The High-Life by Jean-Pierre Martinet

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
     
    "Starting from nothing, Martinet's career followed a perfect path: he ended up nowhere." Such was Jean-Pierre Martinet's self- assessment in the short autobiography he drafted for a 1980s dictionary of contemporary French literature. It is an assertion that appropriately evokes Samuel Joel Mostel's nickname, bequeathed to him after his press agent claimed, "here is a guy starting from nothing." For it is somewhere between Zero Mostel and Jim Thompson's grotesque answer to Hemingway's Jake Barnes, The Nothing Man ( Monsieur Zero in French), that Martinet's own brand of mordant humor lies. The few novels he left behind are inhabited by social zeros—radically marginalized losers—and relentlessly explore an uncomfortable space between laughter and loathing. From the same autobiographical summary: "His characters are almost always on the verge of paranoia and end up being afraid of everything, even of their shadow . Like children, the dark both fascinates them and makes their blood run cold. This gloomy writer, a great admirer of Thomas Hardy, Celine, and Bernanos, is partial to the themes of humiliation and the deserts of love."
    There is a risk of overburdening a short novella such as this one with an introduction, but as this is the author's first appearance in English, a bit of background is called for.Martinet was the author of three novels, the abandoned (yet self-contained) beginnings of a fourth, an essay on the neglected writer A. t'Serstevens, and a scattering of stories and articles. To date unknown in English (something that will inevitably be changing before long), Martinet's reputation has until recently been muffled even in French. Read only by a small number of intimates and aficionados in his lifetime, his work has been out of print and unavailable until the recent efforts of a few devoted publishers.In the span of just two or three years, he has emerged from the literary obscurity of cult status to finally gain some late renown and now has the reputation of being a disturbing and distinctly French successor to Dostoevsky. His handful of books all display a thematic unity in their portrayals of "underground" characters making disturbing descents into private hells.
    Martinet was born in 1944 in Libourne; his less than meteoric career path to nowhere had its beginnings in a strong performance as a student, followed by a lengthy stint as an assistant director at the ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion-Television Francaise). In 1975 he published his first work, the above-mentioned essay Un apostolat d'A. t'Serstevens, misere de l'Utopie (An apostolate of A. t'Serstevens: Misery of utopia), and his first novel, La Somnolence (Somnolence), the latter published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert. La Somnolence consists of the long monologue of Martha Kruhl, an alcoholic seventy-six-year-old woman in the throes of an addled and angry attempt to track down some whiskey and a mysterious man she both loathes and cannot do without; what plot there is involves her tortured efforts to grapple with a hallucinatory, violent limbo that seems to lie between an ending life and a death that refuses to begin. The book is a dark sister to Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There . What Martha finds through her looking glass is horror, and the resultant literary raving was to set the tone for everything Martinet would subsequently write. "My only companions," Martha explains to her uncertain audience toward the end of the book, "you know them: fear, humiliation, disgust." Martha describes to the reader a world whose "sky is an enormous pus sac ready to burst," and whose god "jerks off on our heads."It is relentlessly dark fare, and apart from a few positive reviews and recognitions of Martinet as a new talent, the novel was received in silence and sold only a few hundred copies.
    In 1978, Editions du Sagittaire published Martinet's second novel, Jerome , widely regarded as his masterpiece. A sprawling,