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Author Karine Tuil
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The filmmaker Claude Chabrol would undoubtedly have enjoyed this novel.
The ironic, who died in 2010, with his bitter, bilious work felt the pulse of the French bourgeoisie for decades, with terrifying diagnoses.
For the filmmaker, it was mostly about things that gave his protagonists fundamental social upheaval: stupid coincidences and tiny, gear-like details that suddenly hook and fail in the system, whereupon the gears block - and life courses based on lies and pretense collapse.
Such biographies are also the aim of the new, now fifth novel, translated into German by the Paris-born 1972 author Karine Tuil.
Small human things then develop fatal effects.
Tuil, who studied law, regularly and relentlessly circles social, political, legal and ethical issues in her sweeping social panoramas.
It reads as if Yasmina Reza and Jonathan Franzen had made common cause.
In her novel "Die Gierigen" (published in German in 2014), Tuil told the story of a New York star lawyer whose social rise was based on the fact that he had callously seized the Jewish identity of a friend in order to conceal his Arab origins.
"The Time of the Restless" followed three years later, in which his wife's suicide tore the shiny facade of a top manager to pieces - and once again revealed the cold grammar of power and its dark sides.
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Tuil, who, like Chabrol, has a pronounced penchant for ambiguity, designs in all of her books characters who are not who they appear to be on the outside;
brilliant and incontestable beings whose social rise is based in truth on dizziness, trickery and an insatiable hunger for power and self-preservation, which if necessary overrides all moral rules.
The Farels, which are the focus of her new novel "Menschliche Dinge" at the beginning, are also made of this wood: two representatives of upscale Parisian society, whose lies and private abysses Tuil gradually dissects with her razor-sharp sentences.
Because Jean, who as a TV presenter makes the Grande Nation happy every evening with pseudo-investigative discussions with politicians, has been leading a double life for years, as has his wife Claire, who is a nationally known magazine journalist and is committed to feminism.
When forces begin to form against the man that try to push him into social marginalization, his maxim is: "Persevere - that was the verb that summed up Jean Farel's whole attitude to life: stay with his wife, yourself Maintain health, live long, leave the station as late as possible. "
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Title: Human Things: Novel
Editor: Claassen
Number of pages: 384
Author: Karine Tuil
Translated by: Maja Ueberle-Pfaff
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The only thing that holds the Farels' marriage together is their son Alexandre, who is studying at an elite American university.
His path into the establishment also seems inexorably mapped out, until he is confronted with rape allegations after a night of partying in Paris and is arrested.
The press drives the Farels in front of them: "It was the blackest moment of their life, and they both knew it. They couldn't fall any deeper, they had reached the bottom. Now they could only drift upwards. Perhaps stayed they have no choice but to surrender to the eternal cycle of doom, drowning, reanimation and to rock lifelessly on the waves. "
Here Tuil's deeply sharp double portrait of two people driven by the struggle for their social standing is transformed into a veritable political thriller.
The story was presented in a 2016 case in which a student at the elite Stanford University was charged with rape.
The indignation at the mild sentence - six months in prison, three of which without parole - did not let go of Karine Tuil, so she decided to tell the story from her point of view and to relocate it to her familiar Parisian surroundings.
The result is a gripping piece of literature from these years - written by an intrepid exorcist who is smart enough to be wary of partisans in the end;
Rather, using the Farels as an example, it illustrates in an oppressive way the stripping of the strings of a certain social class that still believes it can bend the law in its own interest.
Karine Tuil: "Human Things". Novel. From the French Maja Ueberle-Pfaff. Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 2020; 380 pages; 22 euros.
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