Jean-Luc Benoziglio - the monologue of a man, disoriented by the gaping void of not knowing his own nationality, recounting the final remnants of his own sanity and his life. In this buffoonish, even grotesque, yet deeply pitiful man, Benoziglio explores, with a light yet profound touch, weighty themes such as the roles of family, history, one’s moral responsibility towards others, and the fragility of personal identity

Jean-Luc Benoziglio, Privy Portrait, Trans. by Tess Lewis, Seagull Books, 2014.

The narrator in Jean-Luc Benoziglio’s Privy Portrait has fallen on hard times. His wife and young daughter have abandoned him, he has no work or prospects, he’s blind in one eye, and he must move into a horribly tiny apartment with his only possession: a twenty-five-volume encyclopedia. His neighbors, the Shritzkys, are vulgar, narrow-minded, and racist. And because he has no space for his encyclopedia in his cramped room, he stores it in the communal bathroom, and this becomes a major point of contention with his neighbors. The bathroom is also the only place he can find refuge from the Shritzkys’ blaring television, and he barricades himself in it to read his encyclopedia, much to the chagrin of the rest of the residents of the building.
Darkly amusing, Privy Portrait is the monologue of a man, disoriented by the gaping void of not knowing his own nationality, recounting the final remnants of his own sanity and his life. In this buffoonish, even grotesque, yet deeply pitiful man, Benoziglio explores, with a light yet profound touch, weighty themes such as the roles of family, history, one’s moral responsibility towards others, and the fragility of personal identity.

Privy Portrait begins with the narrator in a communal toilet, shared by the tenants on the same floor, but it's not a novel that has him barricaded in this retreat for its entirety. The English title, a clever variation on the original French Cabinet portrait, does suggest the toilet, which he does admittedly retreat to with greater frequency and for longer duration than physical requirements would demand, but moving beyond that the book is very much a personal, intimate portrait of a man unmoored we're made privy to, the vagueness and uncertainty about the protagonist's past seeming to catch up with him as he loses all hold in the present.
       After the short opening privy-scene, the story moves on to the narrator arranging his move, from his apartment to a considerably humbler (or downright pathetic) single room, and then the actual move. There's considerable banter with the two movers, whom he calls Asparagus and Brick House (because that's what their physiques respectively resemble) -- two men with whom he'll cross paths again, when they have moved on, employed in other transporting capacities.
       His new domicile is definitely a move down, his new room much too small for all his books -- which is why he ends up trying to store his encyclopedia-set in the communal toilet (and spends much of his time there, looking for answers in it). He's not a particularly neighborly sort -- an amusing scene when he moves out of his apartment has his neighbor there mistake him for the incoming tenant, not even recognizing him as her longtime-neighbor -- but he can't evade his new neighbors (or their loud television), more burdens to bear. But he does find a retreat of sorts on his floor -- even if he does have to vacate it when others need to pay a visit (something that becomes easier once he figures out some of their schedules): 
The peace and quiet that reigned in the john more than made up for the relative discomfort of the seating.
       The narrator never identifies himself by name, but resembles the author in many respects, down to the family name that is incidentally mentioned. He almost always refers to his psychiatrist-father, born Jewish in Turkey, who had settled in Switzerland, as 'the man in the white coat', a man who changed his: wife, nationality, religion, and name. There's not much sense of connection between father and son here; indeed, the narrator reveals that all the papers of his father's he has are: "four documents and four different spellings of his name", Nissim David Benosiglio transformed into Norbert Benoziglio -- documenting only the man's nominal transformation, while actual memories of the man himself are otherwise distant and elusive.
       The narrator is down on his luck. He was married, to Stérile, and even has a daughter, Stephanie. He used to have a decent bank job, but has been downwardly mobile for a while; he's now lost an eye in a workplace accident -- symbolic of his increasingly limited vision, as he seems to have lost almost all perspective.
       For ages, he had simply thought: "I was Swiss and Switzerland's past was my only real past". But now, after years when: "the question of my origins never even occurred to me", it now comes down on him like a ton of bricks: his, and his father's, past clearly haunt him, and he's not very good at working through it, whether in meeting his only remaining relatives or looking for answers in his encyclopedia. Echoes all around -- notably from his loud anti-Semitic new neighbors, the Sbritzkys, who eventually even sic 'Commisioner Stalun' and 'Bailiff Hiltler' on him -- don't help either.
       There's considerable comic relief in Privy Portrait, as the narrator recounts his sadly amusing efforts to get by and find his place -- not very good efforts, which are marked by missteps and bad decisions all along the way. The humor leavens and distracts from what's an otherwise very dark tale, a mix Benoziglio manages quite well, helped by his sharp, wry writing which Tess Lewis captures nicely in her translation.
       While Privy Portrait doesn't really feel dated, its impact is perhaps no longer as strong given the proliferation of novels over the decades since its original publication covering similar ground, dealing with the various forms of guilt surrounding the Second World War, as well as Swiss (and general) anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and issues of personal and national identity. - M.A.Orthofer



