Novelists seldom use first-person narrators that are unsympathetic and unreliable. In Edie Meidav’s “Crawl Space,” however, the narrator has been a key figure in the Holocaust. Although pitiable, he inspires neither confidence nor empathy.
Who is the elderly man, homeless and penniless but retaining a certain elegance of style, drifting unobtrusively around the small French town of Finier? For decades he’s tried to efface his identity, repeatedly changing his name, his domicile and even — with plastic surgery — his face. He has a pacemaker and secretly consults a pendulum for daily decisions. It’s as though his heart, his will and his person have all been replaced.
He is Emile Poulquet, a former official of Vichy France, who’s guilty of deporting thousands of Jews to death camps. Now a fugitive from justice, he’s returned by instinct to the town of his birth.
Self-pitying and venomous toward those who condemn him, he struggles to justify himself in a document he calls his “last will and testament.” He intends to give it to Arianne Fauret, an erstwhile lover whom he irrationally blames for most of his wrongdoing. When he was 8, Arianne shamed him publicly after a disfiguring “hump” was removed from his face, and he found a strange pleasure in submitting to her persecution. “Later,” he adds, “some would say our France fell in a similar way.”
At the root of his guilt is his relationship with the Jews. He viewed the liberated survivors of concentration camps as “sunken-eyed skeletons stirring about like crushed insects on straw mats in the internment camps.” As a Vichy subprefect, he’d been “kept in the dark” as to his victims’ destiny.
At first a passive participant in injustice, he allowed his friend Izzy and his lover Natalie to be deported to Auschwitz. He insists that Paul Fauret, Arianne’s husband and a resistance fighter, added Natalie’s name to his deportation list, although it’s more likely that Emile — who had hallucinations at the time — typed it himself. After that, he accelerated the pace of deportations in a frenzy, for which he was awarded a plaque and the nickname “Poulquet the Ruthless.”
Upon his return to Finier in 1999, he finds that Paul and Arianne have attained legendary status — Paul as a dead hero, and Arianne as a community leader intent on preserving his memory. Also present is Izzy, blind but now a prosperous American, to attend a survivors’ reunion.
Although the author tries to breathe life into her protagonist, “Crawl Space” is an unpleasant book about an unpleasant man. Its real fascination lies in the miasma of evil that overhangs the prefecture of Finier and clings to one of its worst perpetrators. Based on a thoroughly researched study of the recent trials of Vichy collaborators, especially Maurice Papon, the book should appeal chiefly to the reader interested in French or Holocaust history. It should also be appreciated for its subtle and sophisticated literary style.
Meidav was born in Toronto and grew up in California. She is currently the co-director of the New College’s Writing and Consciousness Program in San Francisco. Her father was Polish, and she lost most of her family to the Holocaust. A Francophile, she was fascinated by the French minority that collaborated with Hitler. She believes in understanding people’s motives. She asks, “How do we navigate in a time of moral flux?”
The book is a well-researched and convincing study of the recently prosecuted Vichy collaborators, especially Maurice Papon. Meidav’s style is subtle and sophisticated, resembling that of Marcel Proust, although her narrator perceives more ugliness than beauty in his surroundings. The story shuttles backward and forward in time, weaving together the threads of its complex plot.
Edie Meidav will do a reading and sign books 6:15 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 18, at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, 601 Van Ness Ave., S.F. Info: (415) 441-6670. Also at 7:30 p.m., Friday, Sept. 9, at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth Street, Berkeley. Info: (510) 845-7852.
“Crawl Space” by Edie Meidav (447 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25).