Maria Pourchet’s “Fire”: Caught in the Carousel of Desire | NDR.de – culture – book

by Annemarie Stoltenberg

Billy Wilder is said to have thought for a while that his dreams were film material. He put a piece of paper and a pencil next to the bed and in the morning it said: “Boy meets girl”. Not much more happens in Maria Pourchet’s novel. But he plays in our time today, with the contemporary phenomena that belong to our epoch.

An affair that sparks a pitch-black maelstrom

The heroine of the story is called Laure. She is a lecturer at the university in Paris, married to a doctor, has two daughters who are almost grown up, and at the age of 40 she is bored in a Paris suburb. She asked an investment banker to give a lecture for a congress. She meets him in a restaurant:

Two centimeters of flawless, fine cotton catches your eye between the wrist and the black suit fabric. You bet on a slim fit shirt, washed once, worn twice. at most. Suddenly you want to see what else is hidden under the cool fabric.
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Maria Pourchet lets her first-person narrator address herself as you, as if she were distancing herself. And she does, because she knows right from the start that what she’s doing is wrong. The man she chooses as her lover is named Clement. It is a mentally long dead man who has nothing to give emotionally. An affair with a refrigerator could be more intimate. He has lost all faith in the money economy and human future and is severely depressed. Unfortunately, his perfection of withdrawing from Laure outside of her sexual encounters does not create a saving escape movement in her, but a pitch-black pull. Or it works like quicksand. She cannot escape him. If you want to break the habit of shaking your head at other people and constantly thinking: “But I would never…”, you will quickly reach the limits of your self-control. One cannot help but criticize Laure’s behavior as self-destructive and idiotic. She ignores all feminist efforts of the last decades.

“Fire”: Brilliantly written novel

One of her two daughters realizes what her mother is getting into. She saves her life when Laure gives birth prematurely in the bathroom.

“You could have died. If I hadn’t come home you would still be there.” (…) “Today was my birthday,” she said and stood up. You finally manage to say I’m ashamed. And from shame you would like to die on the spot, lying there on the tiles, so that she would believe you.
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Véra, typical of her generation, is very thin and very angry. Not just on her mother, but on the entire mountain of debt that previous generations have piled up that can no longer be paid off. Not an ounce of intelligence is used in this upper-class family to think about how one could lead a good life together. In this novel, it is not the very freely described sex scenes that are shocking, but the unscrupulousness with which highly privileged life is treated here, as if it were dirt and could be reordered on the Internet. Maria Pourchet offers a brilliantly written, harrowing portrait of a certain class of society in our time.