Making Love by Jean-Philippe Toussaint #ABookADayInMay No.15

I bought Making Love (2002) by the Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint back in 2014, in an edition translated by Linda Coverdale – unusually, and pleasingly, her name even makes the cover. It’s a slim novella at only 114 pages, and I found it beguilingly beautiful… with some reservations. I’ve just learned, from the author’s Wikipedia page, that it’s the first in the ‘cycle of Marie’, of which there are four books so far.

Marie is one of the two main characters in Making Love, the other being our narrator – another unnamed narrator, which has cropped up a few times in May. It is set over the course of a few days in Japan, in Tokyo and Kyoto, and we are told from the outset that this trip is the end of their relationship. It hasn’t been planned as a final trip to say farewell to their love – and it is something the narrator slowly realises, with the sense of something inevitable.

That point comes at the end of this paragraph, though the reason I wanted to quote it is as example of Toussaint’s beautiful, beautiful writing. So much of Making Love is suffused with this sort of gorgeous, strangely elegiac writing. Whether the weather, the glowing lights of Tokyo, or simply the sight of a hotel room, Toussaint (and Coverdale) write prose like poetry – but very readable poetry, that doesn’t obstruct the sense:

From where we sat in the restaurant, the wooden window frame presented only a fragmented and incoherent street scene, giving onto a shadowy building with mysterious electric wires and a column of light made up of seven or eight superimposed illuminated signs rising vertically along the façade to announce the presence of bars on every floor. I watched the snow falling silently in the street, light and impalpable, clinging to neon signs, the contours of paper lanterns, car roofs, and the glass eyelets anchoring the wires of telephone poles. When the flakes crossed the bright zone of a street lamp, they whirled an instant in the light like a cloud of powdered sugar puffed aloft by an invisible divine breath, and that snow seemed to me an image of the passage of time, and then, in the immense helplessness I felt at being unable to keep time from passing, I had the presentiment that the end of the night would mean the end of our love.

Those reservations I mentioned earlier? I think the only thing holding me back from relishing every page of Making Love is clued in the title – there is a seamy side to the novella. Along the way, even as they approach the end of the relationship, the couple make love on several occasions – and I don’t object to that being in the novella. But the words and sentences used to describe those moments lose all gentleness. They tone becomes quite sordid and, dare I say, anatomical. It is at odds with the feel of the rest of the prose, in a way that doesn’t feel effective so much as inelegant.

I was more intrigued by the suspenseful subplot of Making Love – the little vial of acid that the narrator has packed with him on this trip, keeping it hidden in his washbag. He returns to it often throughout, whether in action or thought, and the reader can’t help thinking of it as a Chekhov’s gun – why has he brought it, and what will happen with it, if anything? Interestingly, this additional element to the story doesn’t feel at all jarring, even though it could have done. This part Toussaint managed to incorporate elegantly.

So, I was impressed enough by the writing that I will probably seek out more by Toussaint – and if the Marie cycle is chronological, it will be interesting to see what happens after the end of this relationship.