Since my discovery of Gerald Murnane via Barley Patch in 2015 I’ve been drawn increasingly to prose works which straddle the line between fiction and Since my discovery of Gerald Murnane via Barley Patch in 2015 I’ve been drawn increasingly to prose works which straddle the line between fiction and autobiography, and in some ways, Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London is the quintessence of these, and the work I have read which is closest in tone to my own experiments in “autofiction”.
Autofiction. I remember my skepticism when I first heard that word. Did we really need a trendy descriptor for what, if it simply meant another “I” novel, was probably the most prevalent and uncreative genre among beginner writers? But if autofiction means, as I hope it does, an “I” novel that interrogates itself, that examines, like Murnane or Roubaud, the process of writing about oneself (the tricks played by memory and by the pen, the inadequacy of language to transmit experiences, etc) then I think it’s useful, so long as it doesn’t exclude those writers (like Murnane, like Roubaud) who venture outside of its dictates, who treat it as a trait and not genre.
Briefly then, The Great Fire of London, as well as being autofiction, is a book, like fellow Oulipan Marcel Benabou’s Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, about the absence of a book – about a book which never came into being. Or so it claims. Meanwhile, and to my mind more convincingly, it’s the automatic, diaristic, daily writing exercise of a man grieving, or refusing to grieve, for his young dead wife, and desperate to make of this exercise something meaningful. And it’s fascinating to see, close-up and transparent, the processes through which Roubaud’s thought journeys on its way to believing that his project is a novel. Can it be? That these apparently random missives (though only apparently random since Roubaud’s, as he has claimed in interviews, is an Oulipan work of planned constraints, even if those constraints are mostly not visible) – can it be that these missives on anything from the texture of croissants to his childhood in Languedoc to the making of jelly, the layout of his kitchen, his liking of English women writers, his status as walker, swimmer, reader, lover and professor of arcane poetic forms – can it be that all of this is more than the sum of its parts, a novel? We see Roubaud’s struggle to believe it, see him gain confidence as the pages amass, and ultimately, in a pivotal section which I’ll admit I found virtually unreadable, we witness (what purports to be) a point-by-point quasi-mathematical breakdown of everything that the inchoate “The Great Fire of London” (as opposed to the completed The Great Fire of London) might have been and isn’t. For me, an unnecessary exercise and one that increased my belief neither in the viability of the project or in the loss to literature of that project’s non-existence.
What is or was “The Great Fire of London”? A book conceived of by Roubaud after waking from a dream, a simple dream which he relates here many times, and whose power and significance I never quite grasped. Is the dream – of another woman and another city – emblematic of all that might have been but isn’t? Is it symbolic, even, of fiction? I don’t know, and honestly I’m not much interested. I’m not even sure that the concept helped give his book unity. It seemed a stretch, maybe even a con, though whether Roubaud was conning the reader, himself, or both I’m unsure. Also the famed “bifurcations” and “interpolations” did little for me; I found the format unwieldy and many of the sections unnecessary, either in that I could have lived without them or that I could happily have seen them subsumed in the main body text. That said, I appreciate the transparency of their placement as I appreciate Roubaud’s transparency throughout. And if, as Murnane would claim, a book’s narrator is both its main character and its most valuable invention then The Great Fire of London is a success. It gave me a vivid, intimate glimpse of the life, thought and, to a degree, passions of a character named Jacques Roubaud, who in many ways (his appreciation for the anonymous booklined idyll that is his experience of London, for example) was both illuminating and familiar.
An inspiring work whose most enduring image may well be of the solitary writer at his desk in the pre-dawn hours, this is in some ways the great writers’ handbook, though maybe paradoxically only when Roubaud stops discussing his writing, or at least his grand conceptions of it. The lesson: write what you can, not what you can conceive of. A lesson that, maybe, was hard-won for Jacques Roubaud....more
In the beginning, a short sentence. Only half a dozen words; simple words, the first to come along, or almost the first. Assigned above all to mean th
In the beginning, a short sentence. Only half a dozen words; simple words, the first to come along, or almost the first. Assigned above all to mean that here ends a silence.
Okay, you got me. That’s good advice: “the first to come along, or almost the first”. And “here ends a silence” – that’s poetry! Not that it’s anything new, mind, but Maurice Bénabou doesn’t make that claim.
I am of course a bit late in joining the cohort of those who make the book the subject of their books, who make writing the theme of what they have written.
Hence his paralysis – or near-paralysis. Hence his self-questioning. Here is a man who, it seems, has read one of everything; who knows and anticipates and forsakes all the tricks writers use to make spells of their books; who, at times, believed himself incapable – because too critical – of such magic. Starting from the certainty – or apparent certainty – of his calling, he then proceeded by reduction, deleting from his conception of his work everything that had precedent. There wasn’t much left. And ultimately, all he can do is describe the book that could have been, if all his restrictive parameters were fulfilled, via another book – this book – that is, inevitably, a compromise.
Of all the obscure, or in any event poorly elucidated, facts of my past, the most surprising for me is still this one: why did I come to believe one day that I should write? A simple, seemingly obvious question, yet it took me a long time to feel the need to ask it of myself. It was only after a first long series of aborted attempts that doubt as to the validity of my “calling” appeared and that I came to wonder about the origins of what, until then, I had considered a kind of determination independent of my will. But after that questioning commenced, it did not cease; indeed, at certain times the better part of my work consisted of responding to it.
