Book Review | Brodeck’s Report

Apart from the prestigious Prix Goncourt - France's top literary prize - the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens was created in 1987 with the purpose of encouraging young people to read. Every year, the Academie Goncourt selects twelve literary works which are read and discussed by about 2,000 lycee students, who then vote on a winner. What an excellent way to get young people to read more books of substance every year!

Philippe Claudel won the prize for his novel Brodeck's Report - published in 2007. The author has also written and directed the award- winning film, I've Loved You So Long, which has an impeccable performance by Kirstin Scott-Thomas.

Brodeck's Report, beautifully translated to English by John Cullen, is dedicated to 'all those who think they are nothing'. Claudel also acknowledges his debt to Victor Hugo, quoting from The Rhine: 'I am nothing, I know it, but my nothing comprises a little bit of everything.'

The author starts the novel with the sentence: 'My name is Brodeck and I had nothing to do with it', and ends it with the same words. In between these two sentences he writes on guilt, responsibility, injustice, sorrow, cruelty, shame, silence.

This is a modern parable about the war and its consequence, about forgetting and remembering, and about man's irrational fear of the Outsider. Set in an unnamed small mountain village somewhere near the Franco-German border, near the end of WWII, the protagonist is forced by the villagers to write a report of the events that led to a terrible 'incident', hoping that this will wash away their guilt.

The report is about the violent death of a mysterious, flamboyant man, who comes to the village and is looked on with suspicion and later with hatred by the villagers. Nobody knows his name or where he has come from. He is immediately seen as the 'Anderer' - the Other, the Outsider, the Foreigner who will upset their small community. Brodeck is chosen to write the report since he is better educated and accustomed with writing reports for the administration. He is also an outsider. He was never accepted by the community, neither the first time - when he arrived as an orphan - nor the second time, when he retuned from the concentration camp.

Brodeck was a victim of the villagers' collaboration with the enemy and was sacrificed when they were told to 'cleanse' the village, ending in a camp where he underwent innumerable deprivations and humiliations. 'It was the fear felt by others, much more than hatred or some other emotion that made a victim of me. It was because fear had seized them by the throat that I was handed over to the torturers and executioners, and it was also fear that had turned these same torturers, who had once been men like me, into monsters, fear that had caused the seeds of evil, which we all carry within us, to germinate.'

The nationality of the enemy is never mentioned by name; neither is that of Brodeck's but it is easy to infer what the author is implying. While there are German-sounding words in the book, the author refuses to put the story in a direct German context. In this way, what starts as a fictional story becomes a universal allegory for the equally horrible events still happening now all over the world. What is recounted in this story is shockingly up-to-date. There are reminiscences in the book of J. M. Coetzee's excellent novel Waiting for the Barbarians, and of Kafka in the fable-like, mysterious elements which are never explained.

When the report is finished and handed over to the mayor, the latter burns it saying 'It is time to forget. People need to forget.' But Claudel questions this and says that humanity's salvation lies in remembering rather than forgetting. Claudel's view of mankind is rather bleak and in the novel the only glimmer of hope lies in Brodeck's love for his wife and child. At the end Brodeck accepts that 'maybe there can only be departures, eternally, for those like us'.

This is a novel for our times for it raises a highly pertinent question: will there always be migrations and outsiders? The protagonist accepts defeat, but must it be so? Brodeck's Report is a powerful book, beautifully written and translated, and well worth reading.