The Hyenas of Finland
A Novel By Mahmoud Naouri
Reviewed by Elizabeth Benefiel
Note: as this book is not yet translated into English, all translations are approximations of the reviewer. We welcome reviews of nontranslated books such as these, as long as the reviewer can provide the original source text for our perusal.
It's quite easy to live in a different city from your neighbor. This city might have the same name, the same streets, and the same people. It's fortunate for you &mdash and your neighbor &mdash that nobody can know all of the secrets of one city. This is an arching idea behind Naouri's The Hyenas of Finland: we can never truly pass the boundaries between two people, or the place they live in &mdash even if it is with us.
Mahmoud Naouri, a Senegalese immigrant, lived in Paris (where the book takes place) for three years before moving to Belgium, where he wrote Les Hyènes de la Finlande from 2004 to 2005. Naouri includes a prefatory note about "La Vie Sans Supplices," a Belgian artist's collective. "The object of the collective is obscurity," he writes. "As a member, I disavow promotion, technology and commercial intent." Clearly he doesn't "disavow" logrolling: the book was published by friend (and founder of LVSS) Jean-Luc Martin's d'Erdeur Publications, notorious for its use of a movable-type printing press and refusal distribute outside of Belgium.
Politicking aside, Naouri offers an exemplary study in interpersonal politics, on a broad and personal scale. Balzac's influence is plainly felt, particularly in his early vertiginous sweeps of city life. Naouri portrays Paris and its customs with fascination and somewhat vengeful mocking. "If you want a Frenchman to help you," the narrator informs the reader early in the book, "Make quite sure you are not amusing him." Naouri gets in a few barbs at wider western culture: when informed that the protagonist has a friend in Kenya, a Senegalese waiter exclaims, "Ah yes! And I have a friend in Estonia. That too is on the European continent!"
The book follows Serge Piaglou, a "disarranged man, stiff in all aspects, wearing a wrinkled suit and smelling of antiperspirant." Serge, a thirty-something mathematics tutor of no ambition in distressed West Paris, begins dreaming he is a child invalid named Nadine. The dreams feel more real as time goes on: he interacts with Nadine's caretakers, inattentive parents, and round after round of doctors. However, Serge never sees her face. The dreams invest new meaning into his otherwise dull life. "Her nose is 80% likely to be small and upturned at the end," Serge tells his fiancée's horrified parents at a cocktail party. "'Her skin may be any color from olive to orange, with a slight upturn in probability around pallor.'" His monomania vacillates between "crazy, mad and batshit insane."
One night, Nadine asks her caretaker to explain the word deguessalope, which Serge used in a phone conversation during the day. The next night, she asks why a man would marry a woman he hates (featuring a trite, predictably childish interpretation of sex, which the caretaker is shocked by but not enough to follow up on it). The third night, she calls her mother an unmentionable word, even in French. She writes in her diary that she has strange dreams, of "a man who knows everything and nothing about me," but it's not clear who is writing it.
As the story unfolds, one senses that Naouri sheds meticulousness for exuberance. Motifs are emphasized and discarded without apparent reason. Lilacs, a recurring image early in the book, are never mentioned after chapter sixteen. Serge talks about his lack of ambition; after he begins dreaming he is Nadine, this issue is never resolved or addressed. Does Nadine give him ambition? Does he discover it doesn't matter? Perhaps I'm missing something, but it's hard to say. After Serge and Nadine meet, one gets the sense that Naouri is bored: the writing lacks enthusiasm and elegant metaphor in favor of action sequences peppered with Brenda Starr dialogue. Although the ending shows a return to form, one finishes the book unsure of what to think.
Take the title, for example: it comes from a joke told once by an ancillary character: a man visits his friend in Lapland, and sees an odd package at his door. "That's to keep out hyenas," his friend tells him. "But there are no hyenas in Finland!" the visitor points out. "See?" he responds with a wry smile.
Naouri is at his finest when not bogged by technical explication, and instead focuses on the minute spiritual alienation of life. Take this passage from early in the book, when Jessica rides home with Serge, her head in his lap:
Black powder, from last night's party or the one before that, clings to the rim of her eyes. Serge can tell how she will look when she's older: her nose will pull out from the rest of her face, which will slide in submission. The fine lines around her mouth will deepen, and her eyes will retain their limpid misery. She would gain the look, he realized, of a woman wronged by her own beauty, self-hatred settling deep into the features, the appealing mask slipping away from the rotting core. He pulls Jessica's hair behind her ear and kisses her on the temple, powerless in his desire and disgust.
It's as if the book has as many forms as Paris itself: the city's idiosyncracies and existential quandaries peel away like the skins of an onion, until we're left with nothing but flakes around our shoes. The book's uneven tone is not entirely unsalvageable: it would require a bit of work (perhaps from an impartial editor) to make the book what it can become.
As a first novel, it's hard to know whether to be easy or hard on the author; perhaps it is better to do as Balzac suggested, and strike true. I look forward to the book's eventual distribution outside of Belgium, its hopeful translation into English, and Naouri's future potential.
Text and translations © Elizabeth Benefiel. Les Hyènes de la Finlande © Mahmoud Naouri and d'Erdeur Press, Brussels 2006.