete. Delphine talked a lot with her parents, which fascinated her boyfriend. They always have something to say to one another, he thought; there was never a blank page in their conversation. Perhaps it was a question of momentum: one word led to another. Watching them and listening to them made Frédéric even more acutely aware of his inability to communicate with his own parents. Had they even read his novel? Probably not. His mother tried to act more tenderly towards him, but it was difficult to fill the void of all those years of emotional drought. Anyway, he rarely thought about them. When was the last time they had talked? He really couldn’t remember. The failure of his novel had rendered them even more distant. He didn’t want to see that look of contempt in his father’s eyes as he talked about all those other novels that had been successful.

  Frédéric didn’t even know what they were doing that summer. He found it strange enough that they should be together at all. After twenty years of separation, his parents had become a couple again. What were they thinking? It was probably a good reason to become a novelist: the inability to understand your own parents. He imagined that they had sampled life without each other and, for want of anything better, had decided to get back together. Frédéric had suffered, as a child, from the need to constantly shuttle his belongings from one home to another, and now they’d decided to become a family again, without him. Was he supposed to feel guilty? The truth was probably much simpler: they were terrified by loneliness.

  Frédéric abandoned these thoughts2 and returned to the present:

  “Don’t you get sick of reading all those manuscripts?” Fabienne asked her daughter.

  “No, I adore it! Although recently, I must admit, I’ve got a bit tired of it. I haven’t read anything very exciting.”

  “And The Bathtub? How did you discover that?”

  “Frédéric sent it in the post. And I spotted it while I was rummaging through all the manuscripts on the desk. I was drawn by the title.”

  “Actually, I left it at the reception desk,” said Frédéric. “I went to several different publishing houses, without really believing it would come to anything. I certainly never imagined I’d get a call the next morning!”

  “I imagine it must be rare for it to happen so quickly?” said Gérard, always keen to participate in a conversation, even if the subject didn’t really interest him.

  “The speed is rare, yes. But even acceptance is rare. At Grasset, we only publish about three or four unsolicited novels each year.”

  “Out of how many?”

  “Thousands.”

  “I suppose somebody must be employed to reject all the others,” said Gérard. “What a job…”

  “It’s generally just a standard rejection letter, sent by an intern,” Delphine explained.

  “Ah yes, the famous letter: ‘Despite the many qualities of your work, blah-blah-blah… we regret to inform you that it does not meet our editorial criteria… Yours sincerely blah-blah-blah…’ It’s always the fault of the editorial criteria!”

  “You’re right,” Delphine replied to her mother. “Particularly as the editorial criteria don’t even exist—that’s just a pretext. Just leaf through our catalogue and you’d see that the books we publish are all completely different.”

  There was a brief lull in the conversation then, a rarity in the Despero family. Gérard took advantage of this to pour everyone another glass of red. They had already got through three bottles that evening.

  Fabienne filled the silence with a local anecdote:

  “A few years ago, the librarian in Crozon got it into his head to start collecting all the books rejected by publishers.”

  “Really?” said Delphine, surprised that she didn’t know this story.

  “Oh yes. The project was inspired by an American library, I believe. I’m not too sure of the details now. I just remember that it caused quite a stir at the time. People found it amusing. Someone even said that it was a sort of literary rubbish tip.”

  “That’s stupid. I think it’s a good idea,” Frédéric interjected. “If nobody had wanted my book, I’d have liked it to be accepted somewhere.”

  “Does it still exist?” asked Delphine.

  “Yes. I don’t think it’s very active any more, but I went to the library a few months ago and I noticed that all the shelves at the back were still filled with rejected books.”

  “There must be some real duds in there!” laughed Gérard, but nobody seemed to appreciate his sense of humour.

  Frédéric realized that Delphine’s father must often have been sidelined by the two women in the family. Out of sympathy, he shot him a brief complicit smile, but he didn’t actually laugh. Gérard became serious again, and acknowledged that he found the whole concept absurd. As a mathematician, he could not imagine that there existed a place devoted to all the unfinished scientific research projects or all the failed exams. The whole point was that there were measures of validity, barriers that had to be passed, to demarcate the boundaries between the worlds of success and failure. He came up with another comparison, a strange one to say the least: “It’s like, in love, if a woman said no to you, but you were allowed to have an affair with her anyway…” Delphine and Fabienne did not understand this analogy, but condescendingly praised this pathetic attempt by a rational man to show his tender side. Scientists do sometimes come up with these poetic metaphors, they said, about as subtle as a poem written by a four-year-old. (It was time for bed.)

