{"id":15297,"date":"2015-03-10T11:45:34","date_gmt":"2015-03-10T15:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=15297"},"modified":"2015-03-10T11:45:34","modified_gmt":"2015-03-10T15:45:34","slug":"alain-farah-ravenscrag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2015\/03\/10\/alain-farah-ravenscrag\/","title":{"rendered":"Alain Farah: Ravenscrag<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alain Farah, the narrator, of Alain Farah\u2019s Ravenscrag<\/em> (Pourquoi Bologne, 2013; tr. from the French by\u00a0Lazer Lederhendler, 2015), is, to borrow a phrase, unstuck in time. In two rapidly overlapping time periods, Farah the narrator, and the author, is a professor at McGill, rapidly loosing his sanity. It is not so much that he moves from one year to another, but that they exist concurrently, with one or the other occasionally taking prominence, but as he puts it: \u201cThe year is 2012 and 1962. The year is 1962 and 2012.\u201d Though facts of his biography differ in each period, Farah\u2019s personality, interests, and the demands of his situation remain the same. Much of his life could happen in either period, like his childhood, when he \u201cheld jobs from the age of thirteen on, no longer to pay [his] mother\u2019s gambling debts, but, like all kids, to earn a little pocket money.\u201d Farah is writing a novel, or having his assistant write it, about the MK-Ultra (CIA-sponsored experiments) program at McGill. The experiments involve drugs, mind-wipes, memory\/identity reprogramming, and water immersion as a memory trigger. That novel is the novel Ravenscrag<\/em> and it is also his life\u2014investigating Dr. Cameron, the one rumored, to be performing the mentally disturbing tests\u2014within the novel. Within the fiction of the book, Dr. Cameron and McGill\u2019s connections to the historical MK-Ultra program are rumors, while in reality, Cameron did perform horrific experiments for MK-Ultra. Ravenscrag <\/em>is a slippery, playful novel of surfaces that admits there is life below the surface while remaining uncertain if it will, or can, venture there.<\/p>\n

\"Ravenscrag\"<\/p>\n

That sounds possibly dismissive, \u201cthis book is slick and clever, all surface,\u201d but Farah admits it. He tells us \u201cYou\u2019ll find me likeable, with my electronic cigarette and my designer-label ties.\u201d He seeks to fictionalize situations, whether in a general sense, or down to details that mirror well-known books, movies: \u201cI love this character life, this sweet life, without psychology, this life of surface.\u201d He loves it and is afraid of what might exist in the depths. There is ever something fractured beneath the surface; the question is if it will cohere into.<\/p>\n

Cultural references from the whole breadth of the brows are essential to Ravenscrag<\/em>, so much so that it isn\u2019t certain when have a meaningful connection, or are simply part of Farah\u2019s self-amusement. At times, there is too much of the latter, making the material light, almost skimmable. This is very much a post-modern science-fiction noir, but it may be that only sartorially. On the first page, Farah intentionally sets nerd alarms ringing: he references the video game meme \u201cAll your base are belong to us.\u201d It\u2019s unsettling because Farah the narrator is barely able to distinguish it from reality. The more references shift from their origin, the more you have to unpack just how accurate they are (like the history of uses of Blade Runner <\/em>as a title), the more thrilling it is.<\/p>\n

Beyond the embrace of science fiction and noir, of the bizarre romanticism in fantasizing about MK-Ultra, admitting its inhumanity, but still playing a game with it, Ravenscrag <\/em>gives over with wild abandon to imagination and paranoia as defining traits. Describing, admiring, his office, Farah spirals:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m aware of my lack of caution. A man armed with a high-precision rifle, in the grip of madness or under contract to take me down, hidden behind the perforated venetian blind of his apartment, could easily shoot me in the back of the neck without my ever noticing the laser sight.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The paranoia plays out in a way the infected my own interpretation. At one point, Farah asks his assistant if the secret service may be secretly poisoning them. She asks in return \u201cYou mean the tap water?\u201d I immediately suspected her: he didn\u2019t say anything specific, so why did she go directly there.<\/p>\n

Farah\u2019s investigation into Dr. Cameron and MK-Ultra is as noir as the time travel and mind-wiping experiments are science fiction. Others around him always seem to know more, and happy to make the leap to genre, they embrace their roles, whether it be his secretary (the loyal assistant who is actually more on the ball than the purported hero), a woman he met at a party who keeps on returning to him (the manipulative femme fatale), a security guard at the Dr. Cameron\u2019s facility Ravenscrag (friend or foe?), or his friend Umberto Eco (the ally with his own agenda and flair). Farah is at a loss because there is indeed a conspiracy, and he needs to uncover who is on what side. When planning an attack on Cameron, Eco lays it out as a movie scene, noting \u201cno subtitles\u201d and \u201cthen you dolly the camera back from the table.\u201d They planning on hiding a gun in the bathroom, and I went scrambling to the Godfather <\/em>but the scene is different enough that it stops before recreation.<\/p>\n

The slipperiness of the book makes it easy to read lightly, to fly through the strange entertainments of the novel, of Farah\u2019s drugs and conspiracies. From the outside, the book is as slippery as Farah\u2019s personality, ever-dodging people, ever-unsure of himself and others. Yet, the way it self-contains, even as the multitude of references reach outwards, hints at something else. It self-references: a neighbor\u2019s daughter in the present matches the name and description of Farah\u2019s daughter in the 60s; the security guard of Cameron\u2019s institute has similarities with a childhood friend of Farah\u2019s. The cultural mentions do the same: Farah is asked \u201cWill you be able to adopt the prone position when you shoot?\u201d and sure enough, twenty pages later, a specific mention of Manchette\u2019s The Prone Gunman<\/em>, which leads into the Quebecois classic noir of madness, Hubert Aquin\u2019s Next Episode.<\/em><\/p>\n

This last reference is important, because Montreal is integral Ravenscrag<\/em> (originally published in French by the fantastic press Montreal Le Quartanier). Just prior to the Next Episode <\/em>reference, Farah is caught up in a 2011 protest at McGill, shooting a connection straight to the Montreal independence movement of the 60s, of which Aquin was a part, and his novel centered around. Montreal history exists in Ravenscrag<\/em> the same way that Farah, both lives of Farah, does: they are covering and uncovering trauma.<\/p>\n

Ravenscrag <\/em>plays its games, gets too clever for itself at times, too caught up in its anti-narrative literary style. Despite that, the relationship to trauma aligns with the more traditional pieces of a novel, the characters, their experience, their development. Farah grounds his character, his self, through confession. He shares what he does not have to, what is shameful, embarrassing, as when sitting at home he admits to his childhood experiences wetting the bed and why, or confessing to pissing in a potted plant as an adult. Farah confesses as much as he can, compulsively, including the consequences to him of his mother\u2019s gambling debts. He does not admit his trauma, but circles around it, hiding it by confessing everything else, and through that, leaving a perceivable outline. Resolution of this trauma may not come for Farah, or it might, the way his final scenes embraces the wildest aspects of the novel make it uncertain, but it is how memory, trauma, and narrative intertwine that matters, and the way that fiction, even the absurdist and anti-narrative fiction of Ravenscrag<\/em>, can both obscure and reveal the paths that lead to and from those traumas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

P.T. Smith reviews Alain Farah’s Ravenscrag<\/em>, translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":15298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[724],"tags":[572],"coauthors":[640],"class_list":["post-15297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alain-farah","tag-french"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Ravenscrag.jpg?fit=1575%2C2400&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-3YJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15297"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15300,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15297\/revisions\/15300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15297"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}