Pygmalion is one of many figures from ancient mythology that appear suspect from MeToo’s point of view: the sculptor falls in love with his work, an ivory statue, and wishes for such a woman from Venus. He is heard, the statue comes to life under his caresses, “and together with heaven she sees the man who loves her” (so says Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”). Woman as a creature of male desire – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of a Pygmalion melodrama, baptizes it Galathée.
In Lola Lafon’s novel “Komplizinnen”, a circle of rich older men appears as the Fondation Galatée, who promise scholarships to young girls from simple or difficult backgrounds and test their “maturity” over intimate lunches. If at second glance Ovid’s statue is more than a male phantasm, namely a parable of the power of art, in Lafon’s work the girls become statues, brutally frozen at the age of thirteen, abused at the first attempt to realize their own dreams.
The number revue on par with the ballet
Lafon tackles this delicate issue wisely. She builds her novel around a girl from an eastern suburb of Paris: Cléo, who wants to be a dancer. She trains in jazz dance at the youth center and is approached by the elegant Cathy, who, through gifts and preferential treatment, not only makes her a victim, but also a perpetrator who brings other candidates to the foundation. All of this is told in the first and longest chapter, which makes up a quarter of the novel. The main part of “Accomplices” is dedicated to Cléo’s life following: a decision that on the one hand does justice to the long-term consequences of abuse and on the other hand shows that life is not just regarding that. But he determines a lot: “These story is a splinter that new skin has grown around over the years. A little hill of pink life, taut and elastic. A foreign body that is no longer, it belongs to her, firmly anchored in a strand of muscle fibers, hardly worn out by the passage of time.” In the end, the project of two female directors to make a documentary film on the subject, an undertaking that the now 48-year-old Cléo, married and mother, allowed to approach the other victims.
Lola Lafon: “Complicity”. Novel.
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Image: Hanser Berlin Verlag
The 35 years in between are highlighted in chapters with changing characters. From time to time the focus switches to Betty, another dancer whom Cléo brought to the Fondation and who had a forty-year-old “fiancé” for a long time. The story is regarding Yonasz, Cléo’s childhood friend from high school, Ossip, who also looked following Betty as a dancer doctor, Alan, Cléo’s one-night stand, Lara, her first great love, Claude, Cléo’s dresser at Diamantelles, and Anton, Betty’s Nephew who wants to understand why an ambitious young girl gives up dancing, rejects family expectations and chooses a life as an animal lover on welfare. The view of the companion in suffering complements Cléos Parcours by showing different reactions to what has been experienced.