Resumo de The Company Of Ghosts

When a process-server turns up at a housing estate apartment
outside Paris
and begins cataloging the possessions with a view to seizure for unpaid debt,
eighteen-year-old Louisiane thinks about trying to save the televisions but is
otherwise polite and obliging. Her mother Rose, however, is trapped in the
past, reliving the traumatic events of her childhood in Vichy
France;
she abuses the process-server as a member of the Militia and a follower of
Petain and Darnand and delivers long monologues about wartime events. Louisiane
tries to explain her mother''s stories, which she has heard many times before,
but also begins to talk about her own life, dominated by her frustrated
sexuality. Meanwhile, the process-server sticks to his business, getting his
side of the story in only in an afterword Some Useful Advice for
Apprentice Process-Servers.

The Company of Ghosts has a theatrical feel to it and an evocation
of Sartre''s Huis clos is surely deliberate. Its three characters talk
past one another and occupy worlds which poorly overlap, but they continually
frustrate and upset each other. Louisiane''s first-person perspective seems
relatively familiar and we can readily identify with her teenage fascination
with movies, friends, and sex ? and with her erudition and familiarity with
classical literature, though that demands some suspension of disbelief. Her
mother is clearly insane in her insistence that nothing has changed since 1944,
but given her subsequent history, that begins to seem not unreasonable. And the
process server remains largely silent but provides an audience and the implicit
criticism of conservative France.

The interactions between the characters operate on different planes.
Louisiane and the process-server connect in the workings of the inventory and
his presence sets off her adolescent coquettishness. The mother-daughter
relationship is fraught, with Louisiane having taken on the responsibility of
managing the household and her mother''s insanity. And the violence of the
French state against Rose and her family is clearly linked to the work of the
process-server, as it turns out he recognizes himself. But there is little
space within which all three characters share any understanding ? Louisiane,
for example, seems oblivious to politics ? and The Company of Ghosts
requires a regular switching of frames which can be disconcerting.

If the formal structure is unusual, the style is also distinctive.

Until one day I decided, Monsieur, to become my
mother''s mother. Mama, calm down, please, people are looking at you, don''t talk
so loud, take a shower, no, it isn''t Putain, it''s Jacques Dufilho, because I''m
telling you it''s not Putain, Mama, your drops, fifty, and your three tablets,
you say they knock you out? Not enough, they don''t! Mama, don''t go out in that
outfit, you''re grotesque, Mama, don''t do this, don''t do that. What would you
have done in my place? I asked the process-server who was now concentrating his
attention on Mama''s TV set (we each had our own) and was jotting down in his
little notebook: a color television set, brand Philips, screen
54cm, multifunctional remote control.

The Company of Ghosts is in many ways quite bleak: there are some
horrors in Rose''s memories and the distrainment of a poor household''s meager
possessions is hardly cheerful. But it is leavened by its humor, dark and
unsettling though that is, and is not depressing. It is a striking and
compelling novel.

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