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Never having read Toussaint before, I had no idea what to expect when I opened up the latest of his works published by Dalkey Archive (they’ve published nine now, including The Truth about Marie, which was just longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award). Perhaps that’s a good way to approach this book, with no foreknowledge. But I’ll go on . . . Reticence (La Réticence, 1991; tr. from the French by John Lambert, 2012) turned out to be a wonderfully atmospheric and ambiguous tale about paranoia. It will frustrate many readers, but once I started playing along I found the whole thing enjoyable.
Review copy courtesy of Dalkey Archive.
In Reticence, a nameless narrator, thirty-three years old, has taken a holiday to the fictional island of Sasuelo. It’s the end of October, and he has with him his eight-month-old son. The story he tells begins with a disturbing omen — a dead cat is floating in the harbor — but otherwise all appears to be fine as our narrator walks around the town pushing his son in a stroller. The primary reason — if there is any reason — he went to Sasuelo was to see the Biaggis. Perhaps some old friends. Before he arrived, he sent them a letter, letting them know he’d be in town. But, now that he’s in town, he just can’t seem make that visit.
To a certain extent if I’d come to Sasuelo it was to see the Biaggis. Until now, however, held back by a mysterious apprehension, I’d always put off the moment of going to visit them and steered clear of the area around the house when I went for walks in the village. Even on the day of my arrival, when I was still planning on going over to their place as soon as I’d got settled into the hotel, I’d stayed in my room all afternoon. Two days had now gone by since then and I was starting to wonder at the fact that I hadn’t yet bumped into them in the village, even if I’d been careful to avoid their house every time I went out.
He does venture to the house eventually, but upon arrival he again felt some strange reticence and simply stood outside. He checked their mailbox and found that his letter had just been delivered. A way to keep his presence unknown, then, he takes back his letter along with a few of the others and leaves.
It’s about that time that we readers sense that something is not right here. After all, some of the narrator’s trips around the village, to the docks, and to the Biaggis’ are at night, and he leaves his son at the hotel. And just who are the Biaggis, and why does our narrator, who seemed to feel just fine visiting them, begin to feel apprehension at the thought of seeing them?
But Reticence gets more and more strange when, without any foundation, our narrator is convinced the Biaggis (or at least Paul Biaggi) are on to him, spying on him, even staying at the same hotel, the better to keep an eye on him:
Four tables had been occupied, which intrigued me because it seemed to me that there hadn’t been so many guests on other days. Could it be that someone who didn’t normally eat breakfast in the dining room came down today for the first time? Could it be that Biaggi – because I immediately thought of Biaggi – had come down to have breakfast in the dining room this morning? But if it was Biaggi, I thought, why had he come down precisely today for the first time? Why, if he was at the hotel, didn’t he have his breakfast brought up to his room as he must have done on the other days? Was he now indifferent to whether or not I knew he was staying at the hotel, or had he realized I’d cottoned on and given up trying to hide altogether?
Our narrator becomes more and more convinced something is amiss, that Biaggi, whom we haven’t seen, is getting closer and closer to him — again, though, why does this matter if he himself was planning on visiting the Biaggis on the first day he arrived at Sasuelo?
It’s a story filled with questions as the tension constantly builds. We readers know that the narrator is being irrational, but we go along with him (what else can we do — we know so little), suspecting something is amis but without any foundation. His paranoia becomes the hook that pulls us along. We see him begin a paragraph wondering if Biaggi was somewhere and end it with certainty, and we keep going, even sometimes forgetting ourselves that this narrator must be slightly unhinged, and here he is with an infant. Speaking of which, where is the mother?
If this sounds fun and interesting, I promise it is, but I must also proffer a warning: this is a book about atmosphere and paranoia, not about answers. I loved it. I was certainly worried for the narrator, but not for the reasons the narrator would hope. Then again, there are moments when the narrator seems to know what’s going on, and then he just keeps walking.
So, not knowing much about Toussaint going in, this book was certainly enough to build up my appetite. I now have another author I need to catch up with.
I believe that when some people see a book from, say, NYRB Classics, Open Letter, New Directions, or, as here, Dalkey Archive, they think it must be some inaccessible book that, while nice to read, is a chore. I’ve mentioned this before when I had a lunch with New Directions president Barbara Eppler and she mentioned her perception that readers thought New Direction books were “eat your vegetables” books. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth, and in a comment to that same post Amateur Reader said New Directions is not a produce vendor but a “confectioner.” That goes for the other publishers I mentioned too. To put it mildly, Nisard would have hated each of them.
The reason I went into that is because I’m worried some people in the mood for a bit of fun might turn away from the book I’m about to write about. The cover is very sober, somber. The main premise in the book is a bitter repudiation of a real-life 19th-century literary critic named Désiré Nisard. But Demolishing Nisard (Démolir Nisard, 2006; tr. from the French by Jordan Stump, 2011) is one of the funniest books I’ve read. It is a real treat that, if it were food, you’d feel guilty partaking.
