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JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE (1942–1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. Born in Marseilles to a family of relatively modest means, Manchette grew up in a southwestern suburb of Paris, where he wrote from an early age. While a student of English literature at the Sorbonne, he contributed articles to the newspaper La Voie communiste and became active in the national students’ union. In 1961 he married, and with his wife Mélissa began translating American crime fiction—he would go on to translate the works of such writers as Donald Westlake, Ross Thomas, and Margaret Millar, often for Gallimard’s Série Noire. Throughout the 1960s Manchette supported himself with various jobs writing television scripts, screenplays, young-adult books, and film novelizations. In 1971 he published his first novel, a collaboration with Jean-Pierre Bastid, and embarked on his literary career in earnest, producing ten subsequent works over the course of the next two decades and establishing a new genre of French novel, the néo-polar (distinguished from the traditional detective novel, or polar, by its political engagement and social radicalism). During the 1980s, Manchette published a celebrated translation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel for a bandedessinée publishing house co-founded by his son, Doug Headline. In addition to Fatale and The Mad and the Bad (both available from NYRB Classics), Manchette’s novels Three to Kill and The Prone Gunman, as well as Jacques Tardi’s graphic-novel adaptations of them (titled West Coast Blues and Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot, respectively), are available in English.
DONALD NICHOLSON-SMITH’s translations of noir fiction include Manchette’s Three to Kill; Thierry Jonquet’s Mygale (a.k.a. Tarantula); and (with Alyson Waters) Yasmina Khadra’s Cousin K. He has also translated works by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Raoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Jean Laplanche, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Guy Debord. For NYRB he has translated Manchette’s Fatale and The Mad and the Bad (winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction in 2014), and Jean-Paul Clébert’s Paris Vagabond, as well as the French comics The Green Hand by Nicole Claveloux and Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures by Yvan Alagbé. Born in Manchester, England, he is a longtime resident of New York City.
LUC SANTE is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, and, most recently, The Other Paris. He translated Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines and has written introductions to several other NYRB Classics, including Vagabond Paris by Jean-Paul Clébert and Pedigree by Georges Simenon. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, he teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.
NADA
JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE
Translated from the French by
DONALD NICHOLSON-SMITH
Introduction by
LUC SANTE
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1972 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris
Translation copyright © 2019 by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Luc Sante
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Paolo Pedrizzetti, 1977, Milano: Manifestazione Autonomi Contro La Polizia; © Paolo Pedrizzetti / LUZphoto
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Manchette, Jean-Patrick, 1942–1995, author. | Nicholson-Smith, Donald, translator.
Title: Nada / by Jean-Patrick Manchette ; translated by Donald NicholsonSmith.
Other titles: Nada. English
Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2019] | Series: New York Review Books classics.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018046763 (print) | LCCN 2018051233 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681373188 (epub) | ISBN 9781681373171 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PQ2673.A452 (ebook) | LCC PQ2673.A452 N313 2019 (print) | DDC 843/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046763
ISBN 978-1-68137-318-8
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Introduction
Translator's Acknowledgments
Epigraph
NADA
INTRODUCTION
NADA, first published in November 1972, was the fourth novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, not counting pseudonymous titles, novelizations of films, and other products of what he called “industrial” writing. He was twenty-nine and a seasoned Grub Street professional, and he was fully aware of the political currents of his time. He had joined Communist youth organizations a decade earlier and demonstrated in favor of the liberation of Algeria; more recently he had come under the influence of the Situationist International. It was natural, especially in the highly politicized cultural climate of post-’68 France, that he should merge his two reigning passions and begin writing thrillers on political themes. The first novel he wrote under his own name, L’Affaire N’Gustro (1971), was based on the kidnapping and disappearance of the Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris in 1965.
Nada is also about a kidnapping—of the U.S. ambassador to France by a ragtag bunch known as the Nada group, led by professional revolutionaries. The book is structured like a classic caper novel by Frédéric Dard or Albert Simonin. American readers, encountering it in Donald Nicholson-Smith’s crisp and astute translation, might consider it a cousin to the novels that Donald Westlake (whom Manchette admired and translated) wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark, most of which involve capers gone wrong; like them it is dry and tight, and the pages fly by as if the reader were watching a movie. The caper format is here adapted to the single most newsworthy leftist-terrorist scenario of the 1970s: the symbolic abduction. The casual reader, unburdened by dates, might think that Nada was inspired by the kidnapping of Hanns Martin Schleyer by the Red Army Faction in Germany, or that of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in Italy, but those events would not occur until 1977 and 1978, respectively.