  10

  In the privacy of their room, Frédéric caressed Delphine’s calves, then her thighs, then stopped with his finger in one particular spot.

  “And if I put this here, will you refuse?” he whispered.

  11

  The next morning, Delphine suggested to Frédéric that they ride their bikes to Crozon, to take a look at that library. He usually worked until at least one in the afternoon, but he too felt a pressing desire to go. It would perhaps do him good to witness a physical manifestation of others’ failure.

  Magali still worked at the library. She’d put on weight. Without really knowing why, she had let herself go. It hadn’t started straight after the birth of her two sons, but a few years later. Perhaps at the moment when she realized that she would live her whole life here, and that she would stay in the same job until retirement. This solid horizon put a sudden end to her interest in her looks. And when she noticed that her extra pounds didn’t really bother her husband either, she continued along a path that led to her no longer recognizing herself. Her husband told her that he loved her despite her physical changes; she might have taken this as proof of the depth of his love, but instead she saw it as proof of indifference.

  Another important change should be noted in Magali: year by year, she had become literary. She had become a librarian by chance, without any real taste f
or books, but now she was capable of advising readers, guiding them in their choices. The library had gradually evolved in her image. She had created a bigger children’s section, with special events where people would read books out loud. Her sons, now adults, would sometimes come to give her a hand at the weekends. They were giants now and, like their father, they worked at the Renault garage, but still you would sometimes find them squeezed into the children’s section, reading The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit to a bunch of kids.

  Very few people came these days to visit the library of rejects, and Magali had almost forgotten about it herself. Sometimes, a rather shady individual would enter shyly and mutter that nobody had wanted his book. He’d heard about this refuge from his unpublished writer friends. The word was passed along through this community of disillusion.

  The young couple went into the library, and Delphine introduced herself, explaining that she lived in Morgat.

  “Oh, you’re the Desperos’ daughter?” Magali asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I remember you. You used to come here when you were little.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, it was mostly your mother who came to borrow books for you. But aren’t you the one who works in Paris for a publishing company?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Do you think you’d be able to let us have some free books?” asked Magali, whose commercial acumen was considerably stronger than her tactfulness.

  “Um… yes, of course. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Anyway, I can recommend a very good novel to you. The Bathtub. I could probably get you a few free copies of that.”

  “Oh yes, I heard about that. Apparently it’s rubbish.”

  “That’s not true at all. In fact, allow me to introduce its author…”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Me and my big mouth!”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Frédéric reassured her. “I’m just as bad. I often say that a book’s supposed to be rubbish, without having read it.”

  “But I am going to read it now. And put it on display. After all, it’s not every day that a star comes to Crozon!”

  “Well, I’m not really a star,” Frédéric stammered.

  “Well, you know what I mean. A published author.”

  “Talking of which…” said Delphine. “We came to see you because we heard about a slightly odd kind of library.”

  “Ah, I imagine you’re talking about the rejected books.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s over there, at the back. I kept it as a tribute to its founder, but it’s probably full of really bad books.”

  “Yes, probably,” said Delphine. “But we adore the idea.”

  “Gourvec would be so pleased. He was the man who created it. He liked it when people took an interest in his library. It was his life’s work, if you like. He made others’ failures his own success.”

  “That’s very beautiful,” Frédéric said.

  Magali had uttered that phrase spontaneously, without realizing its poetry. She watched as the young couple moved towards the shelves of rejected books and thought about how long it was since she’d dusted that part of the library.

  1Richard Brautigan could have created another library, for published books about which nobody says a word: the library of invisible books.

  2How long had he tuned out of the conversation? Impossible to say. A human being is endowed with this unique capacity to nod and give the illusion of listening attentively, all the while thinking about something else completely. That is why we should never hope to read the truth in somebody else’s expression.

  PART THREE

  1

  A few days later, Delphine and Frédéric returned to the library. It had enchanted them, reading all those improbable stories. There had been a few fits of hysterical giggling as they read out the titles, but they had also been moved by some of the personal diary entries; they may have been badly written, but there was a trueness of feeling to them all the same.

