Wed Jul 9, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler

Review: 'Ordinary Victories: What is Precious' by Manu Larcenet

Semi-autobio stories about a French photographer

Ordinary Victories: What is Precious
By Manu Larcenet
NBM/ComicsLit, August 2008, $15.95

Ordinary Victories, in France, is a series of four graphic novels about a photographer named Marco Louis. They’ve been very successful, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of each book. But those books are each only about sixty pages long, so they’ve been combined for the American market. This volume contains the second half of the series: volume 3, “What Is Precious,” and volume 4, “Hammering Nails.”

I can’t be the only one to wonder how much “Marco Louis” – a guy in a creative profession in France – resembles his creator with the same initials, but the book itself doesn’t provide much in the way of clues. Let’s just throw this one onto the groaning pile marked “semi-autobiographical” and move on from there, shall we?

“What is Precious” opens with Marco and his partner Emily – it’s not clear if she’s a girlfriend or a wife, but she’s around for the length of the book – visiting Marco’s mother in Brittany in the aftermath of his father’s suicide. Marco needs to clean out his father’s things, which inevitably makes him think about his difficult relationship with his father.

The Ordinary Victories books are really all about Marco’s relationships – with his mother, with the memory of his father, with Emily and her desire for children, with his new psychiatrist, and with an older man named Pablo. (Pablo’s last name isn’t given anywhere I could find in this book – in fact, once I thought he was dead, only to see him turn up a few pages later.)

Many of those relationships center around Marco’s youth in Marseilles and his father’s work on the docks there. Pablo is still a dockworker, though about to retire. The book of photographs that Marco is about to publish at the time of “What is Precious” is made up of shots of the docks and the workers. And the port is about to be closed, throwing Pablo and the rest out of work.

So there are long conversations between Marco and his mother, Marco and Pablo, Marco and Emily, and Marco and his editor Guy – but all those conversations are somewhat elliptical and philosophical, as if the ostensible subject is not the true subject.

Ordinary Victories was translated by Joe Johnson, who left it in not-quite-colloquial English, inadvertently or deliberately. (“The first cigarettes, the first beers often were here. But not the first girls! The girls never wanted to go anywhere with us, in any case!” says Marco on page 9.) It’s particularly noticeable in the scenes with a lot of back-and-forth dialogue, and it makes the book more “French,” more philosophical, and slows the reader down to work out the nonstandard syntax. I found it less than smooth to read, and I’m still not sure if that was on purpose.

The second half of this book, “Hammering Nails,” is clearly set a couple of years later – there’s one major change in Marco’s life that couldn’t have happened immediately – but, otherwise, everything seems to be the same. His mother is still vaguely unhappy as a widow; Pablo is still fighting vainly to keep the docks open. Marco’s book seems to have just come out, or to still be just about to come out. (And I know publishing delays happen, but that’s a bit much!)

The story is still about Marco: his long conversations with mostly the same people, his thoughts and feelings about his life. He’s a likeable main character despite all of his anger and grumpiness, but the story circles around and around things, like a mosquito, without ever landing. 

I suspect the Ordinary Victories stories are so popular in France because they’re talking about common cultural referents – there’s talk of right-wing politicians, and the 2007 elections – in ways that the original French audience immediately understands and identifies with.  But that context isn’t there for an American reader, who is left with just the story as it is on the page – one man struggling to be who he should be and to keep all off his relationships going smoothly.

I found something missing in Ordinary Victories: What is Precious, though it could as easily have been a lack of context from not reading the first half of the story. Still, I wouldn’t suggest starting here. If you’re interested in a semi-autobiographical story by French cartoonists, I’d recommend Dupuy and Berberian’s Get a Life. (Or you could try starting with the first volume of this series; Time magazine and Booklist both thought it was quite impressive.)

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