Ah! Now (though again, such work is far from without precedent) we’re getting somewhere! Though Bénabou claims allegiance with Raymond Roussel, this positions him, for me, with Beckett. And, to me, it’s this struggle – to account for his writing, to justify it, to excuse it even – that gives his book depth. Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, surprisingly, and despite all clues to the contrary (the familiar “playful” self-reflexiveness, the likewise playful direct address to the reader, the tortured convolutions of many of its playful sentences), is heavy, not least because it appears to have been born from suffering. Yet because of its author’s extreme distaste for such things, it never becomes, more than periferally, a sufferer’s memoir.
I, after all, is only a word like any other, a simple tool – useful at times – with which it is not forbidden to play, provided, however, that the game does not, as sometimes happens, lead to self-idolatry.
No danger of that here. Never, despite Bénabou’s canny observation that even self-mockery is a form of self-veneration, does he share more than is strictly necessary to convey the central dilemma that drives the book – a dilemma which, consequently, appears as close to universal as is possible. It’s all familiar, at least to this fellow self-questioner (who also hasn’t written any, or has written very few, of his books): at one point he even describes, in a short paragraph, his quasi-Pessoan detour through multiple personas, a phase which I’d been certain was hardly unique to Pessoa but of which, maybe, only those who do not write (or at any rate publish) their books have the luxury.
Bénabou, in other words, is a fellow traveller, an underachiever made good who bequeathes us, if nothing else, the story of his Sysiphan labours. Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books is a slim book (or “non-book”, as Bénabou would have it) but it’s significant, because it takes us a step closer to a complete, complex, coherent archetype of heroic literary failure. And call me crazy, but in a world full to bursting with books, I say we need a few more non-books. With The Book of Disquiet, with Beckett’s Watt, with Robert Walser’s The Robber, Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books stakes out, boldly, almost despite itself, new territory. Vast territory; all Bénabou’s done, virtually, is put a fence around it. And while his non-book appears to be just more “writing about writing”, it is actually – subtly, deftly, movingly – about something else entirely: namely, Bénabou, the modest perfectionist, who would rather he’d never had to write about himself at all. ...more
These are effective stories, neat and well-wrought, but I can’t imagine they’re central to Bove’s ouevre. Really, I bought this book on impulse, on thThese are effective stories, neat and well-wrought, but I can’t imagine they’re central to Bove’s ouevre. Really, I bought this book on impulse, on the strength of its cover, the ostensible link with Robert Walser (he’s namechecked in the blurb) and the introduction by Goodreads friend/acquaintance Donald Breckenridge. Well, the cover’s great – I love Arp and that combination of greys/blues. As to Walser, he’s here, but peripheral: underdogs in rented walk-ups abound, and tortured (in Bove’s case paranoiac) love affairs, but the sense of a wilful unhinged mind spinning in unpredictable ellipses is absent. Instead, each story narrows, relentless, to its target. Some – “Night Crime”, “What I Saw”, “Is it a Lie” – ride a fine, haunting line between subjective and objective that lifts them somewhere near the realm of Walser; others – “Night Visit” – I found slightly banal. In all, my impression was less of an adventurer on the fringes than of a tenured professional, subdued and tasteful, whose stories could slot neatly into any number of “Best of...” European anthologies, whose prose is a marvel of compression and focus, but who could never chill or freeze the blood like Walser, Poe (there’s a similarity, especially in the title story) or Beckett (the other name dropped here, whose recommendation of Bove, I forgot to say, was the clincher). And Donald Breckenridge’s introduction? It’s skilfully done, a briefer, denser version of a standard NYRB/Penguin/what have you template, but without that spark of irreverance I guess I was hoping for from a Goodreads “amateur”. But then, Mr Breckenridge, like Bove, may well be a professional. Overall, an intriguing but slightly underwhelming package, at least on first reading. All surface? Or the clear lines of stained glass with shadows beneath? I guess I’d have liked more a dive into the shadows. “Night Crime” was promising; the others were a little too opaque. ...more
Mount Analogue may be the book that broke this reviewer’s back. What to say of it, but that it’s brief – tragically brief, given Daumal must have knowMount Analogue may be the book that broke this reviewer’s back. What to say of it, but that it’s brief – tragically brief, given Daumal must have known he was racing the clock – and immense? And in fact, its brief immensity is almost fitting, because (if not for a few nods by the narrator to a known future early on, undermined in any case by the switch to a diarist’s present tense in Chapter 4) what better way for this impossible adventure to end than in mid-sentence, on the slopes of the mountain? That said, I (and, I’m sure, most of Daumal’s readers) would have loved to see beyond the foothills, and when I first realised I’d see no further I was near inconsolable; on reaching the last line I turned to the first and began again. Yet even a second reading has little clarified my impressions – ironic, given Daumal’s own narrative is nothing if not clear. And it’s this clarity – fearless, given the esoteric nature of the topics it gazes upon – that, paradoxically, imparts to Mount Analogue its near-endless seeming mystical/mysterious power.
Point 1, then: Mount Analogue describes a spiritual quest, but one which proceeds by scientific – or quasi-scientific – deduction. This science, or quasi-science, abounding in paradox, provides thrills and high entertainment thanks to its practitioner’s “methodological principal, which consists of assuming the problem solved and deducing from this solution all the consequences that flow logically from it.” Thus is the absurdity of a mountain higher than Everest, which has never appeared on any map, explained by the curvature of space and light, which render it invisible to all except those approaching from the west at sunset. And when the crew of the Impossible make that approach, in a bravura use of white space, Daumal simply starts a new chapter:
A long wait for the unknown dampens the force of surprise.