Review copy courtesy of Dalkey Archive.
Then again, perhaps best you go into this book thinking it will be a grave account of one man’s wrestle with the past. I did. And the book’s first few sentences tend to support such a preconception.
According to Désiré Nisard, French literature fell into an irreversible decline with the death of Bossuet and the end of the seventeenth century, an opinion he expressed in 1835, so imagine how things must have gone downhill since, imagine the distaste he would surely have felt for this book, dating as it does from the early years of the twenty-first. And no, it will not be written in the style of the Latin classics so dear to his heart, but such a flaw would have been only the pretext seized upon by old two-face Nisard to justify his disdain: we’re not that naïve.
And — not that I wouldn’t welcome such a book — I couldn’t have been more pleased when I found just how much the narrator detested Nisard and just how eloquently he voices such revulsion:
He is the slime at the bottom of every fountain. Irretrievably, there has been Nisard. How can we love benches, knowing that Nisard often pressed them into service? Gently stroking a cat’s silken fur, my hand inevitably reproduces a gestures once made by Nisard. Strawberries are the less delectable for Nisard’s love of them. I would welcome the immediate snuffing out of the beneficent sun that also warmed Nisard – sharing his filthy bathwater would inspire no greater disgust. If he could be besotted with a certain Élisabeth, how can we not be put off by the passions of love? Our innocence forever blushes at his brutish experience of this world. Nisard ruined everything in his wake, cities and countrysides alike. If he one day bit into a hazelnut, how can we still have a soft spot for squirrels?
But who is this Nisard? I certainly hadn’t ever heard of him, and I’m not convinced anyone pays him much mind anymore. As the narrator’s wife Métilde says, as she tries to calm the narrator down a bit, “Virtually no one knows who he is, and in any case who gives a damn?” Yet, the narrator cannot help but lament the very emergence of the world because, well, I’ll let him tell you: “Once there was nothing and then there was something, and as it happened this was a bad thing, for the result was Nisard.”
The fun and cleverness also permeates the book’s structure. Between segments where the narrator is attacking Nisard as an infant, we get present-day newspaper clippings about such things as deciding to attack a country on no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Nisard was the man behind that, and he still sticks to his views. Recently Nisard became the winkle-spitting world record holder. And, “In a Tuesday, August 3 interview on RTL Radio, Désiré Nisard reaffirmed his position that France’s minimum wage is overly generous [. . .] .”
Demolishing Nisard is also sprinkled with little tidbits of Nisard’s biography (and an unfriendly obituary). He does indeed sound like an odious man, pandering to the forces in power just to jockey for position of authority over people who hated him. He wrote a multi-volume Histoire de la littérature française, a few other texts, and (according to this book; I couldn’t find support for this — I didn’t look terribly hard) a little book called A Milkmaid Succumbs, which he later tried to eradicate. (Even this leads the narrator to brilliant regret: “[I]t is to be lamented that the lucidity which moved Nisard to seek out an destroy every last copy of his roguish tale did not shine its cold objective light on his entire existence: a noose is so easily tied.”). Apparently in all of his literary criticism, Nisard decried romanticism and did his best to prop up classicism, in the narrator’s eyes showing no intellectual sophistication in anything. Our narrator puts it best here: “In the midst of magicians and sorcerers, Nisard is the disenchanter.”
Fortunately, not a bit of this book, either as written or as translated, is disenchanting. It maintains its vim throughout as the narrator single-mindedly spits fire at Nisard while at the same time seeking out, with sick notions of revenge, Nisard’s lost saucy novel. One has to wonder, though, what is this doing to the narrator? Certainly Métilde, for one, things he is getting “every bit as odious as Nisard.” If he wants magic and sorcery, why shun the sun simply because it also shone down on Nisard? The book’s existential conundrum: in hating Nisard, the narrator brings on his own Nisardification.
It is a lot of fun to read this repudiation of conventional literary taste. I’ll pass on to you our narrator’s plea:
I wouldn’t say no to a little help. Join me. Let’s go after him together, a pack of us on his tail, ten or twenty strong. Come lend me a hand, at least two of you.
I was a bit surprised to see listed among the finalists of the Best Translated Book Award the very short Upstaged (La Scène usurpée, 1997; tr. from the French by Leland de la Durantaye, 2011). But, to be honest, I’m not sure why I was surprised. Yes, I liked a few of the books left off of the list of finalists more, but Upstaged, which is written incredibly well, had me laughing out loud. That tends to be rare, and I welcome it.
Review copy courtesy of Dalkey Archive.
