Holiday in a Coma & Love Lasts Three Years: two novels by Frédéric Beigbeder

Holiday in a Coma & Love Lasts Three Years: two novels by Frédéric Beigbeder
Frédéric Beigbeder

Frank Wynne

One night in a Parisian nightclub and the aftermath of a marriage provide the stories for these two novels by Frederic Beigbeder, award-winning author of ‘Windows on the World’.In ‘Holiday in a Coma’, Marc Marronnier, a shallow, superficial, rich Parisian who works as an advertising executive, is invited by his old friend to the opening of a new nightclub called The Shitter (a satirical take on the famous Paris nightclub Les Bains Douche). Taking place over a single unforgettable night, the novel documents everything from the pit-bull bouncer on the door, to the drugs, cocktails and wannabes who frequent the club, and Marc’s attempts to seduce a catwalk model – any one will do. A catalogue of degeneracy, drugs, sex and decibels, ‘Holiday in a Coma’ is written with a fury and passion that reflect the author's own relationship with a world and he both loves and loathes.In ‘Love Lasts Three Years’, Marc Marronnier has just been divorced and – shallow opportunist that he is – has decided to write a book about it. He has a theory that love lasts no more than three years, and here – recounting the highs and lows of his marriage and taking us through brash nightclubs, vainglorious offices and soulless designer apartments – he brings to bear the theoretical and the empirical to prove his point. Both frightening and funny, the book reads like a diary: sometimes tender and real, sometimes fantastical and cruel, peppered with Beigbeder’s acerbic one-liners and trademark wit.

FRÉDÉRIC BEIGBEDER

HOLIDAY IN A COMA and LOVE LASTS THREE YEARS

Two Novels

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY FRANK WYNNE

Contents

Title Page (#u46530412-b581-5f1f-ad8e-e5540b6e36f6)Holiday In A Coma (#uaeacae19-63fb-5643-9470-4808fd39c058)Dedication (#u8db76efc-f08a-5142-afb2-80ff09b0a1f6)Epigraph (#u52c5c563-3694-55eb-983c-68a85bdcb4ce)7.00 P.M. (#u4a80818a-7daf-5fa7-a4fa-3209e0691056)8.00 P.M. (#ue8400ac8-29af-5669-b187-fde2c3686bd2)9.00 P.M. (#u3eb82da6-88da-542a-ab29-840d25b19884)10.00 P.M. (#u651a2cc1-76e0-5ac0-b0c3-89d57419d1a9)11.00 P.M. (#ucee46b82-0d9c-512d-898b-f399d5479dfd)12.00 A.M. (#litres_trial_promo)1.00 A.M. (#litres_trial_promo)2.00 A.M. Interval (#litres_trial_promo)3.00 A.M. (#litres_trial_promo)4.00 A.M. (#litres_trial_promo)5.00 A.M. (#litres_trial_promo)6.00 A.M. (#litres_trial_promo)7.00 A.M. (#litres_trial_promo)Love Lasts Three Years (#litres_trial_promo)Dedication (#litres_trial_promo)Epigraph (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter I: Connected Vessels (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter I: Endless Love (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter II: The Gay Divorcé (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter III: On The Beach (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter IV: The Saddest Human Being I Ever Met (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter V: Best Before Date (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VI: The End Of The Road (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VII: Some Tips For Surviving Heartbreak (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VIII: For Those Who Missed The Beginning (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter IX: Rain Over Copacabana (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter X: Palais De Justice, Paris (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XI: The Human Man At Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XII: Lost Illusions (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XIII: Flirting With Disaster (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XIV: Provisional Resurrection (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XV: The Wailing Wall (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XVI: Would You Like To Be My Harem? (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XVII: The Horns Of A Dilemma (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XVIII: Highs And Lows (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XIX: Flee Happiness Lest It Run Away (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XX: Things Fall Apart (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXI: Question Marks (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXII: Reunion (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXIII: Leave (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXIV: The Beauty Of Beginnings (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXV: Thank You, Wolfgang (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXVI: Hot Sex Chapter (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXVII: Letters (I) (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXVIII: The Depths Of Despair (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXIX: The South Bitch Diet (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXX: Letters (Ii) (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXXI: L’amant (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXXII: Dunno (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXXIII: The Impossible Decrystallisation (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXXIV: The Theory Of Eternal Return (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXXV: Tender Is The Night (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXXVI: Freelance (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXXVII: The Romantic Cynic (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXXVIII: Letters (Iii) (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XXXIX: Still Falling (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XL: Conversation In A Palace (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XLI: Conjectures (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XLII: The Cunning Plan (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XLIII: A Cheap Trick (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XLIV: Letters (Iv) (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XLV: So (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter II: Three Years Later In Formentera (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter I: D-Day –7 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter II: D-Day –6 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter III: D-Day –5 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter IV: D-Day –4 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter V: D-Day –3 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VI: D-Day –2 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VII: D-Day –1 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VIII: D-Day (#litres_trial_promo)Also By Frédéric Beigbeder (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

HOLIDAY IN A COMA (#ud27d4736-7f82-5863-adb5-1e6ecc2c0e86)

For Diane Β.,I fell,Head over heels.

