L'Enragé par Sorj Chalandon (review)

Reviewed by: L'Enragé par Sorj Chalandon Eilene Hoft-March Chalandon, Sorj. L'Enragé. Grasset & Fasquelle, 2023. ISBN 978-2-246-83467-0. Pp. 416. Chalandon tacks the corners of this fiction to well-documented history. He sets the opening in Belle-Île-en-Mer penitentiary, a Vauban Citadel boasting impenetrable walls and splendid vistas of the Breton sea off its island. After its first three decades of housing political and war prisoners, the citadel became a detention center for "juvenile delinquents." Central to the novel's plot is the historic 1934 revolt of the prison's young inmates, fifty-five of whom briefly escaped, only to be rounded up by the local citizenry for a per-head bounty of 20 francs. The bad press that followed also finds its way into the novel along with a cameo appearance of Jacques Prévert, who wrote the poem Chasse à l'enfant. The fiction begins as L'Enragé posits a fifty-sixth inmate, Jules Bonneau alias La Teigne, who escapes capture. With thorough and plausible psychological realism, the author depicts the dismal origins of Bonneau and their impact. His mother abandons a six-year-old Bonneau; his father unburdens himself of child-rearing on his own aged parents; they, in turn, treat him as a costly interloper. Lacking affection and care, the youngster turns to petty larcenies driven first by hunger and later by easy, unchecked habit. In league with some older orphans, 13-year-old Bonneau loyally associates himself with their desperate and criminal acts of defiance. As a result, he is condemned to Belle-Île until his majority. The author does not mince words: he details the hard labor, poor nutrition, and mistreatment of the boys (verbal abuse, beatings, rapes). Wardens invent sickeningly creative punishments such as handcuffing a child outdoors for an entire night or forcing him to walk in circles barefoot for hours on end. This unabated cruelty hardens Bonneau but also confirms his sense of injustice and solidarity with and protectiveness toward the most vulnerable of his fellow inmates. The narrative drives relentlessly from one chapter to the next, with few glimpses of human kindness until Bonneau meets Ronan, a sardine fisherman who takes his chances with the young fugitive. Ronan's wife, Sophie, is a nurse whose life's work is motivated by risk-filled compassion. The story's tense pace credibly conveys the constant threat Bonneau lives under as a wanted "man" and as a liability for those in his tiny circle of trusted friends. Moreover, the first-person internal monologue used throughout the novel realistically portrays the boy's hypervigilance: Bonneau foresees plausible dangers everywhere, anticipating his own potential responses, most of them violent. We are to understand that these are the psychic reflexes instilled by his state-supported, penitentiary "education." Belle-Île closed in 1977 (only), but in his dedication, Chalandon recognizes that its cruel practices survive—and not only in penal institutions: "À tous ceux qui crevèrent d'ennui au collège ou qu'on fit pleurer dans la famille/Qui, pendant leur enfance, furent tyrannisés par leurs maîtres ou rossés par leurs parents" (7). Attentive readers will not fail to empathize. [End Page 133]