Toutes les histoires d'amour ont été racontées, sauf une par Tonino Benacquista (review)

Tonino Benacquista began his career in 1989 writing romans policiers. In Toutes les histoires he renews with the polar in a highly sophisticated, amusing and idiosyncratic way. An unnamed narrator tells the story of Léo, a solitary sort whose passion is photography. With the help of the rather mysterious narrator, Léo's avocation becomes his profession. His work provides him with a comfortable living and critical respect. At the beginning of the novel Léo lives in a chambre de bonne, which begins to be referred to as une chambre obscure, an increasingly bizarre place where people gather with Leo's implicit encouragement to tell the story of their mostly unhappy lives. Stranger still, their travails appear to be transformed by someone into television feuilletons. There is, among others, the story of Richard de Biase, a rich investor during the week who morphs himself into a clochard on the weekend, and that of Harold Cordell, a testy, egocentric novelist who was challenged by his dying former girlfriend to write the history of their ill-fated love. Léo also has his histoire d'amour with Gaëlle, which careens from the rhapsodic to the catastrophic in a rather short time. A botched dental procedure pushes them apart (Gaëlle's father was the dentist). Léo then lapses into a depression where once again the narrator intervenes, but with only partial success. Eventually, Léo overcomes his despair and at the end of the novel appears prepared to return to photography. What then is the one love yet to be recounted? First option: For those who believe that each great love is unique, then it could be Harold's, or Léo's, or just about anyone's. Second option: Could the chambre obscure, a laboratoire de l'imaginaire (67) be a camera obscura which provides an image of reality, but a reality transformed by appearing upside down? Could this chambre, where Léo initially claims to be a prisoner (169), but ultimately recognizes as part of his mind (179), represent the creative process that reflects and transforms reality at the same time? If Toutes les histoires is replete with many unhappy love stories, it is also filled with reflections on the satisfactions and frustrations of artistic creation. In fact, toward the end of the novel there is a spirited defense of the need for art and the benefits it provides to humanity (209–11). Toutes les histoires appears to invite a choice whether the sauf une pertains to individual lovers or to literary creation. Except there is a third option, namely that the title refers to both. Toutes les histoires may just be a clever commentary on the similarities between a love affair and writing a novel since in the eyes of the lovers and the mind of the artist, what they are doing has never happened precisely this way before.