Tanguy Viel, Article 353 du code pénal
Our Reading Journey
We read Viel's 2017 novel in the fall of 2023, and its plot is set in motion on the very first page: Martial Kermeur, a laid-off dockworker, pushes a predatory real estate developer named Antoine Lazenec into the sea. The whole novel unfolds as one long monologue addressed to the investigating magistrate, as Kermeur explains the slow swindling of his village and the years of personal disintegration that led to that final, fatal push into the fog of the Finistère coast.
The title comes from the article of the code of criminal procedure that asks French jurors only one question: do you have an intime conviction, an inner conviction? The group spent real time on how much of Kermeur's account to believe, weighing a voice that is by turns halting and startlingly precise, and aware that we were being asked to do exactly what a juror does. We traced the same question through La Fontaine's fable of the crow and the fox, which Viel uses to ask whether being fooled makes a man complicit in his own ruin, and through Plato and Augustine, on whether Lazenec, or Kermeur himself, can be said to have known what he was doing. The devotion Kermeur shows his young son, Erwan, throughout the account reminded some of us of Antigone's loyalty to family over the law of the city, though that parallel is our own reading rather than anything Viel states outright. Brest sits across the water from Kermeur's village, hard-edged and visible; the village itself dissolves into Breton fog, and the novel never quite lets that fog lift.
About the Author
Tanguy Viel was born in 1973 in Brest, the same city that hovers just offshore in Article 353 du code pénal. He has published with Les Éditions de Minuit, known for spare, exacting prose, since his 1998 debut, Le Black Note, working consistently in interior monologue and in the friction between individuals and the social systems that fail them. Article 353 du code pénal, published in 2017, won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and the Prix du public at the Salon du Livre de Paris that year. Viel was a resident at the Villa Médicis in Rome from 2003 to 2004, and his 2021 novel, La fille qu'on appelle, made the second selection for the Prix Goncourt.