Upstaged is an attempt for a director’s assistant to document and make sense of a crazy evening at the theater. On the evening in question Marcel Flavy was directing his new play, Going Out to the People, in which the President of the Republican Council puts on a disguise and, well, goes out to the people and has an encounter with Republican rebel Théodore Soufissis. In the audience sat a detested, skeptical theater critic for The Morning Republic. The night, of course, doesn’t go as planned — it goes far better, in fact. Our narrator tries to be objective (which adds to the book’s droll tone) as she recounts these events “with no other aim than edification of a noble profession.” Here’s how the fun begins:
The events this chronicle was undertaken to relate began in the second minute of the second act. Nicolas Boehlmer, preparing to smoke his last cigarette before going onstage, heard a knock at his dressing-room door. “Come in,” he called out. He was to note later how difficult it was to deliver this unexpected line at a moment when he had already entered the imaginative universe of his character. In response to his invitation, a stranger entered — one wearing the same wig, makeup, and clothes as Boehlmer (the outfit — according to costume-designer Sylvie Plumkett — of “a careless intellectual”).
This stranger, who will become known among the theater troop as the Usurper, proceeded (with “perfectly unthreatening authority”) to bind Boehlmer with a red, white, and blue scarf.
Boehlmer recalls the following phrase: “I am indeed taking a part of you, but you will soon find it returned unharmed. You have my word.” The Usurper added: “In case this does not go without saying, I very much admire your work.”
To Boehlmer’s dismay, the Usurper rushed out and began performing Boehlmer’s role in the second act. The role? That of Republican rebel Théodore Soufissis. The Usurper was performing just as Boehlmer had performed the role (he’d obviously seen many performances), with the same gestures and all . . . for a while. Soon the Usurper was introducing subtle revisions in the script and the action. Nevertheless, the director, though mortified, fell under the Usurper’s spell and even knocked Boehlmer on the head when Boehlmer escaped his bonds and tried to get his role back.
Then, at then end of Act II, the Usurper disappeared, leaving the cast to pick up the pieces and finish the third and final act. And the critic? Of course he thinks the play is brilliant, a definite improvement to the text he had in his lap as he watched. His review is appended to the director’s assistant’s account:
Too often in theater a line of dialogue is shoved forward like a reheated pizza instead of like something unique to its time and its place — a time that is none other than now, and a place that is none other than here.
As a theatrical farce, I found Upstaged completely enjoyable, but, as I mentioned above, was still a bit surprised that it was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. I’m fairly confident that much of the politics of the little book were lost on me. In an afterword, translator Leland de la Durantaye adds a bit of color to Upstaged, explaining that it is part of Jouet’s ”La République roman” series. So apparently I’m not very good at putting together the pieces of the story — such as the red, white, and blue scarf, the Republican rebel, and a newspaper called The Morning Republic — because I’m still not sure I understand what it was saying . . . but I completely enjoyed its playfulness.
The first time I heard about Edouard Levé was when a piece of his was published in the Spring 2011 issue of The Paris Review. It was called “When I look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue.” Here is how the strange — and strangely compelling — piece begins:
When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die. I don’t really listen to what people tell me. I forget things I don’t like. I look down dead-end streets. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life. I am slow to realize when someone mistreats me, it is always so surprising: evil is somehow unreal. When I sit with bare legs on vinyl, my skin doesn’t slide, it squeaks. I archive. I joke about death. I do not love myself. I do not hate myself. My rap sheet is clean.
The piece continues from there, a random sampling of statements with no apparent relationship to one another other than to build up our sense of who this person is. It’s short, and you can read the whole thing on The Paris Review website (click here). I wasn’t sure what to expect when opening up Suicide (2008; tr. from the French by Jan Steyn, 2011), which was recently placed on the Best Translated Book Award longlist.
Review copy courtesy of Dalkey Archive.
In brief, what I got was more of the same style, a kind of random sampling of details to give a sense of someone’s life. Only in Suicide, the subject is not the narrator. Rather, the narrator is listing details about a friend (whom he addresses directly throughout) who committed suicide some twenty years before, when they were each in their mid-twenties. The narrator describes his style best: “My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.” And we can expect, amidst the narrative that contemplates suicide, a great deal of random marbles that, somehow, add up to — I’ll say it again — a strangely compelling piece.
Suicide begins by setting up the act:
One Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife. In the middle of the garden you point out to her that you’ve forgotten your racket in the house. You go back to look for it, but instead of making your way toward the cupboard in the entryway where you normally keep it, you head down into the basement. Your wife doesn’t notice this. She says outside. The weather is fine. She’s making the most of the sun. A few moments later she hears a gunshot.
Because there was no apparent tragedy that drove his friend to suicide — he was, we assume, happily married and still had a lot of life ahead of him — the narrator forces himself to consider the invisible motives. Depression seems to have played a large part: “You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.”
While it is all interesting, I was particularly drawn into the narrator’s relationship with his friend, which has become much more meaningful after the suicide. In life, he and this man were friends, but they were not particularly close. There were each closer to others, but the narrator doesn’t feel that way now:
Your silence has become a form of eloquence. But they, who can still speak, remain silent. I no longer think of them, those with whom I was formerly so close. But you, who used to be so far-off, distant, mysterious, now seem quite close to me. When I am in doubt, I solicit your advice.