For ten days, I was so thoroughly absorbed in Jean-Luc Benoziglio’s Privy Portrait that I remained torn between devoting an afternoon to finishing the darkly droll novel and continuing to read it in snatches in order to prolong the particular emotion it provoked. Every day, I chose the latter solution, all the while wondering how I had managed to overlook Cabinet portrait—the original title — when it appeared in French in 1980 and won the Médicis Prize. Tess Lewis has provided an invigorating translation that captures the amusingly colliding layers of diction in the French prose.
In a plot that artfully flits between past and present, Benoziglio (1941-2013) combines joyfully bleak introspection, lively dialogues (or shouting matches), troubling nightmares, absurd or sordid mini-events, oblique yet telling flashbacks, funny asides about writing, and inserted passages taken from the encyclopedia volumes perused by the narrator in the common toilet used by him and other tenants in a Parisian apartment building.
The novel begins with the narrator’s move into a tiny room in that run-down building. He is now estranged from his wife Stérile and young daughter Stéphanie, is blind in one eye, and suspects that he has rectum cancer because of violent pains that assail him.
The concierge assures him that he will eventually get used to the behavior of the other tenants on his floor. It is a real “circus” — a recurrent word. There are gruesome groans behind a door. One neighbor is a somewhat alluring single mother with a mentally retarded, psychologically disturbed son whose behavior can be worrisome. Above all, the narrator must live alongside the Sbritzkys, a vociferous couple who keep their television blaring all day long and who lord over every single detail of the other tenants’ daily life.
Besides their overall vulgarity and aggressiveness, the Sbritzkys are anti-Semitic, whereas the narrator has reached a point in his life when he must come to terms with his Jewish heritage. He has little information about his paternal ancestors, most of whom perished in the Shoah. He knows that his father, chillingly designated throughout the novel as “the man in the white coat” (for he was a psychiatrist), was a descendent of Sephardic Jews who had settled in Turkey after the expulsion of the Jews, in 1492, from the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella; and he is aware that his father had emigrated to Switzerland for his medical studies two years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Settling in the country at the time, he escaped the Holocaust. Passages reveal the extent to which the father-son relationship remained remote—to say the least—during the narrator’s childhood.
In its broad outline, Benoziglio’s own life parallels that of his narrator: the Francophone writer was also born in Switzerland, of a Turkish father and an Italian mother, and he moved to France in 1967. In the novel, the narrator harbors no special attachment to, nor repulsion for, his native country. He has also lived in France for several years, an expatriation by no means implying that he has become “French.” Essentially without a country, he has other doubts about his personal identity as well.
This Wandering Jew theme, which is introduced discreetly into the novel and grows in intensity, is especially compelling. Ever with clownish humor not without twists of poignancy, Benoziglio describes a man who has lost his stability in the world. This is not only due to the break up of his immediate family or to the loss of his job, but also to this unsettling family history, on his father’s side, which is enveloped by a “ghostly and glacial fog.”
Although the narrator mocks his own feelings of existential insecurity, they eat away at him. This angst becomes increasingly clear in a novel that occasionally discloses disturbing and haunting elements within an otherwise farcical — desperately farcical — atmosphere. Beneath the narrator’s playful cynicism lies a sort of yearning. Signs of his sensitivity to his incurable rootlessness include his imaginary conversations with a “cousin” in Turkey and his attempts to catch bits of news about the country by listening to the television broadcasts roaring out from the Sbritzkys’s apartment.
“According to my neighbors’ television set,” he notes for example, “things don’t look good in my cousin’s country. It’s so bad, in fact, that if I took up arms and went I wouldn’t know whom to shoot.” And he muses, now and then, about the few surviving family items that offer clues to his vague, lacunary, Turkish-Sephardic background.

Author Jean-Luc Benoziglio — with clownish humor and twists of poignancy, he describes a man who has lost his stability in the world.

However, as a key flashback reveals, the narrator actually feels only part Jewish, if Jewish at all. Recalling a time when he “was earning money by the shovelful” at the “Bank of Thingy & Co,” he remembers a conversation with a Jewish colleague. The colleague was baiting him, in a bar, to acknowledge his religious heritage:
“For God’s sake,” I whispered furiously enough to strike water from a stone, “try to understand that I’m not interested in the religious side of the issue. I don’t give a shit about religion. Besides, for all I know, my ancestor back there could well have been a communist or a freemason or an atheist or an Islamic convert or a sun worshipper, what difference does it make? Does it change anything?”
“Precisely,” he said. “It doesn’t change a thing. Whether you like it or not he was and he remained a Jew. Like you.”
“Only part,” I said.
“Now really,” he began, “why do you always have to renounce, play down. . . What do you mean by ‘only part’?”
“What I mean is, my mother isn’t one.”
He choked on his drink.
“Your mother’s not Jewish?”
“Nope.”
“But then,” he spluttered, “if your mother isn’t, then you. . . Then you, sir, are not one of us at all? Do you know what Solomon said?”
I wasn’t even sure who Solomon was. …
Beyond the particularities of the Jewish existential condition, which are conjured up with wit and subtlety, Privy Portrait portrays a contemporary human being who has lost all handholds, all footholds, all practical, moral, and metaphysical support—except for that provided by the articles of his beloved encyclopedia. The recorded knowledge of the world provides a last mainstay, a final refuge: he locks himself in the privy for hours until the thunderous knocks of the Sbritzkys or some other tenant draw him out.
But even the encyclopedia might well disappear. The Sbritzkys sabotage the volumes in grievous ways and pressure the narrator to remove them. There are no redeeming characters in the novel except, perhaps, the hapless retarded boy to whom the narrator is kind on a couple of occasions. Even Asparagus and Brick House, the two more or less friendly movers, eventually cheat him out of some money through their “Second to Last” drinking game. Can writing somehow save him? It is the narrator who is writing this deep-probing, grotesquely entertaining novel. - John Taylor