Waiting for Martin Winckler to appear (but he was right on time, as good doctors always are), PW realizes that he is about to meet a rare bird: a French author who is also a storyteller. (There is no French equivalent for "a good read.") Yes, each of the 113 chapters in The Case of Dr. Sachs tells a tale, or continues one, or provides its denouement; they are the impressions of patients, or observations by the doctor's friends, occasionally by his receptionist. Dr. Bruno Sachs himself remains silent throughout, letting his Greek chorus chant for him. Together the characters' stories reveal the satisfactions and frustrations of Sachs's 10 years as a country doctor, a seminal decade of his life that closed when he could no longer support the burden of their collective miseries.
Yet readers could. La Maladie de Sachs quickly found its audience, winning a much-heeded Prix Inter, which is chosen by a 24-member jury of good readers selected to represent different regions and professions--which makes it one of the rare French literary prizes not compromised by a connection to publishers. After the award, sales of the 474-page tome soared from a respectable 7,000 copies to a dazzling 320,000 copies. Later, another 120,000 copies went out in club jackets, followed by a 100,000-copy mass market reprint. Foreign publishers are particularly wary of contemporary novels from France; this one wound up being translated into 10 languages. The English version by Linda Asher was published by Seven Stories Press.
The French press was sympathetic toward, often enthusiastic about, Dr. Sachs, although one influential daily attributed its success not so much to critical praise as to word of mouth, as well as to quite normal curiosity about the life and mind of the general practitioner, "always a popular hero," as Le Figaro's reviewer put it. "A hypothesis one can advance," added a writer for Le Monde, "is that the most important person in the life of most French people isn't their life companion but their generalist. To be able to penetrate... his consulting room, to see and hear what happens with other patients... are among the needs satisfied by The Case of Dr. Sachs."
Winckler's French publisher, Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, a one-time Gallimard editor now running his own purely literary shop and boasting a string of stunning successes, was one of those intrigued by the rare opportunity to, in effect, plant a virtual tape recorder in the doctor's office. A movie version of the novel was released in 1999 to excellent reviews. .
Aware that the prematurely deceased novelist Georges Perec is one of Martin Winckler's culture her s, PW found it difficult, while reading Winckler, not to think of that masterpiece of French storytelling in our time, Perec's Life: A User's Manual. Not only has Winckler borrowed his novel's structure from Perec's Arabian Nights of a book, but he has appropriated the name of one of Perec's characters, Winckler, for his pen name.
For Martin Winckler is really Marc Zaffran, born in 1955 to a Jewish family in French Algeria, soon after the outbreak of the territory's war for independence. His father had gone to high school in Algiers with Albert Camus. Winckler-Zaffran, a hulking figure informally attired--several days growth of beard that suggests (accurately, as it turns own) he's no longer practicing medicine--has brought along a copy of his interviewer's biography of Camus, having turned down the page describing how the young goalkeeper Camus fainted on the soccer field when a ball hit him in the chest. Zaffran's father witnessed that, or a similar incident--Camus's collapse was an early sign of tuberculosis, if not the first. Zaffran père became a specialist in lung diseases.
Algerian friends asked the elder Dr. Zaffran to stay on in their new nation, but as a Zionist he didn't see how he could. Israel was calling, and. meanwhile right-wing extremists among the French were making targets of sympathizers of the rebellion. The Zaffrans--father, mother and three children, including seven-year-old Mark--sailed to Israel, but found no need there for another doctor. Since they were also French citizens, France soon became their home.
Winckler says that the real Bruno Sachs is not himself but his father. "He suffered when his patients suffered. I don't think you become a doctor by accident¦ It's to repair something in yourself, or it has to do with your family history. In my case I had a father who was a good man, and a doctor. I suppose that I thought that if I became a doctor, I'd also become a good man."
He hoped to establish himself while his father was still alive, and found an opening in a village of some 1,500 inhabitants in a rural district 120 miles west of Paris, 10 miles from the nearest town. "There I could be a genuine family doctor." Then, after a pause: "Call it a moral choice." He also knew that it would have been more difficult to practice in a large city, especially as a generalist. "In cities, everyone goes straight to a specialist."
His village had a general store doubling as a restaurant, plus a church and a school. (For more details, read The Case of Dr. Sachs.) He lived with his family in a neighboring village to maintain a semblance of independence on nights and weekends when he wasn't on call. Today he lives in the district capital, Le Mans, a city of 145,000 inhabitants, only minutes from the city center.