To me, this is one of many small miracles in this small miracle of a book, which I first heard of 10-15 years ago; which I sought – not urgently but steadily, almost subconsciously – those several years; and to which, now that I’ve found it (six Australian dollars on a dusty Sydney shelf), I defer as to a literary/spiritual cornerstone the likes of Hesse’s Journey to the East, Kafka’s The Castle or the best of Poe’s tales, which in one sense – the literary – seem Daumal’s clear forerunners, yet in another sense – the spiritual – seem hardly related at all. Point 2: Daumal, on the strength of these 70 tantalising, frustrating, unresolved pages, is an idol.
The different branches of the symbolic had been my favorite study for a long time – I naively believed that I understood something about the subject; furthermore, as a mountaineer I had a passionate love of the mountains. The consequence of these two very different kinds of interest in the same subject, mountains, had colored certain passages of my article with a definite lyricism. (Such conjunctions, incongruous as they may seem, play a large part in the genesis of what is called poetry. I offer this remark as a suggestion to critics and aestheticians attempting to shed light on the depths of this mysterious language.)
Point 3: Mount Analogue, mysterious as it is, by defining both its protagonist’s quest and its author’s, contains the means to its own solution. Or might have done, if it were finished. In any case, it makes sense, plainly and openly, while attempting to plumb the deepest mysteries of life and of art.
If I’ve said little here, if what I’ve said is confused, it’s because my view of my own Mount Analogue obscures my view of others’. But that view – mine, my own quest – is, for now, all-important. As Daumal’s narrator says (when the members of his expedition consider postponing their ascent of the mountain in order to broaden their fields of knowledge in the town below), there’s a time to nail “that nasty owl of intellectual cupidity” to the door. Others (Jimmy, Eddie, Nate) have written here, eloquently, of Daumal’s masterpiece. My Overlook Press edition includes a 17-page introduction by a scholar (Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt) far more knowledgeable than I am. All I can add is that it’s for real, this Mount Analogue thing: if a book is an engine for igniting sparks, it’s incendiary. Leave your owl at the door....more
In many ways, judging by Aunt Rachel, this guy should be Metafiction 101, Ground Zero for an understanding of that term and its importance. And in manIn many ways, judging by Aunt Rachel, this guy should be Metafiction 101, Ground Zero for an understanding of that term and its importance. And in many ways, I wish I’d read him earlier. Back when I first read Thomas Bernhard, for eg, maybe I’d have devoured him as I did Bernhard. Back when I was looking for someone, someone to keep talking and talking and then to shut up when I wanted, and then to start up again at the exact same intensity as if without pause, without my missing a beat because the beat is just so propulsive you can’t miss it, and it DOES NOT stop. Federman, like Bernhard, is that guy. Aunt Rachel, like Correction or Woodcutters, seems one long fast-spinning spiral, though where Bernhard spirals ever inward like a whirlpool, Federman spirals outward, shooting sparks, like a comet. Part of his life-urge, I guess, his joi de vivre; pretty much opposite to Bernhard’s death-wish, come to think of it. But I don’t think it was the death-urge that drew me to Bernhard; in some ways, he was an ill fit, despite that I love the vitriol. Federman, too, despite the vitriol, is a slightly ill fit for me: his ruddy sexed-up con-artist come-on is just a bit too Bukowski. But the way he keeps spinning and spinning, that’s gold, if you’re in the mood to get dizzy, of course.
But the meta thing – what was I saying? Oh yeah. You know, I learned a lot from Aunt Rachel about what “meta” could be: not the animating of cardboard cut-outs because, y’know, it’s all just a story (which is probably, I now realise, a popular debased form of meta anyway), but the necessary distancing of the true-seeming narrator (as opposed to the cardboard narrator) from recollected true-seeming events. All – at least in Aunt Rachel – pretty straightforward really, less interested in acrobatics than in play, than in freedom, the freedom to double back, try again, develop the routine before an audience rather than hidden backstage. The effect, says Federman, is something like jazz. Well maybe. I say it’s like leaving the sketchlines in the portrait.
And even though I stalled halfway through, put it down for months, and have read to the five-sixths mark sporadically hardly daring to guess when I’ll finish – despite that, I like it, I like it fine, and I’m far from worried, anyway, that I’m missing something, or that the end will shock me and I’ll just go “Huh?!”, because I know “the end” will just be a short break for air, that – just like Bernhard – Federman writes the one book, or variations on it, with ever that incessant circling rhythm marching on and on.
Read Federman for straight-talking no-shit metafiction. (Look at me, here I am writing that word – metafiction (I said it again!) – without quotation marks!) Not a subgenre I’m familiar with (the no-shit part, anyway), but Federman makes it look inevitable, and makes the most compelling case I’ve encountered (aside from Gerald Murnane’s) for its inclusion – this technique – in the standard toolbox of the modern writer. Meta-fixin’....more
Of this I am sure: only an intolerable, impossible ordeal can give an author the means of achieving that wide-ranging vision that readers weary of the
Of this I am sure: only an intolerable, impossible ordeal can give an author the means of achieving that wide-ranging vision that readers weary of the narrow limitations imposed by convention are waiting for.
(Georges Bataille, Author’s Foreword, 1957.)
In Blue of Noon as in all his fictions – though, to my knowledge, Blue of Noon is his most explicitly personal – Georges Bataille put his money where his mouth was. Agree with his manifesto or not (and I’ll admit the older I get the more restrictive it seems, the less adventurous, the less admirable) you can’t miss his singleminded dedication to it, which gives his best work a thrust normally felt in thrillers, though it is powered almost entirely by this strange writer’s obsessions. True, it’s not just the suffering but his warped take on sex that’ll compell you, but in Blue of Noon, like Hitchcock, he seems to have perfected unseen-fuelled suspense, and there’s no need to explicate what is manifest in his characters’ actions.
