Reader for Hire - Raymond Jean

'Young woman available to read to you in your own home. Works of literature, non-fiction, any sort of book you like’

Raymond Jean’s novella Reader for Hire is a playful tribute to the emotional power of reading. Beginning when a 34 year old woman named Marie-Constance places an advert in the classified pages of her local newspaper, the book is by turns erotic, comic and tender, with a style which seduces and beguiles the reader.

When Marie-Constance places her advert, the agency man predicts ‘dubious’ responses; aside from any euphemistic interpretation, there is something unsettlingly intimate about the idea of a stranger coming into one’s home to read aloud. Marie-Constance’s clients are outcasts, living on the fringes of small-town society; a paraplegic teenager, an elderly Countess with a shrine to Communism in her home, a company director whose wife has left him, and an eight year old girl with an overprotective mother.

For Marie-Constance, 'a model reader should be a perfectly biddable and neutral instrument. Purely a tool. Purely a voice. Purely transparent. That may well be her limitation, but it may also be her glory'. She is a blank state, onto which her clients can project their desires. Her first experience is with Eric, a sensitive, vulnerable boy. The effect is dramatic; the combination of Maupassant’s prose and the sight of her dress riding up, exposing her knees, induces a seizure. Over the course of their meetings, they form a powerful erotic bond, giving this young man his first sensual experiences.  

In other cases the process is different, but in each she answers some deep need within her clients, for companionship of one kind or another. They want Marie-Constance to be a surrogate mother, lover or child. Often, they receive her whilst lying in bed; her status as a reader allows her access to a private world which would not be afforded to other tradespeople. Her neutral air is almost a provocation, and her clients go to extreme lengths to attract her notice. In fact, the book is almost as much about the power of attention as about literature. When Marie-Constance first proposes her new career, a friend asks her 'who's going to want a reader at home in this day and age if not the manic, the mad and the sick?' This turns out to be prophetic, but Marie-Constance is more than a paid companion for these outcasts: by sharing literature with them, and exposing something of herself, she provokes a reaction in them. They want to give something of themselves in return.

A comic sub-plot concerns Marie-Constance’s running battle with the local police, who suspect her of being a bad influence on the morals of their town. Her appearances alongside the Countess at a May Day rally and her apparent abduction of the young girl apparently confirm the authorities in their suspicions. There is a nod to de Sade in the novel’s denouement, as Marie-Constance confronts local dignitaries in a well-worked satirical set-piece.

Jean’s novel is a sly love story to the idea of literature itself, written in beautiful prose. The act of reading is presented as a collaborative process, an act of exploration: Baudelaire's poetry, for example, 'is an extraordinary mechanism, a fantastical clockwork machine, and all its component parts, its every articulation, could be laid bare'. Through the character of Marie-Constance, Jean investigates the way we invite authors into the most intimate spheres of our lives, and the transformative power of the right book at the right time. If you love reading so much that you even love the word ‘reading’, then you will love reading Reader for Hire.

Reader for Hire was translated by Adriana Hunter