It’s this “belief in your eternity” — a “lunacy” born because the friend’s “disappearance is so unacceptable” — that is so striking to me. The narrator is perhaps a lot like Levé who, in his piece in The Paris Review, says, “I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath.” This friend remains alive, somehow more alive, today, though two decades ago he took his own life.
The book’s structure — that grabbing a marble out of a bag — is effective but also, for me, was a bit hard to sink into. At times it felt like a collection of aphorisms rather than a series of statements about a life, now gone though somehow more present. That said, the book is growing on me more and more, particularly after rereading “When I Look at a Strawberry, . . .” Levé ends that piece on a tragic note:
I do not ask “do you love me.” Only once can I say “I’m dying” without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.
As sad and tragic as that ending note was when Levé wrote it in 2002, it and especially the very book Suicide are drastically transformed when we learn that Levé himself took his life in 2007 at the age of 42. In fact, he killed himself just one week after delivering the transcript of Suicide to his editor. I left this detail out until now because I wanted to attempt to look at the book as its own world and not as a kind of suicide note — which is impossible to do, because I knew the back-story before I started the book. Furthermore, it’s hard not to suspect that this is just what Levé wanted.
So since I finished the book, I’ve been trying to understand why it was interesting to me. In other words, would I have accepted it and its random structure had I not been looking at it as a kind of personal reflection on Levé’s own impending suicide? I’m still not sure. That said, it is an interesting and emotional book in which the confines of life seem to crack at the seams, allowing someone to become something more in death, which could be what Levé was after when he put the final punctuation on this book with his own death: “Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid.” And (sadly? I’m not sure) that is the most interesting thing about this book.
John Self posted a review of Europeana (2001; tr. from the Czech by Gerald Turner, 2005) nearly three years ago (here). I immediately went out and got the book, but, as sometimes happens, when it came I put it aside, feeling like it would be a book I’d really enjoy and I might as well save it for one of those moments when I needed to enjoy a book. Well, I have been making my way through some of the Booker Prize longlist (with only a limited degree of joy, sadly), and it finally came time to read the biggest book of the bunch, former Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. Well, I hope to get back to that book and review it here in the next couple of months, but let me just say that after reading that book for a week (and getting not very far), I put it down and picked up Europeana. These books are not really comparable, though both range the twentieth century, but let me just say that I got more enjoyment out of this book’s first sentence than I had gotten at any time during the week with The Stranger’s Child (I intend to go back to that book, and I’m hoping I end up really liking it — sometimes you just need a break when it isn’t working).
Europeana is a relatively short book at around 125 pages, but in those pages it meshes together an abundance of events and themes of the twentieth century, from the wars to the introduction of the Barbie Doll, the whole time poking fun at the retrospectively ignorant 1989 essay by Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History”; Europeana‘s final sentence is this:
But lots of people did not know the theory and continued to make history as if nothing had happened.
This book is largely a swipe at any attempt to explain history or predict what’s coming; the one constant, the one thing we can rely on, is human absurdity, which is nicely introduced in Ouredník’s tone in the book’s first, scientifically quantitave sentence:
The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War who measured 176 centimeters, and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans.
It’s a strange perspective on loss, but my favorite part is that last conclusion – ”and so they were” — which makes fun of the methods and the conclusions we make as we study this stuff and makes us shake our heads as we realize that something as arbitrary as three centimeters can determine how one sits in history. In a way this emphasizes just how mechanical humanity can become when determining how to best mete out destruction — and then respond to it.
There is a lot going on in this book, but a couple of themes burst through the discussion on just about every topic. One is how dissatisfied some were by the past — the inhumanity, the violence, the injustice — and how they wanted to look forward to a better future, made possible by the optimization of the human race, a guarantee of peace and a harmonious society (with convivial entertainment). One of the book’s principal strengths is that it can at once speak of this goal and the horrors people committed trying to realize it: “And in 1914, American psychiatrists urged that alcoholics be promptly sterilized in the interest of preserving a healthy, superior society.” It almost doesn’t need to be said that the book spends a great deal of time discussing the Holocaust (all in that strange tone).
Europeana doesn’t just focus on these blatantly inhumane attempts to optimize humanity. Science promises much. A favorite passage from near the end is the discussion of sperm banks and how a woman could walk in and go through a long list of attributes so they could mix and match to get the perfect offspring. They are even supplied — if they ordered it — with a recording of the dad’s voice:
The text of the recording was HELLO! THIS IS A REALLY LOVELY DAY, JUST MADE FOR WALKING IN THE COUNTRY. I HOPE YOU’LL BE SATISFIED WITH ME. And one woman who ordered the recording wanted to know if she could have a ten-percent discount because the sperm donor had a lisp.