In London, in a cellar, in a neighbourhood dive – the most squalid of unlikely places – Dirty was drunk. Utterly so. I was next to her (my hand was still bandaged from being cut by a broken glass). Dirty that day was wearing a sumptuous evening gown (I was unshaven and unkempt). As she stretched her long legs, she went into a violent convulsion. The place was crowded with men, and their eyes were getting ominous; the eyes of these perplexed men recalled spent cigars. [...] Drunkenness had committed us to dereliction, in pursuit of some grim response to the grimmest of compulsions.
What I love about Bataille is his clearsightedness. And his resolve: to tell the truth about the processes at work on his dissolute narrator (a truth which we presume, and Bataille does as much as acknowledge, he could only know by having endured it) even at the nadir of that barely-sketched character’s infamy. Blue of Noon revolves around the axis of humiliation. In scene after scene we witness the urge to humiliate in the hurt and unhappy – in the narrator (Troppmann), whose failed marriage has led him via a series of prostitutes to an impotent codependence with the cruel but beautiful (or, in his eyes, beautiful because cruel) Dirty, and then into bored victimising of the lost Xenie. That despite himself he’s drawn also into the orbit of the would-be revolutionary Lazare (though more because he requires “a bird of ill omen” to keep him company than from any social conscience, which would be trite) seems merely another instance of his bullying, since one thing he knows in his bones is that Europe is doomed, and every time he purges himself in confession to this good Christian virgin he can’t help but shock her with doom-laden pronouncements out of shame at his own helplessness. It’s ugly, but powerful. He’s far, far from a hero, but equally no villain, no death’s head, no gargoyle. What Bataille does here – and I don’t think it’s been done often – is reveal just how vulnerable a cruel man can be. Sensitive too. And aware of his own cruelty. All of which just compounds his suffering.
For readers of the 2001 Penguin edition (and probably the 2012 edition), Will Self pens an impressive introduction, comparing the novel to an out-of-control car. “It is as if some cloaca God were to descend to someone who was labouring on the torture throne of constipation, and deliver them a laxative balm.” He also compares “Bataille’s own view of lust as an annihilator of human difference [...] to the way the Nazis’ lust for power threatened humanity with annihilation.” (Blue of Noon is set, in various European cities, in the lead-up to the Second World War.)
For those unfamiliar with Bataille, The Story of the Eye is (in English) his most famous work, though My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man (a novel and two short works published by Marion Boyars in 1989 and 1995, and again by Penguin in 2012) is equally rich, startling and powerful. His Eroticism also comes highly recommended, but I started to grow away from his vision before I read it and have only revisited him recently from an urge to consolidate that period and set something of it in writing. Call him an influence but not a favourite. Brilliant because unique, because so few have attempted what he attempts. But doomed to circle the same terrain ad nauseum, much as it may be his own....more
I didn’t get this. A “gutpunch”, as one reader would have it? Hell, maybe all that core-conditioning in karate is paying off, cos my guts were unscathI didn’t get this. A “gutpunch”, as one reader would have it? Hell, maybe all that core-conditioning in karate is paying off, cos my guts were unscathed. Me, I found this dry, vapid, very tenuous. The link between the two strands I found slight, the link between the first and second halves of the second strand (ie, the Land-of-W part) non-existent, the whole thing half-baked though not a bad (if risky) idea in theory. Oh, and I thought the analogy (olympics to concentration camp) was a stretch. The thing that can’t be spoken? Maybe I’m too literal-minded, but I’ll take Borowski’s version any day: that is some kind of gutpunch. But then, as I say, I just didn’t get this. Perec, clearly, is some kind of a genius, along with his mentor Queneau (whom I also don’t get). No sarcasm here, it’s just that apparently my temperament doesn’t sit right with theirs. I’ve only read one short Perec piece besides this one (a novella, Which Moped with Chrome-plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard?, which I didn’t much like either), and some fragments of the User’s Manual, so chances are I haven’t cracked his emotional code yet. But will I ever? The fussiness on display in what I’ve read so far suggests otherwise, but never say never....more
A few moments later a strange equipage drew up in front of the glass doors: an outlandish old farm wagon with rounded panels and moulded ornaments; an
A few moments later a strange equipage drew up in front of the glass doors: an outlandish old farm wagon with rounded panels and moulded ornaments; an aged white horse with head bent so low that he seemed to be hoping to find grass in the road; and in the driving seat―I say it in the simplicity of my heart, well knowing what I say―perhaps the most beautiful young woman that ever existed in the whole world.
