The Little Girl and the Cigarette - The Pink Book Greg Read on the Train in Mild Embarrassment
I think the last pink book I read before zipping through the satirical “The Little Girl and The Cigarette” by Benot Duteurtre (translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell) was my older sister’s grade school diary.
Picture this: A weird little Greg with perfectly parted hair, wearing some lame matching shirt-and-shorts combo, sneaks into his older sister’s room while she’s at acrobats or some shit. He carefully removes her pink diary from the wide middle drawer of her desk. Greg sits on the hidden patch of carpet between his sister’s double bed and the wall, and then reads the diary with a hovering green marker he uses to cross out any sentence where his sister calls him a jerk. Yes, he’s not very smart. But no, he will not stand for libel.
Fast forward 20 years and a different weird Greg is sitting on the Brown Line reading the bright pink “The Little Girl and The Cigarette” which is about, well… it’s pretty titular, actually. It opens with a man – Desire Johnson – on death row whose last wish is to smoke a cigarette, but there’s a no smoking policy for the entire prison. The warden, caught in the old Catch-22 because there are a couple of contradicting laws on the books, finds the case spreading through the national media like piss at a mental hospital’s pool party. He prolongs the execution until he can find a decent solution.
Outside the prison walls is the novel’s main protagonist, an unnamed smoker in a city where public smoking has also been outlawed, and he totally gets busted puffing away in the bathroom by a little girl who doesn’t knock. It should be said that this smoker hates children, never wants to have children, and he lives in an ambiguous city in an ambiguous time where the mayor has recently declared children the most important people of society. The smoker cracks and lashes out verbally at the little girl, which is something you can’t do in this city. Weeks later he finds himself charged with a crime against children, “the worst accusation of them all.”
I close this novel three days later and can’t stop talking about. I find Duteurtre’s jabs at today’s society – especially those he directs at governments that remain steadfast in lieu of new research, and those he uses to lampoon American Idol – to be brilliant. Almost as brilliant as my acting when my sister confronted me about the crossed out passages in her little pink diary.
The Little Girl and The Cigarette
Benot Duteurtre (translated by Charlotte Mandell)
Melville House - March 1, 2007
Paperback, 187 pages
Greg was excited about this book before I even started it. I remember the day he bought it at The Book Cellar, its simple pink cover held up proudly for me to see. His enthusiasm only grew as he buried himself in it on the couch that same evening and before he was even half-way through it he was suggesting (re: demanding) that I read it myself.
Inwardly I sighed. Even though I’ve been an avid reader all my life there’s nothing I dislike more than being sternly encouraged to read a book — suddenly there’s this obligation to read the thing, and what if I don’t like it or what if I get bored and want to start reading something else? How do I explain that to my friend who holds one out to me, tears shimmering in her eyes as she recounted how it completely changed her life?
Well, Greg wasn’t that dramatic but nonetheless, I felt mighty obliged to pick up and read that damn pink book a week or so after he did.
And it was good. Really good.
“The Little Girl and the Cigarette” is a simple story, a dark satire on our society’s obsession with being politically correct and all the Catch-22s that come with trying to be so.
Taking place in an anonymous contemporary European city, the story follows two characters: the first a death row inmate whose last request is to smoke a cigarette. Smoking has been banned in the prisons, but there is also a rule that a prisoner’s last request must be granted, thus throwing the entire system into chaos. The second storyline follows a middle-aged man, annoyed by the restrictions that a workplace smoking ban has placed on this small enjoyment of his.
The story spirals from there — the demise and uplift of each character more sarcastic and strangely believable than the last, until you have finally closed that pretty, pink cover. Reminiscent in tone of both Kundera and Kafka, “The Little Girl & the Cigarette” is a lovely escape from the duplicitous post-modern tomes I’ve been crowding my bookshelves with.
Tags: Benot Duteurtre, Cigarette, Diary Reading, Suggested reading, The Book Cellar, The Little Girl and the Cigarette, Weird Greg
May 9th, 2008 at 1:52 am
Ah, the pink book. Greg’s brown line literary journey will also become the first pink novel that my school’s AP English students will be reading as their final high school novel. This odd-shaped book found it’s way into my hands during a recent visit to Claire and Greg’s and true to his post….in 18 hours it was finished. It will now fall into the hands of many kids who wonder if Paris is in Germany and yet, can name every single contestant in American Idol Season 3. I look forward to watching them drink in the satire, watch the flower petals on the table, and comment on what it all means as they approach the real world for the first time as official adults.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:08 am
This book actually sounds really interesting despite the pink cover. I’ve added it to my list. Thanks for the suggestion!