French writer Tanguy Viel has written a subtle #MeToo novel that also pokes fun at politicians in Paris.
The French writer Tanguy Much is a master of the blanks.
If Dürrenmatt had been Breton, he might have written such a crime novel. The novel is by Tanguy Viel and is called «The Girl Who Calls». A small town by the sea. The roles are divided, but what role morality plays only gradually emerges. A young woman in a body-hugging dress. Not exactly a social case, but still. A mayor who promises to look after her when she’s looking for a flat, quickly crossing the lines of what is pleasant.
You end up in a flophouse together, and from then on what is felt and what is thought diverges quite a bit. So much so that two police officers who have to take a complaint against the young woman only look on helplessly. The police world is all there is to a case, but what is the case here?
The Breton Tanguy Much is a great technician of the recesses. For him, what is not said is psychology. It gets even more exciting when not even the people described by the author know what they are not saying. Basically, the matter is simple. “The Girl You Call” is a kind of #MeToo novel. Everyone knows each other in the provincial town by the sea. You help yourself. Ex-boxer Max, who is about to make a comeback and is the mayor’s driver, asks his boss to do something for his daughter Laura.
Sexual Assault with Consequences
In the first encounter between the two, the mayor’s giant office quickly shrinks to a few centimeters apart on the visitor’s sofa. Unwanted for Laura. There are further meetings in the bed of the tiny apartment, which the mafia friend and ex-boxing manager Franck Laura has made available. Are the routine movements the result of an assault?
It’s not rape, but psychological violence is involved. relationships of dependency. An imbalance between two unequals. The affair escalates into a scandal when the small-town mayor becomes French minister for maritime affairs. There is a final meeting in a two-star hotel in the Paris banlieue. The propriety zones of French politics should remain untouched, but since #MeToo we know that this is no longer so easy. Laura goes to the police.
Even the title of Tanguy Viel’s novel moves between an atmosphere of innocence and its professional opposite. The “call girl” is also inside “The girl you call”. At sixteen, Laura was an underwear model. The fact that the ex-boxing manager Franck has a magazine with pictures without any underwear in his desk drawer under his pistol is proof enough of moral issues in the small town.
Not for Tanguy Viel, however, who makes a crime novel out of a crime novel that actually isn’t one. In “The Girl You Call” the topic of sexual violence is spelled out in all its ambivalence. Tanguy Viel makes it clear how much the evidence also requires psychological evidence by presenting exactly this. By telling. By implying. The translator Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel hit the right note for this form in German as well.
Big showdown in the harbor
The novel by the French writer is subtle not in its plot but in its method. The staff is plastic to the point of cliché and almost cinematic. The boxer and father of Laura has a face crushed in the ring and by life. The mafia manager and casino owner wears a white suit. The careerist mayor, the insignia of power. With its idea of being able to afford everything, it is a classic discontinued model. At least that’s what one hopes. There have been cases in French politics that were perhaps less trivial, but very similar.
Tanguy Viel’s book is also a boxer novel. You’ll be reminded of that when the big showdown occurs at the end of the book. Against the magnificent backdrop of a Breton port town. On the way to regaining dignity, fists are clenched. And the police, guardians of law and order, don’t know what’s going on again.
Tanguy Much: The girl you call. Novel. Translated from the French by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2022. 160 pages, CHF 30.90.