For the first half of Le Grand Meaulnes I was well-nigh intoxicated by the air of romance as it’s only breathed in youth: from the arrival of the singleminded adventurous Meaulnes (a less angry proto-James Dean as Jim Stark) in the cloistered village schoolroom to his inadvertent discovery of the mysterious “domain” where he meets the abovementioned beautiful young woman, despite challenges to credibility that a lesser story would have collapsed under, I bought it all, surprised and touched by my own softheartedness. But from the moment (p142 in my Penguin edition) when the narrator’s aunt meets a “young man” with “face so white and so pretty that it was frightening” I began, rapidly, to wake from the trance, having guessed the “dark secret” around which the book kept circling. Which isn’t to say I didn’t like it, only that where earlier I’d wondered how Alain-Fournier, at age 27, could possibly have conceived it, by its end I’d relegated its sorceror-author back to the realm of mortals, able to enchant through a rare mix of lucidity and young ardour but constrained by the young man’s love of mystery stories to make of his modern fairytale a convoluted puzzle with pat ending. Still, I’ll take Meaulnes over Werther, over Raymond Radiguet, over Hamsun’s Victoria, because when Meaulnes is on he’s every young man’s fearless alter ego, and his Lost Domain the ultimate young man’s dream―a masked ball where children rule over adults and a never-to-be-forgotten young woman presides―but one from which he never awakes. At first, as I delved deeper into that domain, I feared that Alain-Fournier would pull the ground from under me (“It was all a dream,” he’d say), or that he’d strain my faith in him too far. But no, he brought me down gently, and for that alone he’s a genius. So he then contorts himself in plot-twists? I forgive him, because somewhere in here is an archetype awaiting (re?)birth. Whether its author knew it or not, Le Grand Meaulnes strays magically close to perfection. In the relationship of its hero to its narrator, in the mirror-images of Meaulnes/Frantz and Yvonne/Valentine, in its tightrope straddling of the line between childhood and adulthood, fantasy and realism, this flawed novel hints at a deep well of intuited meaning. That its young author chose a mystery story to convey that essence doesn’t bother me; that he let the form distort the essence does. Never mind! One day, I’ll read just the first half. Until then, long live the Lost Domain! Long live Yvonne de Galais! Long live le grand Meaulnes!...more
OK, I get it. Finally a Queneau I can relate to! Yeah, the translation is wobbly – beset by insurmountable challenges from the get-go. But because expOK, I get it. Finally a Queneau I can relate to! Yeah, the translation is wobbly – beset by insurmountable challenges from the get-go. But because experimentation is front and centre the wobbly English is excused, expected, acquires charm from striving after the impossible. (Still and all, translating ‘Paysan’ with ‘West Indian’ seemed random and misguided to me. Maybe some permutations could simply have been dropped?) Anyway I’m not sure what depth there is here, but there’s laughs, and it’s thought-provoking, especially for those who toil over words and descriptions. I like ‘Passive’:
It was midday. The bus was being got into by passengers. They were being squashed together. A hat was being worn on the head of a young gentleman...
‘Metaphorical’ is good too:
In the centre of the day, tossed among the shoal of travelling sardines in a coleoptera with a big white carapice...
But ‘Mathematical’ takes the cake:
In a rectangular parallepiped moving along a line representing an integral solution of the second-order differential equation:
y” + PPTB(x)y’ + S = 84
two homoids (of which only one, the homoid A, manifests a cylindrical element of length L>N encircled by two sine waves of period pi immediately below its crowning hemisphere)...
So it goes. Read ’em three at a time and you’ll be fine. But cover to cover? You’re done for....more
I haven't had much luck with French writers lately. Queneau, Vian, Topor - sometimes I'd just as soon exchange them all for a couple of books by Jean I haven't had much luck with French writers lately. Queneau, Vian, Topor - sometimes I'd just as soon exchange them all for a couple of books by Jean Giono, so different in tone to these zero-gravity fantasies, or for those pre-surrealists like Nerval and Gautier who really seemed to be trailblazing, not just opening up side-trails to dead ends and minor attractions. Roland Topor may be a great artist, but The Tenant, to me, is strictly sideline - something for the master to doodle in the margins of whatever real work he was doing at the time. Georges Bataille asked: 'How can we linger over books to which their authors have manifestly not been driven?' 'Linger' over The Tenant we - or at least I - cannot. Aside from a single unusual quirk of subject matter (crossdressing), handled in a bizarre and possibly meaningless fashion, there is nothing to suggest deep feeling here. Now me, I like this brand of hallucinatory cartoon thriller, if it moves me, but I don't need it to come from Paris; I'll take Bioy Casares' The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata over this any day, because its characters interact in ways that reveal their unique characteristics, and events pile one on top of the other rather than lying flat and scattered like so much rubble. I've no doubt the Polanski film is a good one, but we all know the best movies don't always come from the best books....more
I don't know what this book is about and I don't understand what's great about it. I've made it the requisite 50% of the way through but, finding myseI don't know what this book is about and I don't understand what's great about it. I've made it the requisite 50% of the way through but, finding myself now completely indifferent to how it ends, I'm going to put it aside. Maybe it's too subtle for me in the hyper-emotional state in which I find myself, or maybe I'll just never relate to such an apparently lightweight, whimsical and banally dialogue-driven way of telling a tale. ...more
