Beautiful Image has been published by Pushkin Press in collaboration with the French Embassy in London who promote translations into English of notable French books (see French Book News). Marcel Aymé is little known in Britain despite his ironic and insightful body of work emerging from the 1930s and 40s and including the period of German occupation.
Aymé’s books often had unusual themes – In The Walker Through Walls, the main character suddenly finds he has a unique gift of (need I say?). Beautiful Image similarly begins with Raoul Cérusier presenting two passport photographs of himself to a government office, only to find that the clerk refuses to accept them because they bear no resemblance to their bearer. The supervisor and other colleagues are called to assist and confirm to the astonished Cérusier that the photograph it completely different to his appearance. Cérusier manages to look at his reflection in a window and finds that indeed, his face is now that of a different person.
Cérusier leaves the government office and begins to take in the implications of his transformation. One of the first things he discovers is that his new face is greatly attractive to women, and whereas before, he was little noticed by the opposite sex, he now notices two women on a bus looking at him, “the one dreamily, the other with a distinctly greedy eye”. Needless to say, nobody from his past life now recognises him. He sees a friend in the street and goes up to him, only to find that he seems to want to hand him over to the police as a mad-man.
Cérusier manages to go into his office but has to hide his face, and when his secretary comes in, he pretends to be busy sorting out a deep and dark cupboard until she eventually leaves. He realises that he will not be able to go home to his wife and children and instead telephones his wife to tell her that he has been called away to Bucharest on urgent business.
Cérusier is able to confide in his wife’s eccentric uncle who is the only person who believes what has happened. Aymé then begins an exploration of the effect of the transformation, with Cérusier and his uncle hatching a plot whereby Cérusier will seduce his own wife and start a new life with her under his new identity.
Passe-Muraille "The Walker Through Walls", place Marcel Aimé, Paris
However, despite his enforced dislocation from his life, Cérusier is also an opportunist with not a little amount of cunning and he turns his new appearance to his advantage in various ways showing that nothing that happens to us is entirely without its good points. On the other hand, Cérusier’s seduction of his wife is comic but also disturbing in that he knows exactly the way to his wife’s heart, but also has to watch her unfaithfulness to “him”.
Although this novel is in some senses comic, it is also philosophical, and it could justifiably be describes as “Kafkaesque”, in that the main character is both part of normal life, yet also alienated, as though being permanently on the other side of a pane of glass and not quite able to return to normality.
I would not want to spoil the book for other readers by describing the outcome of this transformation, but Aymé uses his story to consider many aspects of the relationship between identity and life. If my face changes, am I the same person? How does peoples’ reaction to our physical appearance affect their response to us? What effect does beauty have on others’ perception of us? I found this an engaging and thought-provoking read which deserves a wider audience which I hope is attracted by this new Pushkin edition.