So this particular “dad” might not bring about optimized offspring, but perhaps the price is right — the sentiment itself doesn’t speak well for our progress.
Contrary to those who believe in the optimization of humanity, there are those who believe the past was wonderful, and certainly the twentieth century — with the inhumanity, the violence, the injustice — was a sure sign that the end of the world was nigh. Here’s a wonderful passage that expresses a bit of this sentiment:
In the Golden Age people were more courteous to each other and criminals were more considerate and did not fire at policemen, and young people treated each other with respect and restraint and did not have sexual intercourse until they were married, and when some young man raped a girl in the fields on her way home from work and she then became pregnant, she would put the child in an orphanage where it was cared for at the state’s expense, and when some motorist ran over a chicken, he would get out of his car and pay for the chicken.
I love how this short passage contains, in one line, one of the book’s many deliberate (though always presented in a tone that makes it look blind) contradictions: “young people treated each other with respect and restraint and did not have sexual intercourse until they were married, and when some young man raped a girl in the fields . . .”
Ouredník is not just making fun of the way we view history; he’s also making fun of the way we study it, the way we manipulate it. Here is another, perhaps better, example of how he does this. This passage comes from early in the book:
News came from the military headquarters that the was was nearing its end and melancholy was to be avoided, spirits were to be kept up and patience and a positive attitude were required, and in 1917 an Italian soldier wrote in a letter to his sister I FEEL THAT EVERYTHING THAT WAS GOOD WITHIN ME IS GRADUALLY LEAVING ME AND I FEEL MORE AND MORE CERTAIN EVERY DAY.
And quite a bit later, with no reference back to the original quote, we have this passage:
And one of the commune’s members became a well-known choreographer in Nazi Germany and devised gestural dance for the German workers in order to increase productivity in the arms factories. And in 1917, an Italian soldier wrote in a letter to his sister I FEEL MORE AND MORE POSITIVE EVERY DAY. And in 1930, a French doctor announced the beginning of a new age that would transpire under the sign of Aquarius, which would give birth to a new human being and usher in a world without war and violence.
Besides showing human ignorance with these types of contradictions (this latter one a good example of stripping out context to further one’s point), Europeana also has a load of marginalia, as if we are reading a textbook and some student has gone through it to prepare for a test. Nearly every page has one or two passages written to the side, meant to highlight what is being said, though these passages are often ridiculous because the marginalia leaves out pieces of information, highlights the insignificant portion, completely changes the meaning of the passage, or is just ridiculously pointless (e.g., the marginalia next to the passage on the sperm donor’s voice I pulled above simply said “Country Walks”).
I really enjoyed this book. It was humorous and serious and very skillfully written (and translated — Turner won the 2004 PEN Translation Award for this), and it provides a nice bit of perspective on just how warped our perspectives can be.
To my knowledge, the only Czech literature I’ve read is from that fairly famous author who has his own adjective. It was to expand my range, more than anything then, that led me to open Michal Ajvaz’s The Other City (Druhé mesto, 1993; tr. by Gerald Turner 2009), lauded as a hymn to Prague, a city I’ve never been to but hope to visit. Of course, the intimations of eccentric imagery and the connection to Borges also interested me. Oh, and everything the Dalkey Archive puts out is at least worth looking into.
Review copy courtesy of The Dalkey Archive Press.
The book started clearly and methodically enough with a nice scene where the narrator is reading a book on a snowy Prague day. It spoke nicely to my mood.
I was in no hurry; I was happy to be in a room that smelled pleasantly of old books, where it was warm and quiet, where the pages rustled as they were turned, as if the books were sighing in their sleep.
This peaceful beginning, while somewhat indicative of the nice imagery to come, is completely misleading in other respects. This is perhaps the only peaceful part of the book. Soon we are taken for a ride, getting whiplash, as Ajvaz pulls us from one scene to the next, each getting increasingly bizarre. It all starts when the narrator finds a book with a purple binding and a strange unearthly alphabet. It emits a sort of glow and he starts getting glimpses of another world just out of his periphery.
It was not the first such encounter in my life. Like everyone, I had, on many previous occasions, ignored a half-open door leading elsewhere — in the chilly passages of strange houses, in backyards, on the outskirts of towns. The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn’t run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it. We are walking all the time along a shore and along the edge of a virgin forest. Our gestures would seem to rise out of an entity that also encompasses these concealed spaces, and in an odd way they reveal their shadowy existence, although we are unaware of the roar of waves and shrieks of animals — the disquieting accompaniment to our words (and possibly their secret birthplace); we are unaware of the glitter of jewels in the unknown world of nooks and crannies; usually we don’t stray off the path even once in the course of our lives. What golden temples in the jungle might we find our way to? With what beasts and monsters might we contend and on what islands might we forget our plans and ambitions? Maybe it was the fascinating flurry of snowy chimeras outside the window or maybe an ironic love of fate, engendered by my failures of recent years, that caused my old fear of crossing frontiers to protest only feebly — as if out of habit — and then quickly fall silent; I pulled the book out and opened it once more.