Let’s dance

The last dance

Tonight

Yes it’s my last chance

For romance

Tonight.

Donna Summer, ‘Last Dance’

Casablanca Records

Second novels are written in a secondary frame of mind.

Me

7.00 P.M. (#ud27d4736-7f82-5863-adb5-1e6ecc2c0e86)

He combs his hair, puts on or takes off his jacket or his scarf as one might toss a flower into a grave which is still open’

Jean-Jacques Schuhl

Rose Poussière

Marc Marronnier is twenty-seven years old, he has a beautiful apartment, a cool job and still he doesn’t kill himself. Go figure.

His doorbell rings. Marc Marronnier loves a lot of things: the photos in the American edition of Harper’s Bazaar, Irish whiskey straight up, the avenue Vélasquez, a song (‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys), chocolate éclairs, a book (les Deux Veuves by Dominique Noguez) and belated ejaculation. Doorbells ringing is not one of those things.

‘Monsieur Marronnier?’ asks a bell-boy in a motorcycle helmet.

‘In the flesh.’

‘This is for you.’

The bell-boy in the motorcycle helmet (he looks like ‘Spirou and the Golden Bowl’) hands him an envelope approximately three feet square, jiggling impatiently as though he urgently needs a piss. Marc takes the envelope and gives him a ten-franc piece to disappear out of his life. Marc Marronnier doesn’t need a bell-boy in a motorcycle helmet in his life.

Inside the envelope, he is utterly unsurprised to discover the following:

A NIGHT IN SHIT

* * * * * * * * *

Grand Opening Night

Place de la Madeleine

Paris

He is, however, pretty surprised to find, stapled to the invitation:

See you tonight, you old queerJoss DumoulinDJ

JOSS DUMOULIN? Marc was sure he was living in permanent exile in Japan. Or dead.

But dead men don’t host club nights.

And so Marc Marronnier brushes his fingers through his hair, a gesture that indicates a certain inner contentment. It has to be said, he’s been waiting a long time for ‘a night in Shit’. Every day for the past year he’s walked past the construction site for the new club, ‘the biggest nightclub in Paris’. And every time he passes, he thinks, on opening night, there are going to be a truckload of honeys.

Marc Marronnier aims to please. This is probably why he wears glasses. When they’re perched on his nose, his colleagues think he looks like William Hurt, only uglier. (NB His myopia dates from his secondary school days at Louis-le-Grand, his scoliosis from his days studying at Sciences Po.)

It’s official: Marc Marronnier is going to have sexual relations tonight, whatever happens. He may even do the deed with more than one person, who knows? He has packed six condoms, for he is an ambitious young man.

Marc Marronnier senses he is going to die, in forty years or so. When he’s quite finished getting on our nerves.

Society scoundrel, armchair rebel, photo-opportunity mercenary, disgraceful bourgeois, his life consists of listening to messages on his answering machine and leaving them on other answering machines. All the while watching thirty channels simultaneously using picture-in-picture on cable TV. He sometimes forgets to eat for several days.

On the day he was born, he was already a has-been. There are countries where one dies at a ripe old age, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, you are born at an old age. Blasé before he had lived a day, he now cultivates his failures. For example, he boasts about writing slim volumes of barely a hundred pages with print runs of less than 3,000. ‘Since literature is dead, I make do with writing for my friends,’ he eructates at formal dinners, knocking back the dregs from the glasses of the girls sitting next to him. It is important that Neuilly-sur-Seine not give up hope.

A nightlife correspondent, copywriter–editor, literary journalist: Marc cannot commit to anything. He refuses to choose one life over another. These days, he says, ‘everyone is insane, the only choice left is between schizophrenia and paranoia: we are either many in one or one against all’. And yet, like all chameleons (Fregoli, Zelig, Thierry Le Luron), if there is one thing he hates, it is being alone. This is why there are multiple Marc Marronniers.

Delphine Seyrig passed away in the late morning, it is now 7 p.m. Marc has taken off his glasses to brush his teeth. I’ve just told you he is unstable by nature.

Is Marc Marronnier happy? Well, he’s got nothing to complain about. He spends vast sums of money every month and has no children. That, surely, is happiness: having no problems. And yet, from time to time he feels something like worry in his belly. The annoying thing is that he is unable to determine what kind of worry. It is an Unidentified Anguish. It makes him cry watching dreadful movies. He is definitely missing something, but what? Thank God the feeling invariably wears off.