Friends and Lovers (Les Amies, 2023) is the second book by the French author Nolwenn Le Blevennec, following As the Eagle Flies (2023; La Trajectoire de l’aigle, 2021), both nimbly translated into English by Madeleine Rogers. While the first book concerned the porousness of romantic relationships in the subtle key of an Éric Rohmer film, slightly loping yet elegant in its lack of resolution, this new one explores the boundaries of friendship and what it can withstand.
Recurring themes in both novels include relationships with large age gaps, affairs, professional roles in the media (or related cultural industries) and various references to classical music, opera and Literature with a capital L: “Rim sang a tune from Rigoletto”; “I also tried to remember a debate between Flaubert and Nietzsche, summarized somewhere by Houellebecq, on the psychomotricity of writing”.
Friends and Lovers features three friends: Armelle, Rim and Anna. Rim and Armelle have known each other since childhood and Armelle met Anna through work. They are all mothers navigating the fine balance between careers and motherhood, their partnerships and fears about the climate. They are the type of friends who have a shared Google document dedicated to the psychoanalysis of their dreams; they quote Racine, read Maggie Nelson, watch films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and prefer Daniel Barenboim’s interpretations of Chopin to those of Maria João Pires.
The story is told from the perspective of Armelle, who spends a day in bed (Rim’s birthday, which Armelle is mournfully not celebrating), piecing together where it all went wrong. For these friends have recently been on a pair of trips, each one disastrous in its own way. The first one, to Djerba in Tunisia, led to sexual affairs with significant domestic consequences; the second, to Brittany, ended the group’s friendship altogether. It was there that Anna and Rim discovered the screenplay Armelle had been writing, featuring characters too familiar for comfort. This led to a near-catastrophic fight, with Armelle arguing: “Autofiction is experience seen through a kaleidoscope so everything gets distorted. It’s nothing to do with reality. It’s a story with little bits of my life inside, but it’s a story first and foremost”. But later on she wonders: “How much of a person can you capture without them getting upset? Is it better to commit a thousand tiny thefts or to seize hold of a chunk of personality and drown it in a pool of untrue details? Can you write without hurting anyone?”
Friends and Lovers is slightly less subtle than As the Eagle Flies, and it contains the odd plot point that seems to chafe against credibility. Armelle was subject to a “motiveless kidnapping” in her youth, but managed to get away; in 2002, her apartment block went up in flames, and when she learnt from the news that a woman had jumped out of the window, she had “no further doubt in my mind that it was [my mother]” (an accurate premonition). In a book that enquires into the nature of “autofiction” – where reality begins and ends – the accumulation of not necessarily implausible but certainly curious detail does seem somewhat compromising.
Nolwenn Le Blevennec’s novel is nonetheless enjoyable, erudite and witty. The writing is precise and the imagery artful: “Every Thursday evening, he went to eat oysters at La Coupole … [he] would come home with eyes as blurred and watery as the molluscs he was digesting”. It is certainly a book to take on holiday, though readers are advised to leave their screenplays about their travel companions at home.
Oonagh Devitt Tremblay is a writer based in London and works for the TLS
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