As the narrator goes about his business, thinking about the book, other people begin to admit they’ve encountered the strange letters and have felt the presence of, or even seen, another world that coexists with Prague (perhaps it was my uninitiated senses, but this book didn’t seem to hinge on knowledge of Prague at all; seemed more incidental, but I’d love the insights of others). A particularly affecting account came from an old man whose daughter was taken away by the strange citizens of the other world.
We’ve never met our daughter since, except for a few occasions when we’ve caught sight of her face in the depth of a mirror or in a darkened room, and sometimes we’ve caught the sound of her voice in the roaring of a stove. At first we would occasionally come across slips of paper at the bottom of drawers or between the pages of books, bearing sad messages that we would understand less and less: she would write about halls through which there flowed rivers with rafts carrying bronze lions, and also about never-ending symposia in fossilized forests, or about cafés, where the waiter would emerge out of thick mist.
These accounts get stranger, and finally the narrator himself has a more substantial encounter with the other city when a tiny rusted hatch opened up to a massive cathedral where a priest was leading a congregation. This other city comes to be an obsession for the narrator because he’s sure knowledge of it will lead somewhere. He’s at the time of his life when he no longer wants to ignore the glimpses. In Prague, ”the flame of meaning had gone out,” but in this other perhaps it could be kindled. Thus begins a quest for meaning among absurdities and contradictions.
For the first quarter of the book I must say that the only thing keeping me going was the fantastic though bizarre imagery. It was too disconnected and episodic and didn’t seem to be leading anywhere. In other words, bizarreness for the sake of being bizarre, and I’m not a fan of that. Thanks to the imagery, though, I kept going and the quest for meaning took me in. The episodes, while still strange in unexpected ways, began to cohere also, and I found the theme of clarity and sight to mesh well with the theme of questing and meaning.
One of my favorite passages comes in the latter part of the book. The narrator, still searching for the center, enters a library. Deeper in the library, the stacks of books transform slowly into a jungle. It’s a fantastic scene, but I also enjoyed its introduction where a library patron requests a book from the deep. The librarian about to search for the book accepts his quest.
He is warned by his colleagues not to go there but he just laughs and says he’s worked in the library for thirty years and knows every nook and cranny. When he takes no heed of the warnings, the other librarians rush off to find the reader and beg him to cancel his request, bringing him teetering stacks of magnificent books, books with flashing jewels embedded in the binding and pages scented with the rarest perfumes of the Orient, books with three-dimensional illustrations, full of soft velvets and find sand, books with edible pages tasting of lotus leaves, which the reader may immediately devour after reading, silken books that can be unfolded and used either as a hammock or on windy days as a hovercraft with which to float high above the landscape, books with intoxicatingly erotic stories played out on nocturnal marble terraces beneath cypress trees by the sea: the pages of these books have been soaked with hashish so that after a while anyone reading the book is gripped by a hallucinatory vision and becomes part of the story, bathing with beautiful girls in the warm nocturnal sea, but the stubborn reader casts not one glance at the books they have brought and insists on his book—a book about car maintenance or making pickles — he wants it because he requested it and believes it to be the duty of the library staff to obtain it for him willy nilly, and to the unfortunate librarian’s beautiful daughter whom someone has meanwhile summoned by telephone and who is offering the reader, like Sheherezade, to tell him stories all night long, he merely declares: ‘Look here, young lady, there is nothing for us to discuss, I want my book on car maintenance (making pickles)’ — and so the librarian embraces his daughter and sets off into the depths of the library, everyone gazing stupefied at his departing figure; at the bend in the corridor he turns and waves before disappearing behind the shelves and no one sets eyes on him again; the reader waits in vain for his book, pangs of conscience start to gnaw at him, every hour he goes to ask whether the librarian has returned with his book and he ends up spending the entire day by the book delivery hatch and by five in the morning is marking time outside the locked doors of the Clementium intoning dismal dirges. Several librarians disappear in the depths of the library every year and the librarianship schools are unable to turn out enough graduates.
Surely you get a sense for how wonderfully strange this book is. And thankfully, though we also quest with the narrator for meaning, the book itself is not without purpose, and the meaning comes along.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started the very short Splendide-Hôtel 
Review copy courtesy of The Dalkey Archive Press.
