«Serge» the new novel by Reza is released

Her writing is brilliant, she is always ready to explore the neurotic behavior of the urban middle class, in particular the liberal left-wing, by alternating between caustic and somewhat endearingly witty tones. In her novels and plays, Yasmina Reza, playwright, writer and screenwriter, always creates some incident, whether a mere coincidence or a gaffe, which causes a conflict to erupt and ultimately exposes the hypocrisies of good people. Above all, the scenes created by Reza ridicule the respectability (which today is that of political correctness), the feeling of being on the right side that Gogol had already pilloried and that Nabokov called with contempt «pošlost’», considering it the height of vulgarity: the self-satisfied pettiness. We are all vulnerable, this is what Reza tells us, and hidden behind the certainties and behaviors of people who feel they have made it in society are chasms of contradictions. If we middle-class people were carpets, the author would show us not the outline, the colors, the pattern, but rather the dust, the mites, the moths. Precisely as happens in her successful play The God of Carnage, which has been translated into 35 languages, performed in many parts of the world by famous actors, and then taken up by Roman Polansky who made the film Carnage.

Under the strokes of an extraordinarily expressive writing falls the social hypocrisy of two wealthy upper middle class bobos, who are hypocritically under the illusion of being healthy bearers of progressive ideas à la page. There is no current fashion or attitude that escapes her pen. In another successful play, Art, which earned her a flood of royalties and was translated into 40 languages, Reza mocks the contemporary art world, with its ridiculous prices and unrealistic illusions. In fact, the human material on display brings to mind the brilliant compendium of politically correct names and thought-provoking ideas featured in the essay by two other Frenchmen, Sven Ortoli and Michel Eltchaninoff: Manuel de survie dans les dîners en ville (Survival guide for dinner parties in the city). Let’s take one of Reza’s phenomenal little books, the collection Happy Are The Happy (title taken from Borges). There are 21 stories, short tales each framing a discomfort of a relationship, of loneliness, of parental relationships. Reza is a ventriloquist, able to do the voices of each character: old men with cancer, actresses in meltdown, adult children ashamed of their oddball parents, or vice versa, parents ashamed of their sickly children, financial advisors exhausted by marital conflicts that flare up over nothing, followed by aggressive marital silences. Throughout, there is a fantastic selection of details that makes her stories of social criticism of hypocrisy and the dismantling of the concept of respectability real, shared by all of us.

Reza is the greatest weaver of arguments and squabbles, of bedtime brawls over who should turn out the light, of disputes. A cantankerous old woman in the waiting room of a cancer ward talks to her son, who escorts her and asks her to lower her tone, after the woman has loudly made a tally of the chemo wigs on the heads of all the other patients, and the relative chances of life left to each of them. The old woman changes the subject and immediately goes on to illustrate to a trembling old stranger sitting next to her her disagreements with her late husband who was pathetically obsessed with Israel. Yasmina Reza, daughter to an Iranian engineer and a Hungarian violinist, both of Jewish descent, is a quintessential Parisian. Slender, very feminine in her dress, beautiful legs, she is not afraid to be ironic even on very delicate topics, such as the visit to the concentration camps. In her latest novel, Serge, recently published in Italian by Adelphi, a messy group of French Jews, brothers and nephews, go on a journey to Auschwitz. The trip is planned as a duty of remembrance and is lived as a certificate of good conduct, amidst spine-chilling photographic exhibits, bombed-out wagons, piles of emptied suitcases, hanks of hair and hundreds of glasses kept in display cases. Yet the main characters are distracted from focusing on the momentous tragedy, engrossed in the debris of their current lives, in the pettiness of their concerns, in the impatience they feel towards each other. So they argue in grotesque fashion in the heart of the tragic shrine of the Holocaust.

Last year, in October, we met Yasmina Reza in Capri - where she was awarded the prestigious Malaparte Prize 2021 and where she dragged editors and translators of the Adelphi publishing house, which publishes her in Italy, into deadly escapades between Villa Jovis, Via Krupp and Villa San Michele. Reza does not like that her writing is defined cynical: «I do not possess strong opinions on any subject. My job as a writer is to explore a reality that I don’t understand. The problem is that in France humor is seen as a light matter of entertainment, of boulevardier theater. But the critics like my texts, so they have had to say that I am being sarcastic, since sarcasm is intellectually legitimate. Rather, mine is an empathetic viewpoint; I laugh at myself when I write. I like to be inside things, not above them. In social relationships we all wear a mask of morality and good manners, but what I am putting on scene is the moment when nerves break down». And when asked about the status of women, she says, «By now, writers are forced to express themselves every day on absolutely everything, from politics to metoo, but it’s not an exercise of freedom, it’s the opposite: once you have publicly said what you think, then you have to write the same stuff in your books, and you jeopardize a lot of possibilities. Not that I don’t agree with metoo, clearly, it couldn’t be otherwise, but long ago I made my decision: I don’t have social media and I don’t talk about current affairs. Because then, you are judged only for your ideological and political positions». And she blocks the umpteenth question on current affairs with an elegant: «Je suis pas sociologue». I am not a sociologist.

«Serge» by Yasmina Reza Published in Italian by Adelphi (186 pages, 20 CHF), while the publisher in France is Flammarion. A sarcastic novel, to say the least, even if the author would prefer to speak of humour. It is the story of the remains of the middle-class Jewish Popper family: so broken up and in such an existential decline that at a certain point even a trip to Auschwitz seems a plausible way to find oneself. It ends up in a Theatre of the Absurd where, as has been rightly said, «a sense of humour and a warm-hearted cruelty widens the field of things one can laugh at»