I'm rarely impressed by 'encyclopaedic' novels or 'maximalism'. The truth is I don't know if we have the luxury of them - or rather, we do, but for hoI'm rarely impressed by 'encyclopaedic' novels or 'maximalism'. The truth is I don't know if we have the luxury of them - or rather, we do, but for how long? The success of McCarthy's The Road convinces me that I'm not alone in this. What will happen if there's a nuclear war, if societies break down, if schools and computers and language don't function, except for the sake of the privileged, and the privileged are few? 'Fear the man of one book,' the saying goes, but what if one book is all you can carry? The novel, in its brick-like nineteenth- and twentieth-century form, is suited to the settled house-dweller, who need only carry it from the bookcase to the armchair. But what of the man or woman or child on the road? I sometimes imagine an anthology for those unfortunates, made up of stories from across the world: a bag of seeds, a literary Noah's ark, to keep imagination alive in that place of harsh realities. Beckett, without a doubt, would be central to that anthology, and any one of the three pieces in Nohow On could suggest the scope and thrust of his achievement. True, by this stage his characters are rarely on the road, but surely in the dark time maybe-to-come not everyone will be traveling; as Ian Curtis sings in Joy Division's 'Ice Age', they may 'live in holes and disused shafts / hopes for little more'. Beckett is the great celebrator of 'hopes for little more'. The critic A. Alvarez called him (I'm paraphrasing) a cultivator of what would grow in a void, but crucially this void is something not just described, but that his prose embodies. Perhaps by virtue of its having been written in French and translated by its author into English, there's a sense that, however contorted it becomes, this prose is as close to universal as is possible - as shorn of adornment and as streamlined as an arrow that must pass through the skins of cultures. And it isn't shot from a void, obviously, but the void is all around and edging closer, as the circle of given words and actions ever narrows. I'll confess to being baffled that this near-to-terminal (ie: near impossible-to-follow) work should be called 'modernism' while work which seems nostalgic and retrograde, centred on a reinvocation of pre-modern forms, is called 'post-modern'. Still, in a sense the term 'post-modern' suggests a turning back, because what else is there to do after the new? Or so it may seem. Beckett proves the lie to this, though, by gazing over the precipice of the collapse of culture that almost was and could be and documenting what small beauty he finds there. As timeless as any art can be, his brand of modernism may well be something that (like rock 'n' roll?) never dies, and cannot be limited by any movement that supposedly supercedes it. Trust me, when it's dark and you're footsore and the lantern is almost out of oil but you want a human voice to ease you into sleep, he won't let you down. Maybe the post-modernists are right, and the world will keep ever-complicating itself as we hide away in our loungerooms with walls of books and computers and flat-screen TVs being bombarded by information. But just in case, there is Nohow On. There it is, there it will always be, a life in a few short pages, eternity in a grain of sand....more
I struggled through about half of this because I was traveling and didn't have anything else to read, but I found it absolutely flat, opaque and affecI struggled through about half of this because I was traveling and didn't have anything else to read, but I found it absolutely flat, opaque and affectless. Wondering if I'd missed something through lack of attention, when I got back to Australia I gave it to my dad to read, and his response was the same, despite his tastes being fairly different to mine. This just seems a clear case of overreach: Le Clezio doesn't have the requisite empathy with his (mostly black, African, poor) characters and the result is tedious and empty. Or so it seems to me....more
I didn't see the point of this. The style is dry, sterile, the type of writing that fetishises objects in an attempt to create 'realism'. Nor do any oI didn't see the point of this. The style is dry, sterile, the type of writing that fetishises objects in an attempt to create 'realism'. Nor do any of the characters really seem to interact. And despite the protagonist's moving restlessly across the map it all seemed somehow intrinsically static, as if what movement there was were just currents on the surface and the depths remained still. Well-executed, yes, as far as it went, but to me that didn't seem very far. Anyone who thinks this 'outdoes' Camus either hasn't read The Plague or reads for very different reasons to me....more
Lately I've been reading a lot about the craft of fiction - James Wood's How Fiction Works, Paris Review interviews, even Stephen King's On Writing - Lately I've been reading a lot about the craft of fiction - James Wood's How Fiction Works, Paris Review interviews, even Stephen King's On Writing - but this is something different, not so much about craft as philosophy, and as original and insightful as pretty much anything I've read on subject of the novel. Here is Kundera talking about Goethe's concept of Die Weltliteratur (World Literature):
For, open any textbook, any anthology: world literature is always presented as a juxtaposition of national literatures... as a history of literatures!...
And yet Rabelais, ever undervalued by his compatriots, was never better understood than by a Russian, Bakhtin; Dostoyevsky than by a Frenchman, Gide; Ibsen than by an Irishman, Shaw; Joyce than by an Austrian, Broch. The universal importance of the generation of great North Americans - Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos - was first brought to light by French writers ("In France I'm the father of a literary movement," Faulkner wrote in 1946, complaining of the deaf ear he encountered in his own country). These few examples are not bizarre exceptions to the rule; no, they are the rule: geographic distance sets the observer back from the local context and allows him to embrace the large context of world literature, the only approach that can bring out a novel's aesthetic value - that is to say: the previously unseen aspects of the existence that this particular novel has managed to make clear; the novelty of form it has found.
Do I mean by this that to judge a novel one can do without a knowledge of its original language? I do indeed mean exactly that! Gide did not know Russian, Shaw did not know Norwegian, Sartre did not read Dos Passos in the original. If the books of Witold Gombrowicz and Danilo Kis had depended solely on the judgement of people who read Polish and Serbo-Croatian, their radical aesthetic newness would never have been discovered.
Right on! I mean, hey, I divide up my shelves (on Goodreads and at home - when I have a home) by nationality; I find it more meaningful than alphabetical order. But Kundera's right, and it's a beautiful thing! A few pages later he talks about 'Antimodern Modernism':
"One must be absolutely modern," wrote Arthur Rimbaud. Some sixty years later Gombrowicz was not so sure...
In Ferdydurke, Gombrowicz got at the fundamental shift that occurred during the twentieth century: until then mankind was divided in two - those who sought to defend the status quo and those who sought to change it. Then the acceleration of History took effect: whereas in the past man had lived continuously in the same setting, in a society that changed only very slowly, now the moment arrived when he suddenly began to feel History moving beneath his feet, like a rolling sidewalk: the status quo was in motion! All at once, being comfortable with the status quo was the same thing as being comfortable with history on the move! Which meant that a person could be progressive and conformist, conservative and rebel, at the same time!
