A PREDATOR FINALLY BROUGHT TO BOOK
Consent: A Memoir Vanessa Springora
HarperVia £12.99
Does literature really excuse everything?’ ng?’ asks Vanessa Springora a in her memoir, a searing indictment of an overly permissive era that has triggered a national reckoning in France. Consent chronicles Springora’s teenage ge affair with Gabriel l Matzneff (right), an author whose brazen exaltation of sexual relationships with adolescents earned him fame as a provocateur.
In the 1970s, some liberals petitioned for the decriminalisation of adult-juvenile sexual activity. Matzneff exploited this cultural context, and the veneration of art over morality, by enshrining his predilections in literature; Springora argues that he wrote to secure impunity. His books – featuring letters proving the consent of his ‘muses’ – are ripostes to paedophilia accusations but fail to recognise that the vulnerability of these minors negates their consent.
Starved of paternal love, the 13-year-old Springora was intoxicated by Matzneff’s attention when they met at dinner with her mother. ‘G.’, aged 50, bombarded ‘V.’ with letters and invited her to his flat, where they became lovers when she was 14. Her mother – who som sometimes invited G. to dine à trois – and the poli police, although ale alerted, failed to in intervene. Suffering acute anxiety, V. broke with an increasingly manipulative G G., aged 15, y yet he haunted he her, publishing dis distorted retellings of th their relationship. The rap rape was twofold, a theft of a adolescence and identity. It took years of psychoanalysis to accept that she had been a victim, to rebuild trust. Books were tainted yet inescapable, and Springora is now director of the Paris publisher Julliard. In dialogue with literary history, she reclaims her story – threaded with allusions from Nabokov to Proust – challenging the elite on the very turf that shielded Matzneff. Shattering a prolonged, collective silence, Springora’s fierce and controlled account of systemic negligence has launched a rape investigation. Matzneff’s diaries have been withdrawn from bookshops. Finally, the predator is muzzled, caught ‘in his own trap’.