Credit where credit is due: I picked up Jean-Pierre Martinet’s With Their Hearts In Their Boots (translated by Alex Andriesse) in no small part due to the fact that its introduction was by William Boyle. Boyle’s cultural recommendations, whether literary or cinematic, are often spot-on, and reading his description of this “[h]hard-boiled, funny, dangerous” short novel piqued my interest for what was to follow.

But what sort of book is With Their Hearts In Their Boots, anyway? In his introduction, Boyle categorizes it alongside Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend, citing the way that protagonist Georges Maman spends much of the book making bad decisions while in a drunken stupor. There’s also a certain sense of moral horror that runs throughout this book; if there’s a Venn diagram overlap between the literature of alcoholism and the psychological nightmares of something like Roland Torpor’s The Tenant, this short novel exists there.

Much of that sense of dislocation comes from its protagonist’s downward spiral. By the time the reader encounters Georges Maman, his best days as an actor seem behind him. He’s taken to performing in adult films, but he doesn’t seem to be doing terribly well there, either — and his surname certainly exists at odds with the image of a man’s man he’s trying to cultivate. 

With Their Hearts In Their Boots is also a novel that transforms familiar situations into grounds for pitched conflict. Early on, Maman’s reflections on Paris’s bathrooms in November depicts them as a brawl waiting to happen. Later, after he’s encountered his acquaintance Dagonard, the two men continue on their downward spiral:

Dagonard handed the bottle to Maman, who took a healthy swig, no bones about it. Since going back to sleep was out of the question, might as well gather strength for the night. The night would be long, it had Dagonard’s face, Dagonard’s corpulence, Dagonard’s odor of sweat. Perhaps it would soon even have the odor of Dagonard’s blood.

In Andriesse’s translation, Martinet’s account of one man’s progression down the margins of society turns into the stuff of existential horror. This is a far cry from comfort reading, but like a sub-zero breeze — or a shot of high-proof booze — it’s bracing throughout.

***

With Their Hearts In Their Boots
By Jean-Pierre Martinet; translated by Alex Andriesse
Wakefield Press; 94 p.

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