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Cronus' Children

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Yves Navarre is one of my favorite writers; and CHRONUS'S CHILDREN, winner of the 1981 Prix Goncourt, remains one of my favorite novels although I liked it better in 1986 when it was translated into English than when I reread it. I believe that is because I already knew the horrific event in this French family's lives that propelled the action. It is one of those novels like Patrick White's THE TWYBURN AFFAIR and Kazuo Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO where you are completely taken with what the writer has done with the plot upon your first reading and can never be surprised again. That is also why one should never read a review that is merely a plot summary of this book that cries out to be read.

This novel takes place in about a twenty-four-hour-time span that begins on July 9th in Paris probably in 1980, the year that the novel was published in France with the title of THE ZOOLOGICAL GARDEN. Henri Prouillan is the despotic seventy-four-year-old head of this wildly haunted and guilt-ridden family consisting of a daughter Claire, two heterosexual sons Luc and Sebastien and of course Bertrand the youngest child whose 40th birthday is July 9th. Henri's wife and the mother of his children Cecile has died of cancer. The family maid of many years Bernadette, who is 74 as well, lives in the plush Paris apartment with Henri. There is also Suzanne, his younger sister by seven years, who is the only family member who still talks to this awful father and is the sisterly thorn in his side, as well as ex-daughters-in-law and grandchildren who make up this larger-than-life family.

The first chapter is quite remarkable for setting the tone for what we will find out about Henri. I had forgotten how the novel ends and hoped against hope that he would step in front of one of the trains of the Paris Metro. If such a death was good enough for Anna Karenina, surely this ogre deserves it too. Unfortunately Navarre did not agree with my ending. Henri takes his aged poodle Pantalon for what the reader thinks is a routine visit to the vet as Navarre tells us that Henri takes the animal routinely for treatment. We only find out that the poodle has been euthanized when the vetinarian tells Henri how smoothly the procedure went. This awful man would not even be in the same room with the dog as he dies. And Bernadette, who is the person who most often walked the dog, does not know what Henri has done to the animal until Henri returns to his apartment carrying the leash. His callous treatment of a beloved dog is a harbinger of what is to come.

Navarre has tremendous insights about families-- the good, the bad, the ugly-- and the human animal in general. There is a beautifully written passage-- and I hope well translated-- when Claire, whose husband Gerard was killed in an automobile accident-- nobody lives happily ever after in this novel-- muses that she has never thought of replacing him "because he is here all the time, multiplied in the little blond heads, the mouths to feed, their nakedness observed by the mother at shower time." (I am almost certain that if I should read that passage to a friend of mine who lost her husband far too soon, she would respond: "I know.") There is also Bertrand, who is never far from the rest of the characters' minds, who reminds his brother Sebastian that "'this is the story of a murderous father who could find no better way of killing his children than letting them live.'" And Claire's quotation: "It is enough to understand that isolation is not the risk of solitude, but solitude the crowing of all isolation." And her description of her sisters-in-law: My two sisters-in-law did not like each other very much. I have never seen two women related by marriage embrace one another from so far and look at each other so little." The writer's language can be beautiful as well: "Sebastien would feel the night sparkling from every part, on each side and in the depths of the fjord, the snow night suspended on fir summits, the night of white ink."

Navarre's dense CHRONUS'S CHILDREN shows in all its horrific intensity what parents sometimes do to their children to further their own selfish ambitions and the difficulty that children have in trying to extricate themselves from what has happened to them. Then there is the collective guilt associated with family tragedies. Even though parts of this novel are almost too painful to read-- page 70 comes to mind when Bertrand is described as "like a child on an empty merry-ground"-- when you are finished you are well aware that you have read a great novel.