Roland Topor – The Tenant – Review

 

The French writer Roland Topor first published his novel, The Tenant, in 1964. In 1976, the Polish director, Roman Polanski, adapted the book to film with limited success in Europe. This recent edition from Valancourt Books, 2020, includes an engaging Introduction by R.B. Russell.

Topor is known primarily as an artist and illustrator. He published several books with his drawings, sketches, and wood cuttings. An artist with many talents, a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, actor, film producer, set designer – he also wrote and produced a puppet show Telchat that ran for two years on French television. However, he is most famous for his surrealist flair in all his work across the spectrum.

One cannot necessarily include The Tenant as a surrealist novel. Russell calls the text, "The Tenant is a quietly subversive realist novel" (p7). It can be labeled an absurdist work for many reasons. First, the reader cannot precisely depend on the narrator, whether he is the victim of evil intent by those around him or a tale of a once sane man falling into paranoia and utter madness. It really isn't a big stretch either way because both views are absurd and cannot be trusted.

Trelkovsky is a 30 something Parisian, employed, single, and seeking another flat to rent in the city. The man is a Parisian of bourgeoisie sensibilities. Meaning a man who fits into polite society, conforming to all the rules demanded of that society. When he finds his new dwellings, he's treated like an outsider, someone who doesn't follow the rules, disturbing the status quo. Trelkovsky is targeted by his neighbors in the apartment complex for making too much noise. There are constant raps and pounding on the ceiling and walls for him to quiet down. Strangely, it is only on the first night that he has a housewarming party. The weeks and months afterward, he's quiet as a mouse. So the psychological sense of persecution begins to pervade his consciousness, promoting a developing sense of severe paranoia.

When he rents the flat, he is told that the previous tenant committed suicide by jumping out the window through a glass terrace below. Making a few more inquiries, Trelkovsky discovers the tenant hasn't died at all and is lying in hospital. He visits the woman, bandaged like a mummy and near death. He meets Stella, a friend of the bedridden woman, and develops a relationship with her.

The longer he remains at the apartment, the more his neighbors abuse him. Finally, he tells his colleagues at work, and they make fun of him for not standing up for himself. He soon separates from his friends and workmates, becoming a loner, living alone.

Some critics have called The Tenant, and other Topor projects an analysis of the conformist and nonconformist in society. Though Trelkovsky is a well-behaved bourgeois, following all the rules and living a quiet life, suddenly, he's kicked outside acceptable community and forced to survive... thus leading to madness.

The text's ending felt to be tied up, though absurd, like a birthday ribbon.

That said, an exciting and original tale of French society and madness.