The Man in a Hurry

July 27, 2015
The reputation of Morand—a French modernist on the scale of Proust and Celine—has suffered as the result of the author’s collaboration with the Nazi Party in Vichy France, yet Pushkin Press’s gorgeous new edition of Morand’s masterpiece, written in 1941, is a shockingly clever farce. Pierre Niox is an antiques dealer who suffers from a curious affliction: he insists on doing everything quickly, which puts him at odds with other human beings. Haste isn’t just Niox’s cardinal virtue, it is his lifestyle; he lives “quickly and badly,” turns up at the death beds of the wealthy just in time to swindle them, and treats patience as a foreign concept. With no time for friends, Niox seems destined for the exclusive company of the strange artifacts with which he surrounds himself. Then he falls in love—suddenly, of course—with Hewige de Boisrosé and is forced to decide if any woman is worth waiting for. As marriage, pregnancy, and family drama ensue, Niox realizes he may be too quick for the modern world. And yet he is equally sure that, if he slows down, even for a moment, he will die or, worse, miss a new opportunity. This is a strange book, written in prose as speedy as its impossible hero, and Morand deserves to be widely revisited both for the ageless appeal of his style and the specific (sometimes worrying) portrait of human nature at war with 1940s modernity.

July 1, 2015
Sometime after World War I in France, a compulsively restless antiquarian plies his trade, marries, and contemplates fatherhood in this modern fable. In a long and sometimes-controversial life, the French author Morand (Venices, 1971, etc.) married a Romanian princess, befriended Proust, was translated by Pound, wrote many fiction and nonfiction books, and collaborated with the Vichy regime. A hint of his apparent anti-Semitism creeps briefly into this novel, which he wrote in 1940-41 in the early months of the Petain government. Its first scene says much about the rest, as 35-year-old Pierre Niox rushes into a tavern and is so intensely impatient for service that he charges to the bar and grabs a glass and bottle himself. Observing him by chance is Dr. Zachary Regencrantz, a German psychologist with whom he discusses his compulsive haste. Thereafter, commonplace actions and leisurely analyses by Pierre and Morand will accompany the overstated theme of haste through a chronological assemblage of events in a year or so of Pierre's life. He buys an old chapel in the south of France and while renovating it, discovers a Roman cloister, which he eventually sells, as well as a slow-moving mother and three daughters, one of whom he marries. Along the way, his hurrying costs him a butler and close friend, but he scarcely has time for regrets about either. The translation's prose is refined and worldly, the atmosphere European, the overall effect that of a jeu d'esprit. Where the book rises above that is in the depiction of the minimatriarchy Pierre marries into. The four women's curious behavior recalls moments in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels and Eugenides' Virgin Suicides. A compulsive traveler himself, Morand may have found this vicarious exercise in unfettered movement an amusing way to pass the time amid the constraints of war and occupation, but it's not an easily shared pleasure.

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