Trouville Casino by Christine Montalbetti (review)

Montalbetti composed her most recent novel over a period of several years, sometimes working on it, sometimes shelving it in order to attend to other projects. Like the novel that precedes it, La vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses (2016), it is a real event that inspires the book. But this event is far thinner and more anecdotal than the space mission she describes in that previous novel, for here it is a question of a casino hold-up, and the only thing saving that event from banality is the fact that the author of the robbery was a 75-year-old man. The manner in which Montalbetti appropriates that event is powerfully intriguing. Indeed, for a certain kind of reader, that aspect of her book will prove as interesting as the story of the hold-up. For one way to read the text is as a sustained meditation on how we come to terms with the real, and more particularly how a novelist comes to terms with the real. To Montalbetti's way of thinking, it is important that both novelist and reader take their time as they go about their respective activity. She insists on the right to be dilatory, to digress, arguing that the novel does not engage the real immediately and directly; instead, it "dreams" the real, inviting us to dream along with it. "Pourquoi réclamer un roman balisé," she asks, "taillé au cordeau, policé, encadré par des barrières de sécurité, quand c'est avant tout de rêverie qu'il s'agit?" (180). Montalbetti puts the process of dreaming on display here for anyone who cares to witness it, with a great deal of candor—and with very considerable cunning as well. A fascinating tension between truth and fiction drives this book, which argues that those categories are less inconsonant than we might have deemed them. Because much of what Montalbetti wishes to tell must be imagined: the robber's state of mind, his antecedents, the quality of daily life in the town where he lived without remarkable incident, the decisions that he took one after the other whose causal logic appears only in retrospect, and so forth. In short, everything that serves to transform an anecdote into a story. It is that very metamorphosis which is principally at issue here, as well as the terms of a writer's engagement therein. And those of a reader too, come to think of it, for we may find ourselves just as reluctant to come to the end of this story as is the writer herself, by her own admission, "à cause de ces heures passées ensemble, vous, à imaginer cette histoire, et moi, à vous imaginer" (229). Such narrative generosity, which proposes the book as a site of active articulation, is significantly tonic. It challenges us to take a more active role in our reading, and it suggests that we are in good company as we do so.