When I receive books I like to open them to peruse their structure. Is it divided into parts, books, chapters (long or short)? Are there several pages of unbroken text? The like. I was surprised when I opened this book to find several short segments all beginning with a letter of the alphabet. Turns out the book is a bunch (27 to be exact) of incredibly short, uhm, musings?, beginning with the letter A all the way through Z, the extra letter being the Rx pharmacy symbol thrown in for good measure. And, to introduce you to the loose feel of the book, here is what Sorrentino said, “One must find some structure, even if it be this haphazard one of the alphabet.” Each letter is important to the segment as that letter inspires a starting point. A, for example, brings out a discussion on flies. I never even noticed—doubt I would have noticed—that an A looks kind of like a fly from above, wings pulled up on the side. As you can tell, even that bit of structure is loose. I can take a strange structure as long as the content provides a reason for it. Here, the content is just as strange and seemingly arbitrary as the structure, so there’s reason enough. And there’s reason for the strange content too.
The title of the book comes from Arthur Rimbaud’s prose poem “Après le Déluge” in his Illuminations: ”Et le Splendide-Hôtel fut bâti dans le chaos de glaces et de nuit du pôle.” (“And Hotel Splendid was built in the chaos of ice and of the polar night.”) For Sorrentino, Splendide-Hôtel is a place of and for the imagination. Within its structure dwell many poetic characters, but the structure is also a place where the work of art is praised for itself, for the toil of its creation and for its grandeur.
Everyone who is a devotee to graciousness in living knows under what incredibly difficult conditions the Splendide-Hôtel was built: the chaos of ice and polar night, the blizzards and avalanches, the black bitter frosts that took so many workers’ lives. Why it was built in such an unprepossessing spot remains a mystery to this day, yet its location has certainly not prevented it from being one of the most elegant hotels to be found anywhere. From the day it was opened in 1872 until the present, it has stood as the epitome of Old World charm.
The primary presences in the novel, besides Sorrentino himself, are the poets William Carlos Williams and Arthur Rimbaud. In many of the segments Sorrentino engages with their work on a formal and substantive level. I believe some familiarity with Williams and Rimbaud is important, but I don’t think it is necessary to enjoy this short book. In fact, this short book might be a good segue into their work. More than analyze their work, Sorrentino uses it to draw out more general meditations on writing, politics, whatever, while keeping the beauty or power of language front and center. Here’s one I particularly liked. It’s how the letter E begins:
It is my opinion as well as that of others that the word grey spelled with an e is “greyer” than the same word spelled with an a: gray.
Can the poet be correct in assigning the color white to this letter? Admitting, therefore, more light to the world so that it becomes itself lighter, creamier, if you will: on the other side of darkness. The blackness of a. Gray holds to itself more black than does grey.
Yes, it is loose. Somehow, though, Sorrentino brings many of the images together in later segments, each building somewhat on what has come before, creating, in a manner of speaking, Splendide-Hôtel, even while discussing it.
While most of the writing is pensive or expository in nature, there are several segments where, though still ruminating about the power of prose, the reader gets a glimpse of feeling that might be more common in Sorrentino’s novels.
I learned to play chess—or play at chess as the expression goes—from a man in my company in the army. Of the many things I remember about him two come to mind immediately each time I think of him: his love for avocados and his showering in a Mexican bordertown brothel with five whores. I see him there, streaming with soapsuds and water in the whirling steam, he and the girls laughing with enormous joy. He was, I believe, a regional chess champion in his native Pennsylvania.
It would be an enormous pleasure to me if he would read this book—finding it on his own—and recognize himself in it. To open it in his easy chair, his four or five children involved in their various activities, his wife preparing supper. He sits back and takes a swallow of cold beer and suddenly—suddenly he tastes that ripe avocado, lightly salted and tangy with a squeeze of lime and smells the clean flesh of those harsh Mexican whores, sees their white teeth and golden crucifixes. He puts the book down to look across the room at his wife. the aroma of meat loaf in the oven, apple pie with plenty of cinnamon.
Outside, the streets and lawns of Allentown are white with the last snowfall of winter, it comes down with that fabled gentleness all writers at some time remark upon in one way or another. And why not?
This passage shows all the evidence I need of his greatness. The contrast between the whore’s flesh and their golden crucifixes, the exotic avocado and the good old American apple pie . . . I wonder, did this fellow ever find himself in the book?
When I began this book I was not looking for a sort of treatise. The talk about Sorrentino I’ve been privy to was all about his devestating novels (which must be somewhat in the cutting tone of the above quote). It was with some trepidation then that I began with the letter A, that fly. Soon I was engaged and it then took me only an hour or two to read straight through. A small cost in time, but it lead me to think about many things, literary, political, personal, etc. Not a bad result when commencing a relationship with an author.
Another of the best places to go for excellent world literature is the Dalkey Archive Press, a nonprofit publisher ran from the University of Illinois. An interviewer once asked the founder, John O’Brien, for a description of the types of books the Dalkey Archive publishes—experimental, avant-garde, innovative? O’Brien said: Subversive. “My point was that the books, in some way or another, upset the apple cart, that they work against what is expected, that they in some way challenge received notions, whether those are literary, social or political.” The Dalkey Archive is also home of the triquarterly publication Context, which you can read on their website. It’s a valuable website for many reasons, but critical introductions to unknown authors (for example, Gérard Gavarry) make it invaluable.
