Jacques Chessex, Sosie d’un saint

This unsettling collection of short stories, published in 2000, explores dark desires in the tranquil setting of the Swiss mountains. Although the stories are all separate, the reader frequently has the impression that the narrator – most often an isolated man obsessed by sex and/or death, who roams the landscape in search of some sort of epiphany – is the same across several stories, transposed into a slightly different setting or profession.

The word that best encapsulates these stories is perhaps “rôder”, to roam, to wander, to hang around. The narrators prowl the streets or the lakeside paths and watch the other characters, who are generally strangers to them. One fantasises about killing his wife. Another finds himself in a canine cemetery in the middle of the night. Still another follows a disturbed woman into an abandoned casino.

Many of the stories feature some kind of spiritual revelation, or a character who addresses God, as in ‘Le rabais’, in which a former priest has given up religion because he fears he is not good enough for God. The title story, which is among the strongest in the collection, is narrated by a writer who discovers he has a lookalike who is getting him into trouble by accosting women on the metro and leaving restaurants without paying. Rather than being angry or afraid, the writer undergoes a quasi-mystical experience and believes his double is giving him a message about the true essence of being.

Sexuality, religion and death are everywhere in these stories, in many forms, often uncomfortably intertwined. In ‘L’application’, a young clergyman in a guesthouse is fascinated by a mysterious woman. He finds his way to her room, where she insists on showing him the hairshirt she has been wearing as penance since her mother’s death. In the bizarre ‘L’agneau’, the narrator performs oral sex on a series of women in the mountains, before pushing them down a steep drop to their deaths. The spare, tightly controlled prose adds to the unnerving nature of these stories. What sat uneasily with me, though, wasn’t the peculiar or perverted forms of sexuality encountered in the stories, but the fact that whenever the narrator of a story determines to have sex with a female character, he succeeds. These narrators seem mostly to be voyeuristic, isolated middle-aged men. Why the procession of young women that passes facelessly through the collection should uniformly desire them is a bit of a mystery.

My overall feeling on reading Sosie d’un saint, which as far as I know has not been translated into English (several of Chessex’s novels have been, including The Vampire of Ropraz and  A Jew Must Die), was that I was in the presence of technical skill, but that it had not really resulted in anything I wanted to read. Some of the stories were enjoyable, but several were so shrouded in mystery that I felt unable to engage with them. The shadowy nature of the settings (abandoned buildings, institutions about to close down) and of most of the characters works well up to a point, but when the two are combined, it too often results in a story where the reader simply has nothing to latch on to. Chessex is clearly a skilled writer, but I am inclined to conclude that he is not for me.