Mario

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at Ryerson University in
Toronto.

Mario is a translation of La sablière (1979), which won the Prix France-Canada. Ethel and the Terrorist (1964, translated 1965) is the best-known of Claude Jasmin’s ten novels, but Mario should be of no less interest to the literature student, the general reader, and the movie-goer who may already have seen the film version.

Like most of Jasmin’s work, Mario is political — but much less overtly. Clovis is a 15-year-old clinging to his last summer of childhood; Mario is his 10-year-old brother who may always remain a child, for he has a brain disorder. At the cottage, Clovis takes Mario to the sand dunes to lead him in a summer of military campaigns: they are Moslem heroes in a holy war, forever advancing gloriously upon medieval Europe. Clovis is the leader, Mario the follower. Does Clovis do this out of love for his unfortunate brother — or out of a need to prolong his own childhood, to put off for one more summer the world of factories, of ledger books, of reality?

Clovis views his mother as a nag and his father as a “stern, distant man” — both pressuring him to join their drab world of responsibility. Worse, they send Mario to an orphanage, for he has failed his school grade three times and is laughed at by normal kids. But are the parents really such tyrants, or are they just normal adults living the lives they must? We are tempted to side with Clovis, who narrates, just as we side with Franz Kafka, who narrates the famous letter that he never sent to his own father. Whom would we side with, though, if Mario had been narrated by the father of Clovis and Mario, a little merchant who joins his family at the cottage on Mondays and who cries at his own father’s death? Nadine Gordimer has recently published Hermann Kafka’s reply to Franz, written in heaven: in Gordimer’s version it is the son, not the father, who emerges as a monster.

Such moral and “political” ambiguities give Mario a power that is only heightened by an undercurrent of violence ever ready to surface — of potential death by water, by explosion, by sickness, by fire. And as the story moves to its conclusion, another pattern surfaces: while Mario is locked in his childhood, Clovis begins to leave his behind.

This novel of children, of adults, and of those making the passage from one world to the other is related in a graphic and economical language that, for the most part, is well served by its translation. Oberon has done a real service in making it available.