Attacked as a reactionary by Sartre and his bunch, Camus got off the famous remark about people who had "merely set down their armchairs facing in the direction of History"; Camus was right, but he did not know that the precious chair was on wheels...
That was when a certain number of Rimbaud's heirs grasped this extraordinary thing: today the only modernism worthy of the name is antimodern modernism.
Right on again! And sure, maybe it all seems obvious when it's set down so directly like this, but what greater feeling than having your own deeply-held convictions brought to light by someone who can express them so succinctly. The guy can write. Me, I read a lot of his stuff in my earlier twenties - I liked The Joke, and Unbearable Lightness... of course, but something in Immortality rang false to me and I stopped there. He was writing in French for the first time - maybe that was part of it. But here he's writing in French and this translation reads beautifully. I devoured this book - not a word I usually use and not always a recommendation. But in this case it made for maximum impact. I picked it up on a whim at the library; I dipped into it randomly, hunting out names like Gombrowicz just to hear them spoken of, then went back and retraced my steps with a bunch of post-it notes beside me. It's a philosophy of the novel - Milan Kundera's philosophy. But how much more thought-provoking, more inspiring than any 'how to' guide.
There were long periods when art did not seek out the new but took pride in making repetition beautiful, reinforcing tradition, and ensuring the stability of collective life... Then one day in the twelfth century, a church musician in Paris though of taking the melody of the Gregorian chant, unchanged for centuries, and adding to it a voice in counterpoint... Because they were no longer imitating what was done before, composers lost anonymity, and their names lit up like lanterns making a path toward distant realms. Having taken flight, music became, for several centuries, the history of music.
All the European arts, each in its turn, took flight that way, transformed into their own history. That was the great miracle of Europe: not its art, but its art become history.
Alas, miracles do not endure for long. What takes flight will one day come to earth. In anguish I imagine a time when art shall cease to seek out the never-said and will go docilely back into the service of the collective life that requires it to render repetition beautiful and help the individual merge, at peace and with joy, into the uniformity of being.
For the history of art is perishable. The babble of art is eternal.
Sisters and brothers, let us pray. Long live the history of art. Long live the novel....more
Boy, am I ever having a problem finishing books lately! This one has almost grabbed me, and I've made it to within 50 pages of its 230-page end, but IBoy, am I ever having a problem finishing books lately! This one has almost grabbed me, and I've made it to within 50 pages of its 230-page end, but I can't help noticing it's been almost grabbing me since I started it, with no increase in my interest since. Granted, it's hard to read when you've just fallen in love, with a woman with three rowdy sons, and moved house 1000kms, and when you're not absorbed in deep conversation or communion or trying to entertain or discipline children can hardly focus your thoughts for wondering and hoping and worrying about the future. BUT how glorious it would be to have a decent book to escape into now and then! And this too youthful, too loosely constructed, too ultimately mundane and unchallenging, ever-so-slightly tantalisingly dreamlike but in the final analysis cod-realist episodic novel is just not enough! At times - at times - it seems about to break its bonds and careen into unreality, but too quickly it's back behind the safety barrier, as if its author were afraid to break the mold he has selected for his fairly safe, fairly unoriginal and not very inspiring ruminations on Europe and civilisation between the two world wars. It's frustrating, because somewhere in here is the spark of something that could really come to life, rather than the cardboard shadowplay of talking heads - dense with ludicrous coincidences - that this monument to authorial indecision so often becomes. You want to know what it's like, try early Paul Auster with a slight bit more naturalness and less weirdness (and a lot more sociology, rudimentary as it is). It's almost interesting, but I can't help suspecting Szerb of wanting to pay the bills more than he wanted to get to the root of anything, despite the meaningful poses he has his cartoon characters striking in various picturesque locations throughout. The modernist Auster? That's a 3-star maximum, no matter how you cut it. Now for f**k's sake what can I read that will grab me?!...more
I just can't understand why Giono is not more well-known in English. In France he is, literally, a household name. Browse the secondhand bookstores anI just can't understand why Giono is not more well-known in English. In France he is, literally, a household name. Browse the secondhand bookstores and you'll find as many of his works as just about anyone's. Yet this book - one of his major works - has received only seven ratings here, and not one review!
Is the problem that Giono does not fit with our Anglo conception of French writing? Hyper-intellectual? Defiantly not. Cold, formal, racy, existential, surreal? Again, no. Not even satirical. For a culture almost synonymous with modernism - sophisticated, urban, permissive, centred on Paris - the France which the rest of the world sees via its literature can seem forbiddingly cool, and totally unlike the works of the unassuming Corsican banker from the mountains of Provence. In contrast, Giono is earthy, instinctual, sensual. There is intellect, but always in the service of something else - groping beyond the cage of human thought towards whatever there is in us that is animal. Nowhere is this more evident than in Two Riders of the Storm, a novel so deeply physical, so masculine it makes Hemingway seem cartoonish. In truth, it's been a while since I read this, and not much remains but the feeling of it as I lay up at nights in the rainy Sydney winter and gripped onto this world to remind me of something lacking in my (for me, unnatural) urban existence. The rain on the hillsides; the huge trees in the wind; the women in the kitchen cooking, baking and fretting while their husbands slog through the storm; the fire in the stove; the passion of the men to prove themselves, to live like men (again, a la Hemingway), but a doomed passion, a passion deeply-felt and yet perhaps almost alien to the gentle Giono, in whom there may well have run a deeply-feminine streak. (I say this because, despite the preponderence of masculine themes, his women also seem so alive.)
