Daniel Pennac, Au bonheur des ogres
Our Reading Journey
Our session followed Benjamin Malaussène into the strangest job in French fiction: professional scapegoat at a Paris department store, paid to absorb customer complaints so convincingly that people withdraw them out of sheer sympathy. He supports a chaotic, half-sibling-heavy household in Belleville on his own, a family that includes Louna, weighing whether to keep the twins she's carrying; Clara, a photographer with a taste for documenting the ordinary and the grim; Thérèse, who claims to read the future; Jérémy, who's already caused one explosion at school; and the youngest, Le Petit, who draws ogres and won't say much else. When actual bombs start going off in the store where Benjamin works, his day job makes him the obvious suspect, and he ends up investigating the case himself alongside his journalist girlfriend and a coworker, while somehow still narrating bedtime stories to Le Petit every night.
The discussion spent real time on the scapegoat premise itself and how literally Pennac dramatizes an idea usually left abstract: a man paid to absorb blame, in a book that keeps circling back to the mechanics of blame itself, who a crowd needs it directed at, and how a community absolves itself once someone else agrees to carry the guilt. The group traced the discussion back to René Girard's account of the scapegoat, then watched Pennac undercut the theory's solemnity at every turn with slapstick, wordplay, and a genuinely tender family plot running underneath the noir mechanics. Belleville itself works almost as another character, rendered in specific, unglamorous detail. The whodunit resolves by the end; the question of why people accept blame that was never theirs remains.
About the Author
Daniel Pennacchioni was born in Morocco in 1944; his father was an army officer, and the family moved constantly during his childhood before settling in France. He became a literature teacher in 1969, working first in Soissons and Nice before settling into a Paris school, and he didn't leave teaching to write full time until 1995, a decade after Au bonheur des ogres, the first of his six-volume Malaussène cycle, appeared in 1985. Its sequels went on to win their prizes, including the Prix du roman policier francophone de la ville du Mans for La Fée Carabine in 1987, and Chagrin d'école, his 2007 memoir about being a failing student himself, won the Prix Renaudot. In 1992 he published Comme un roman, an essay defending reading for pleasure that ends with his widely quoted “rights of the reader.”