Nada was written early in the period that became known in Europe as the Years of Lead, a time when revolutionary fervor was cresting, as was frustration at the glacial if not retrograde pace of social change. The urge to action was felt everywhere, although it primarily resulted in meetings and pamphlets. But the Red Brigades carried out their first kidnapping in 1972—the twenty-minute abduction of a factory foreman—and the Red Army Faction also undertook a bombing campaign that year: four incidents, five dead, fifty-four injured. (The French counterparts of these groups, notably Action Directe, would not be formed for several more years.) Manchette recorded in his diary that on May 7, as he was finishing the manuscript, his wife (and frequent collaborator), Mélissa Manchette, suggested that his characters might be “positive models,” to which he responded: “Politically, they are a public hazard, a true catastrophe for the revolutionary movement. The collapse of leftism into terrorism is the collapse of the revolution into spectacle.”
The characters in the gang are the usual odd mix you expect to find in caper novels. Buenaventura Diaz is one sort of professional revolutionary, an exile who never met his father—he died in 1937 defending the Barcelona Commune—and who has invested his whole life in militant action; his only other significant interest is gambling at cards. In Claude Chabrol’s uneven 1974 film adaptation he is given the full spaghetti-western romantic treatment. André Épaulard is a professional of another sort, a former member of the Communist Resistance during the Occupation who has nev
er been able to quench his thirst for action, and while pursuing revolutionary opportunities around the world has also dabbled in corruption. Manchette enjoys endowing his characters with Homeric epithets; Épaulard is usually “the fifty-year-old” or “the ex-FTP fighter,” referring to the “Francs-Tireurs et Partisans” in the Resistance. His name implies that he is given to shouldering his way through. In his review of Chabrol’s film, Andrew Sarris noted that the character’s essence combines Humphrey Bogart’s “wrinkled fatalism” and Yves Montand’s “wistful patience.”
Marcel Treuffais, who teaches philosophy at a suburban lycée, is the author of the Nada manifesto, their resident intellectual, a proud member of the Libertarian Association of the Fifteenth Arrondissement (Errico Malatesta Group). In keeping with genre conventions, there is also muscle: the driver, D’Arcy, a drunk (he is invariably referred to as “the alcoholic”); and Meyer, a waiter who has a crazy wife, seems to have gotten involved with the group for no particular reason, and doesn’t do much (“Meyer, who hardly ever said anything”). There is also an unofficial sixth member, Véronique Cash, the group member who provides the farm they use as a hideout, who proves to be as ferocious a fighter as Diaz and much more so than Épaulard. As she tells the latter: “My cool and chic exterior hides the wild flames of a burning hatred for a techno-bureaucratic capitalism whose cunt looks like a funeral urn and whose mug looks like a prick.”
Manchette is as ever rich in details; as always, he flaunts his encyclopedic knowledge of guns and cars. And he is sharp in his satire of both the faction-intensive Parisian left of the time and the labyrinthine corridors of the government and the police. Few thrillers have been stuffed with quite as many acronyms as this one. It is telling that a major plot turn occurs as a result of an obscure squabble between two law-enforcement agencies. For that matter, every action and statement by the gang is followed by retorts and denunciations by the variegated leftist groupuscules, which are duly noted by Le Monde in a sidebar. An entity calling itself the New Red Army dismisses them as “petty-bourgeois nihilists” and proclaims:
“Down with All Little Neumanns!”
“Neumann? You mean like Alfred E. Neuman?” asked Épaulard in alarm.
“Heinz Neumann,” Cash clarified, placing the tray and radio on the table. “A guy who had something to do with the Canton Commune in December 1927.”
From its tower Le Monde parses their manifesto: “The style is disgusting . . . and the childishness of certain statements of an archaic and unalloyed anarchism might raise a smile in other circumstances.” TREMBLE RICH PEOPLE YOUR PARIS IS SURROUNDED WE ARE GOING TO BURN IT DOWN says a wall, echoing the telegrams sent from the occupied Sorbonne to the Communist Parties of China and the USSR during May ’68: SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAUCRATS STOP THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS COUNCILS WILL SOON WIPE YOU OUT STOP. . . . Meanwhile a member of the ambassador’s protective detail is reading Ramparts and the other The Greening of America by Charles Reich.
The book is briskly paced, full of clipped dialogue and nonstop action, but it also presents a political argument. Treuffais, who seems to be something of an authorial proxy, decides not to go along with the plot, for doctrinal reasons: “Terrorism is only justified when revolutionaries have no other means of expressing themselves and when the masses support them.” By the end, Diaz, who had kicked Treuffais out of his apartment when the teacher begged off, has come to agree with him. “Leftist terrorism and State terrorism, even if their motivations cannot be compared, are the two jaws of . . . the same mug’s game,” he admits. “The desperado is a commodity.” Manchette has the press dub the gang’s hideout “the tragic farmhouse”—the epithet used by the newspapers in 1912 to refer to the death scene of Jules Bonnot, the driver and press-appointed leader of the Bonnot Gang, an earlier model of that commodity. Sixteen years after its French publication, in his preface to the book’s first Spanish edition, Manchette acknowledged that its political argument was “insufficient and obsolete,” because it “isolated” the gang from the broader oppositional social movement, and furthermore failed to account for the “direct manipulation” to which the State would have subjected such a group.