Giono - the writer of violent myths - was a pacifist, imprisoned by the French government for his attempts to speak out for peace between the wars, despite his having fought on the front lines in World War One. Possibly his greatest book, The Horseman on the Roof, is an adventure story about a hot-blooded young Italian colonel and expert swordsman who in 500 pages does not raise his sword against another man once, but instead spends his time in self-questioning and in acts of selflessness, having already enacted his one killing in the time before the book opens. When later, in the sequel, we witness him in action it is spectacular, revelatory, utterly moving, the opposite of some shoot-'em-up where the bad guys fall off-screen one after the other in a blaze of pyrotechnics and are forgotten. All of which is to say that when Giono writes of violence he feels it, feels it more deeply than almost anyone I am aware of, the same way he feels nature, which to him is both lyrical and terrible, a force of life and of death. I think of the opening to his Song of the World: the river at night and the two men dwarfed by it, searching, aware of its caprices and dangers, and the vast forest overhead. God, it's beautiful. Not a shred of irony in it, and yet so far from stupid. Spiritual.
Perhaps in the Anglo world Giono's biggest claim to fame is the praise he received from Henry Miller. 'I have been preaching the gospel of Giono,' Miller says in his Books in My Life: 'Like our own Faulkner, Giono has created his own private terrestrial domain, a mythical domain far closer to reality than books of history or geography. It is a region over which the stars and planets course with throbbing pulsations. It is a land in which things "happen" to men as aeons ago they happened to the gods. Pan still walks the earth. The soil is saturated with cosmic juices. Events "transpire". Miracles occur. And never does the author betray the figures, the characters, whom he has conjured out of the womb of his rich imagination.' Later he says: 'In Giono the music and the instrument are one... We no longer know, in reading his books, whether we are listening to Giono or ourselves. We are not even aware that we are listening.'
If you ask me, there can be no higher compliment. Giono, as he himself says in Blue Boy, is a man whose sensuousness has made him 'like a drop of water pierced by the sun'. And through his works we too can feel caressed by that sunlight - that animal, physical understanding....more
I gave it a try, and to be fair I'm often reading upwards of four books at a time so it wasn't as if I threw myself into it. But there's a basic skillI gave it a try, and to be fair I'm often reading upwards of four books at a time so it wasn't as if I threw myself into it. But there's a basic skill for storytelling that, four chapters in, Enard just doesn't seem to have. At first I wondered if it was me; to a certain extent, the style is compelling, the atmosphere strong, but gradually it becomes clear what is missing. Never does he linger on a scene. Everything's a whirl. Cut, cut, cut. And while this may seem impressive on the surface I question if it will ever take me deeper. Nor do I find the 'one sentence' ruse convincing - it really is as if he's gone through afterwards and taken out the full-stops; sometimes it's that obvious where they should be. And while occasionally it works, at other times it seems more like camouflage for clumsy, plain or hackneyed prose. I gave up after Chapter 4 because that was where Enard dropped his ruse and told it straight (the novel-within-the-novel section), and boy, that was dire. Here's your chance, man: simple declarative prose, unity of time and setting, give us some old-fashioned drama! But nah, he just has the character polish her gun for 8 pages while trying to distract us with lines like 'The Palestinians have gloriously resisted the Israeli army. The resistance continues. The glorious fight for the liberation of Palestine continues... She goes on playing mechanically with the rifle.' Now OK, fair enough, Thomas Bernhard does this kind of thing all the time - has a character sit in a chair for a whole novel, in fact. But Bernhard never lowers himself to uttering such banal prose. Beckett does the same, but he's a master - his every sentence is a joy. Who was it that said we trust Picasso because we know he could draw like Ingres? And both Bernhard and Beckett are focussed; Enard seems very far from focussed.
I wanted to like this. I like secret agents with briefcases on train journeys. I like ranting monologues. And Enard is my contemporary - born a year earlier. But I guess it all seems too obvious a grab at high-literary status: the subject matter, the style, the humourlessness (again, not a feature of either Bernhard or Beckett). Maybe I'll give it another shot. Maybe it's just the disparity between the ridiculous statement on the cover ('novel of the decade, if not the century') and the text inside. But at first glance it's a pretty big disparity. ...more
It's hard to know how to take this, mainly because I've never read anything quite like it. For this reason - its uniqueness - let's say it's good. AndIt's hard to know how to take this, mainly because I've never read anything quite like it. For this reason - its uniqueness - let's say it's good. And it is: fast-moving, convincing, entertaining. Fine writing it ain't, but it doesn't waste words and it doesn't feel as if it's unfolding to an agenda. On my edition (the Black Inc Australian one) an Australian woman critic calls it (or the film version) a story about 'women on top', and adds 'Vive le revolution!' But if you're looking for cathartic anti-male affirmative-action scenarios look elsewhere: the two psycho sex-addicts in Baise Moi don't care who they kill, man, woman or child, and they certainly have no manifesto. None, that is, except the absence of one. Killing for killing's sake - anything else is immoral. And there's something true in this, at least in the world of Baise Moi (or maybe in any fictional world - how I hate books with a clear-cut moral). A book with so much sex and violence could easily (like American Psycho) have bored or disgusted me, but not once did I feel this became gratuitous. And the characters? I liked them. Whether this book will leave a lasting impression on me I don't know, but for doing what it does with naturalness and raw grace I recommend it. ...more
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