Gavarry is entirely new to me, which makes sense since Hoppla! 1 2 3 (Hop lá! un duex trois, 2001; tr. from the French by Jane Kuntz, 2009) is the first English translation of one of his eight books. It will be available early June. It is the first book this year that when I finished I wanted to go immediately back to page one to read again, even without a short break. It is that interesting and complex. I’m really hoping some of you get a hold of the book so we can talk here about it. It is one to read, reread, and then discuss.
Review copy courtesy of The Dalkey Archive Press.
The title of the book comes from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera: ”And as the first head rolls I’ll say: hoppla!” One can infer from this that things in this book lead up to an act of violence, and that is correct (though it is brief and usually occurs offstage). The 1 2 3, comes because, in a sort of triptych, we get to read the story—the lead-up and the violence—three times with three different sets of images, and to see the roots of violence as they begin to grow in three different perspectives.
The first section, called “The Coconut Palm,” begins with a beautifully rendered traffic jam. Yes, “beautifully rendered” and “traffic jam.” The radio is playing and tells the listening drivers about alternate routes:
This resulted in an anarchic swarm of automobiles filling up the entire local grid. Migratory flows intermixed, intertwined, increased, and multiplied, becoming long processions, wandering in slow motion, searching in the dusk for some alternate route. A cold rain began to fall, soaking the gray of the sky, the red of the brake lights, the white, yellow, and orange of headlights and suburban glare.
“The Coconut Palm” presents the roots of violence from a social or communal perspective. We watch the story unfold almost as if we were one of the many people wandering around the periphery; or rather, as if we are all of the people wandering around the periphery. There is an exceptional scene on a train heading from Paris to the suburbs. The passengers in the last coach are comfortably seated for their journey home until four rowdy youths enter.
At present, the other passengers are taking up less room in the compartment. They are also less individualized, bound together now by the fearful hostility they feel toward these unruly youths they’re being forced to ride with, having no idea what lunatic idea might now come into their heads, what new stunt they might improvise, whether their next move will be swift, precise, and brutal, or slow, expansive, and awkward . . .
The situation worsens when two young women engage in a scuffle with the boys. Nevertheless, the fellow passengers on the train remain uncomfortably immobile. Gavarry describes this scene in a strange and wonderful way that so effectively defamiliarizes the reader with the situation:
All around, some of the passengers wagged their heads, a sickly smile on their faces—which was their way of maintaining that all this commotion wasn’t really amounting to anything nasty. Others, as though barely restraining themselves from intervening, gave a slight wiggle of heroic indignation; while still others acted as though they hadn’t seen a thing, despite the mounting evidence that something disastrous was about to happen right under their noses. Because, despite multiple attempts by the as-yet-unmolested girl to intercede—”Come on, quit screwing around!,” “Cut the crap!,” or “Is this what you guys are like?”—the male excitement was growing. Worse, it was changing form. The four late adolescents, who together had foisted their physicality onto the scene in the train-car from the start, and whose subsequent movements, however varied they may have been from one boy to the next, had nonetheless composed a well-regulated choreography—these same four were not getting increasingly agitated, and each in his own way.
While Gavarry’s premise for the book is excellent, it is bolstered by an exquisite style that can be both abstract in an almost scientific sense, as in this example—
Between the epigastrium and the pelvic region, in among the meanderings of our entrails, there germinates Refusal. We don’t feel its corpuscular presence at first: only a thermal shift, and icy cold welling up from a place deep within us—deep, but nonetheless as far from the self as possible—and which, spreading unobstructed into our bodies, assumes the form of a thousand filaments merging with the complex network of our nerves. This intermingling disrupts the entire organism, all the way to the epidermal level, where, reacting to a phenomenon normally restricted to the viscera, the skin pales here, flashes there, and everywhere starts to crawl. Finally, when it outgrows the belly—as do pain or rage in similar circumstances—Refusal is externalized.
—or disturbingly, poetically, intimate, delving into lonely fears while remaining beautiful, as in this example—
As four hours Universal Time approaches, which in February is three o’clock Ris time, no harbinger of a new dawn emerges, but instead there is a deepening of night in the outlying suburbs. Not a sound to be heard. Nothing stirring. The nocturnal fog soaks the suburban lamplight, so that everywhere the same stagnant icy gray medium reigns, where earth and sky mingle, engulfing structures, sleepers, and vegetation alike.
There is a lot to think about in this piece. I didn’t even go into the fantastic groups of images Gavarry utilizes in each of the three pieces, giving each piece its coherence and completeness while further defamiliarizing the reader, eliminating bearings the reader used to orient him or herself in the other sections. Each section carries the same people to the same event. Each is still unique and compelling and important. Indeed, through this book not only does Gavarry reveal some excellent insights into the roots of violence but, in doing so, he shows the power and vitality of literature.
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