Emmanuelle Petit provides a more contemporary view of the city of Nantes than than the authors we looked in previous posts, Gracq or Rossi. In Petit;s 2010 police novel, Elle n'était pas Marilyn. The key theme is one of setting off into new and unknown ways of living coupled with a slightly wistful look at the ways of life that will be lost. This theme is grounded in two places that Petit uses in the story and which can be easily identified and visited today.
Capitaine Dubreuil crosses the Loire
The first scene occurs very early
in the novel (Petit 2010, 12) when the main police detective, Capitaine
Dubreuil crosses the Anne de Bretagne bridge in his car and stops at La pointe
de l'Île de Nantes beneath a large grey coloured crane, ‘sous la grue grise’
(Petit 2010, 12). Dubreuil likes to come
to this point to think, he can see out along the river Loire to the bridge, Le
Pont de Cheviré. Pont de Cheviré was
inaugurated in 1991 and creates a link in the Atlantic Arc so that goods can be
transported by road from the UK to Spain using the ferry ports of
Brittany. The bridge represents new
European cooperation on trade and Nantes’ new place in that modernised
geography. In a later scene, without giving too much away, the great grey crane
comes to represent the end of an era as the quayside loses its commercial
transport activities. The character, Dubreuil, uses the place to reflect on
what he has lost thanks to his immersion in his everyday working life and
dreams of what he should have been doing instead.
A second character, who will also have to change with the
city’s new millennium identity, manages one of the hostess bars on le Quai de
la Fosse. Her bar is introduced quite
early in the story (Petit 2010, 38) but these bars along the Quai de la Fosse
are important to the story and so are often re-visited as the story
unfolds. The ambiance of this central
urban space at night with its prostitution and alcohol forms a backdrop for the
main story. However, this exploitation
will have to change as the city loses its cargo docks on the Quai Wilson. For
the visitor in the twenty-first century both of these locations are easy to
find and Petit’s novel allows contemporary visitors to re-live vicariously the
dangers and beauty of Nantes in the last days of the twentieth century. Rather than being a nostalgic view of the
Nantes just lost, the novel offers a second chance to its older characters and
to the city along with the warning that it is time to take that chance now.
For French learners planning a City Break in Nantes, this novel is the perfect travelling companion.
Petit, E. (2010) Elle n'était pas Marilyn, Paris :
Belin.
More on the Novelists of Nantes, please click here
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