Before setting up for himself, using Le Mans as a base, he often stood in for other doctors in nearby villages while serving for three years as an intern at the Le Mans hospital. He spent one day a week at the hospital's abortion clinic and also put in time as a family planner. His experience with abortions--legal in France, although difficult to obtain in some rural areas--was described with few concessions to readers' sensibilities in his first novel, La Vacation (loosely translatable as "Part-Time Duty"). Wholly sympathetic to the women he treated, he knew that an abortion is never a routine procedure; there's always a drama lurking behind it. He stopped performing abortions only a year ago, but still pitches in with family planning.
Digging further--for this writer doesn't easily talk about himself--PW learns that his distinctive approach to medicine was forged quite early in his career. "I never saw a patient as my enemy, although in medical school we were taught to keep our distance; patients weren't 'thy neighbor' to be loved. I had seen my father treating his patients as equals." His preferred medical journal refuses the pharmaceutical advertising that keeps its sister papers alive (and advocates, among other things, that doctors prescribe only generic drugs). This paper, and not medical school, taught him to prescribe fewer pills and engage in more dialogue.
While he doesn't comment on the novel's American title, he has something to say about the French one--La Maladie de Sachs. "Why do they insist on naming diseases after the doctors who first described them? How can you be expected to be proud of a vile illness?" Still, the reader can guess that Dr. Sachs is proud of his, since his malady is to suffer for his patients. "It would be nice to find that at some future time a doctor's breakdown might be called Sachs's disease." In the author's interpretation of his own novel, Bruno Sachs isn't quite the good doctor we think he is, for he doesn't have a happy life, as the ideal doctor should. "You want to tell him, 'Get a life.' " (Winckler employs the American expression here.)
Sachs's creator has such a life, it would seem. For one thing, he and his second wife have a passel of children--eight in all, some from his first marriage (which ended in divorce), some from his second wife's first marriage, some they've had together. That keeps them busy. Then Marc Zaffran reveals that he began writing at the age of seven or eight, and never stopped. Apparently, one can be a doctor and a writer at the same time. "A doctor listens, a writer imparts. The two are compatible."
At 17, the young Marc was off to the United States as an exchange student under a program sponsored by the American Field Service. He lived with a family in Bloomington, Minn. (just outside Minneapolis); he's stayed in touch with his American hosts. The experience immunized him from the drier aspects of French academia. He wanted to learn to type, for example, and an American school taught him to type. No one in his French high school could type, nor could anyone in medical school back in France. Even before his exchange year, he thought he knew a lot about America thanks to comic books, detective stories and movies; today, he is an authority on American prime-time series such as E.R. He's so much an authority on another series, Law and Order, that the article he wrote on the show and its producer for a French magazine was translated into English for Law and Order's Web site.
He is fascinated by the plots, by the way stories get told in the series. "American prime time television shows are the only examples of narration I know where characters and viewers grow old together." In much the same way, he reads American short stories "for the narrative."
He has two favorite writers, Georges Perec and Isaac Asimov. "Any subject that interests them is fair game for a book, which is very different from what the French usually think. Perec also grew up on comics and assumed that he'd never be a writer because of that." Winckler never met Perec, but it shouldn't be a surprise that he took over Perec's job as French translator of American ex-patriate Harry Mathews, a writer of experimental thrillers. He read David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress for his French publisher, urged its publication and became its translator.
Along the way, he accumulated pages of a novel in manuscript which he now believes will never be published, at least not in its present form. It tells not one but half a dozen stories, of half a dozen possible lives. One of his characters is a fine writer who has stopped writing--"as if Perec had lived longer but without working." (Perec died at 46, and worked right up to the end, his death coming from lung disease.) Another character is a writer who has never stopped writing, but destroys his work as he creates it. The book is even longer than The Case of Dr. Sachs, which may be the reason it scared off his French publisher. "Let it be your Jean Santeuil," the publisher suggested--referring to Proust's apprenticeship novel, which remained unpublished during the author's lifetime.
Not to worry. Martin Winckler does have several more feasible projects in the works, one of which is a memoir-biography of himself and his father, in which he mixes fact and fiction, as Sartre did in Les Mots (Words).
But first, he's finishing a history and analysis of American television series of the past decade. Possible title: "Mirror of Reality."
