The Beast of Paris and Other Stories by Marie-Louise Scherer (Sexto Piso, 2014) brings together four stories originally published in German between 1983 and 1991. The first story, which gives the book its title, immediately captures the reader’s attention because it combines several elements that fascinate today’s lovers of true crime in film and television: it tells the tragic story of the murders committed in the 1980s by Thierry Paulin and Jean-Thierry Mathurin, two immigrants to France from Martinique and French Guiana, respectively.
It is a story that confirms the hackneyed idea that violence begets violence, even if its manifestations are less spectacular than those recounted here. Before becoming murderers, the killers were children born into poverty in overseas France, raised by mothers, fathers, stepfathers, stepmothers, and grandmothers who abandoned them before they really had them, without giving them a sense of belonging.
Very early in their lives, they faced the burden of a migratory wound and homosexuality that, at the time, pushed them to the most extreme margins of French society.
About Paulin, Scherer says the following:
Paulin’s mother was sixteen when he was born out of wedlock. He grew up in the care of his grandmother, his father’s mother, who had left Martinique and was living in Toulouse. When his mother took him in at the age of six, she was expecting another child. After having another son, she married, and another son was born. With three young half-brothers and a mother abused by a husband who found it difficult to cope with marriage, Paulin was surplus to requirements. Later, in Paris, he would recount how his mother rented him out as a delivery boy and domestic help to other people.
The story is constructed from fragments of the victims’ last moments—slow, frail old women whose footsteps are lost among the shops as they search for their daily groceries—some details about the lives of the murderers, and a perhaps too brief conclusion that wraps up the case.
The other three stories—one dedicated to surrealism, especially Philippe Soupault, another about Proust, which runs parallel to the preparation of a film adaptation of Swann’s life, and the fourth about a fashion show that is many shows at once—are extraordinary because they eschew closed sentences in favor of moments described with such beauty that they provoke both joy and a certain envy.
Days after finishing the book, images and phrases still linger with me: a Joyce who privileges music in his prose—“(…) he placed great emphasis on the flow of the sentence, as he cared more about sound and rhythm than meaning”; a Proust tired from asthma and driven by the search for stories that escaped his breath; gossipy, money-hungry surrealists; and designers who dream up impossible shapes to dress long legs in tubes.
The weak side, if there is one, is perhaps the excess of these lyrical moments, which follow one another without offering the reader a respite, without an idea to give them substance. However, this continuous flow is more akin to the way we experience reality, moving away from the illusion constructed by other types of literature with a closure.
As a reading experience, I found myself caught between the pleasure of reading and the desire to finish the text, not because I was eager to know how the story continued, but because of the exhaustion caused by the suspended ideas, the meticulously described moments that are linked together in a succession of almost endless paragraphs. Scherer has been a discovery that I celebrate: prose that is both clean and baroque—a difficult balance to achieve—and a way of storytelling that challenges the reader, who is compelled to create within themselves a unity of meaning from ideas that seem open-ended but constitute a way of recounting moments in history with a style that is not necessarily complacent and yet is nonetheless pleasing.