  They spent a whole afternoon there, unaware of time passing. In the evening, Delphine’s mother stood in the garden anxiously awaiting their return. She finally saw them, just before sunset. They appeared in the distance, preceded by the lights on their bicycles. She immediately recognized her daughter from the precise, unswerving way she rode a bike. Her arrival was heralded by that straight, mechanical ray of light. Frédéric’s was more artistic, advancing in fits and starts, drifting from side to side. You could imagine him constantly looking around. They made a good couple, Fabienne thought then: an alliance of the concrete and the dreamy.

  “Sorry, Mama, my phone battery died. And we were delayed.”

  “By what?”

  “By something amazing.”

  “What happened?”

  “First call Papa. Everybody must be here for this.”

  She pronounced this last phrase in a solemn voice.

  2

  A few minutes later, over aperitifs, Delphine and Frédéric told her parents about their afternoon in the library. They took turns to speak, one telling an anecdote while the other clarified certain details. You could tell that they wanted to make the moment last, that they didn’t want to reveal the momentous news too quickly. They talked about how they’d laughed at some of the manuscripts, particularly the more bizarre and obscene ones such as Masturbation and Sushi, an erotic ode to raw fish. The parents begged them to get to the point, but it made no difference; they wanted to take the scenic route, stop a few times to contemplate the landscape, turning their account of the afternoon into a slow, delicious adventure. Until the punchline:

  “And then we found a masterpiece,” Delphine announced.

  “Oh?”

  “To start with, I thought there were a few good pages—I mean, why not, after all?—and then I was just swept away by the story. I couldn’t put that book down. I read the whole thing in two hours. It blew me away. And it was written in such a strange style, simple and poetic at the same time. As soon as I finished it, I gave it to Frédéric to read, and… I’ve never seen him like that before. He looked completely captivated.”

  “Yes, it’s true,” Frédéric confirmed. He appeared to be still in a state of shock.

  “But what’s it about, this book?”

  “We borrowed the manuscript—you can read it.”

  “You just took it?”

  “Yes. I don’t think anyone will mind.”

  “So what’s the subject?”

  “It’s called The Last Hours of a Love Affair. It’s magnificent. It’s about a passion that has to end. For various reasons, the couple can’t love each other any more. The book recounts their final moments. But what makes the book so unique is that, in parallel with this, the author describes the death of Pushkin.”

  “Yes, Pushkin was wounded in a duel,” Frédéric went on. “He was in agony for hours before he finally died. It’s an extraordinary idea to blend the end of a love affair with the death throes of a great Russian poet.”

  “And the book begins with the sentence: ‘One cannot understand Russia if one has not read Pushkin’,” Delphine added.

  “I can’t wait to read it,” said Gérard.

  “You? I thought you didn’t like reading,” said Fabienne.

  “Yes, but this makes me want to.”

  Delphine observed her father. Not as his daughter, but as an editor. She immediately realized that this novel could move readers. And, of course, the way it had been discovered would make for a great story.

  “Who’s the author?” the mother asked.

  “I don’t know. His name is Henri Pick. On the manuscript, it says that he lives in Crozon. Should be easy enough to find…”

  “Hmm, that name is familiar,” said the father. “In fact, isn’t it the guy who ran the pizzeria for a long time?”

  The young couple stared at Gérard. He was not the kind of man who made mistakes. It seemed im
probable, but then the whole adventure had been improbable.

  By the next morning, Delphine’s mother had read the book too. She had found the story beautiful, and quite simple. “And it’s true that there’s a sort of tragic power that emanates from the parallel with Pushkin’s death,” she added. “I didn’t know about that before I read the book.”

  “Pushkin isn’t very famous in France,” Delphine replied.

  “His death is so absurd…”

  Fabienne wanted to talk more about the Russian poet and how he died, but Delphine interrupted her to talk about the book’s author. She’d spent all night thinking about it. Who could have written a book like that without becoming well known?

  It wasn’t too difficult to find information about the mystery man. Frédéric typed his name into Google and discovered an obituary from two years before. So Henri Pick would never know that his book had found enthusiastic readers, including an editor. Delphine decided that they should meet his family. The obituary had mentioned a wife and daughter. The widow lived in Crozon, and her address was in the phone book. It was hardly an investigation worthy of a thriller.