But whatever its theoretical shortcomings, Nada is a remarkable book. At the time of its publication, there was nothing like it outside of Manchette’s work; novels and politics kept separate bedrooms. As Didier Daeninckx, who began writing his political thrillers in the 1980s, put it in an interview: “Manchette seized a scorned genre that in the 1960s was right-wing, even extreme right-wing, and in one stroke shattered the conventions. With that he effected a split in the genre.” Manchette essentially launched an industry of left-wing thrillers, ranging from a historically minded stylist such as Daeninckx to the brew of crime, porn, and agitprop served up by Éditions de la Brigandine in their quickies, which are bylined with various noms de guerre and intended to lure the innocent consumer of pulp. Manchette himself would go on to produce six more novels in the course of the 1970s, each seemingly more complex and considered than the one before. But Nada was his first real hit, as in a hit song, striking an unexpected chord that resonated with the French reading public, and like a true hit it has carried on, bringing the baggage of its time into our own very different set of circumstances without losing any of its power.
—LUC SANTE
Translator’s Acknowledgments
I MUST once again thank Doug Headline for answering my questions, not to mention his ongoing (and patient) support for our translation of his father’s cycle of noir novels from the 1970s. Once again too, let me say how grateful I am to Alyson Waters, my partner in this endeavor, to all at New York Review Books, and to Gregory Nipper for his copyediting. Jim Brook cast a critical eye on the translation and made many suggestions—thank you, Jim. As usual, words cannot adequately express my debt to Mia Nadezhda Rublowska, without whom—well, without whom.
—D. N.-S.
The heart that beats for the welfare of mankind passes therefore into the rage of frantic self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and to do so by casting out of its life the perversion that it really is.
—HEGEL
That is how things are, and inasmuch as one sometimes has to shoot, one may as well do so cleanly, without the drawbacks of a high caliber and a wide-spreading pattern. Cleanly? Well, an impeccable kill must be the chief concern of the good hunter. That is our essential point. In the chapter on shooting we shall see what imperatives, in our view, arise from this principle. For the moment, suffice it to say that a bore is preferable which is just slightly more than adequate.
—LE CHASSEUR FRANÇAIS
NADA
1
DEAREST Mom,
This week I am not waiting till Saturday to write to you because do I have things to tell you, my gosh yes!!! The fact is, those Anarchists who kidnapped the U.S. Ambassador, well, it was us who got them, our squad I mean. I must say right away that I myself did not kill a single one. I want to be clear on that because I know it would disterb dissturb be very upsetting for you, my darling Mom. All the same, let me say again that this is something that has to be faced head on, just in case one day we have to use force in defense of the State. Turning the other cheek is all very well, but what do you do, I ask you, when you are dealing with people who want to destroy everything? Father Castagnac pretty much agrees with me (in fact we studied the question the other Sunday when I went over after mass). His opinion is that if policemen are not ready for anything, like I am, there would be no reason for certain individuals not to do anything they want and that is my own point of view too. Seriously, my sweet Mom, would you want a country with no police? Would you want the Barquignats’ boy (just taking him as an example) to lay his foul hands on your daughter, who is also my sister? Would you want our property, which we worked so hard for, overrun by levelers and collectivists in an orgy of destruction? I am not saying that the majority of people in our town are not decent folk, but still,
even in this peaceful rural community, if it were not known that there is a police force, and one ready to shoot if need be, I can think of a few who would not hesitate, not to mention the Gypsies.
Anyway, yesterday, all I did was do my job. I was with François, who I have told you about, and we fired quite a lot, but to no effect. It was other police officers on the other side of the building who eventually got inside the place and managed to kill the individuals. I will not dwell on a bloody slaughter fit to turn your stomach. François is sorry he did not get hold of one of the anarchists himself and give them a taste of what they deserved. Personally I would not go that far, but I respect his point of view.
This has been a long letter and I do not quite know what else to tell you. So I will close for today. Kiss my father for me, Nadège too. I hold you tight, next to my heart.
Your loving son,
Georges Poustacrouille
P.S. Could you, if it is not too much trouble, send me the camembert-box drum because I will need it as we are having a surprise party for Sergeant Sanchez’s promotion. Thank you in advance.
2
ÉPAULARD parked his Cadillac half on the sidewalk and then walked up the street as far as the urinal on the corner by the mosque and the Jardin des Plantes and relieved himself. Retracing his steps, he lit a filtered Française as he walked. He was a tall thin man with the mug of an army doctor, an iron-gray crew cut, and a beige raincoat with epaulets. He went into a wine store that was also a bar and ordered a Sancerre, which he savored. Or at least as best he could, considering that smoking sixty cigarettes a day does not leave you much of a palate.