Renée by Ludovic Debeurme

A dozen or so years ago, I covered Ludovic Debeurme's engrossing but dark bande desinée Lucille. At the time, I praised the story of two young doomed lovers, noted that a sequel Renée had already been published in France, and expressed some hope that, given the sequel, they were not perhaps as doomed as they seemed to be.

Reader, I was wrong. They are much more doomed than I thought. And many other people are also doomed, in this larger, multi-threaded story of violence, despair, unhealthy love, and generational trauma.

Debeurme tells the story of Renée much as he did Lucille - thin-lined, vignetted drawings, floating on his large open pages without borders, with minimal words for the first hundred or more pages of the book. (It's unpaginated, but looks to be three hundred pages or so.) He doesn't name most of his characters on first appearance, and some of them not at all - but we do learn, by the end, the names and connections of all of the major characters, if we pay close attention.

There are basically four strands: two women and two men. Lucille and Renée, Lucille's now-incarcerated boyfriend Arthur (who was Vladimir in the first book, and there's a brief explanation of that here) and an unnamed boy with a twisted face.

Parenthetically, Debeurme makes a lot of his characters - mostly just minor background people, though - exceptionally ugly in this story. There's a whole imagistic section in the middle about that, in fact. Occasionally at the Basil Wolverton level, with some creepy transformations and images mostly used as transitions, but most of the time recognizable normal people in a normal world, who are not attractive in the slightest bit in any way.

Debeurme moves among these four strands constantly, back and forth. For close to a hundred pages, the reader isn't really clear on who any of them are, and how they all connect doesn't come clear until the very end. And, again, their names appear only sparsely, generally later in the book. But here's who they are, and what they're dealing with:

• Lucille is living with her mother, trying to rebuild a normal life after the events of Lucille and to recover from an eating disorder.
• Arthur is in prison because of what he did in that book.
• The unnamed boy is dead; we learn his story late in the book.
• Renée is in a tumultuous love affair with a married jazz musician, Pierre. They both are demanding in different, unfortunate, unhelpful ways, and readers may suspect they are not good for each other at all.

The strands overlap and combine as the book goes on: Renée and Lucille meet very late in the story, Arthur gets a new cellmate who is related to another character, which leads to another moment of shocking violence for him.

It all comes out badly, for nearly everyone. I don't know if Debeurme is always a storyteller of despair and death and hideous grotesques and broken people lashing out at each other, but that's what you'll find in Renée, and, as I remember, Lucille was much the same. If that's what you're looking for, at this darkest time of the year, this is exactly that.