{"id":24458,"date":"2018-08-14T11:55:25","date_gmt":"2018-08-14T15:55:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=24458"},"modified":"2018-08-14T11:55:25","modified_gmt":"2018-08-14T15:55:25","slug":"jeremy-gavron-felix-culpa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2018\/08\/14\/jeremy-gavron-felix-culpa\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeremy Gavron: Felix Culpa<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/span><\/div>

Felix Culpa<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Jeremy Gavron (2018)<\/span>
\nScribe (2018)<\/span>
\n208 pp<\/span><\/p><\/h3><\/div>

\"JeremyJ<\/span>eremy Gavron’s Felix Culpa<\/em> opens:<\/p>\n

\n

Never open a book with weather. Never use the word \u2018suddenly.\u2019 If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These are, although not marked as such, direct quotes from three of\u00a0Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, two of which Gavron proceeds immediately to break. Indeed he later asserts “meteorology is not superfluous to the story” from the collected maxims of the great\u00a0W.G. Sebald, as recorded by\u00a0David Lambert and Robert McGill\u00a0(see here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Felix Culpa<\/em> continues:<\/p>\n

\n

But what if a story begins with weather? What if a writer goes to work in a prison in a long gypsy summer and the world turns? Suddenly turns.<\/span><\/p>\n

A modern prison. Red-brick buildings. Lawns, flower beds.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even a pond in the middle, in which it is said there were once fish until they were caught and fried up on the wings.<\/span><\/p>\n

A former military airfield — you can still see the shape of the runway cutting across the prison grounds and into the neighbouring cornfield like the ghost of some ancient ley line.<\/span><\/p>\n

Writer in residence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though he does not reside here and does not appear to be much of a writer. He comes into the prison three days a week, wanders the wings, sits with the men in their cells, looking at their writing, but mostly listening to their talk.<\/span><\/p>\n

Listener in residence, then.<\/span><\/p>\n

Privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That last line is a direct quote from\u00a0The Great Gatsby<\/em>\u00a0and the line that inspired the highly innovative technique that Gavron has used to write this book; a technique that violates the third of Leonard’s rules, since this is a novel made up almost entirely of writing, writing which is not re-written but rather re-used. As he explains in an\u00a0Irish Times<\/em>\u00a0interview (here<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

The novel opens with a writer working in a prison, as I once did myself. I was trying to catch the experience of days spent talking to men who had, or so it seemed to me, lost the plot, the thread, of their own lives. As I did so a line from The Great Gatsby<\/em> came into my mind:\u00a0\u201cPrivy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.\u201d\u00a0I wrote it down and liked how it looked.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I wrote on, other lines appeared almost of their own accord on the page in front of me.\u00a0\u201cAnd then there came both mist and snow and it grew wondrous cold,\u201d\u00a0from\u00a0The Rime of the Ancient Mariner<\/em>.\u00a0\u201cLosing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going,\u201d\u00a0from\u00a0Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>. I liked the way these fitted into my own story. Liked the resonance they provided. Enjoyed also the challenge of making them cohere, both in meaning and language, with the lines I wrote myself.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The result, as per the Author’s Note as well as the interview:<\/p>\n

\n

The great majority of the lines in this novel are sourced word for word from books, by some eighty authors.<\/span><\/p>\n

The story starts mostly in my own voice, with my own lines, but as it goes on the borrowed lines take over — more than four-fifths of the lines are taken from what turned out by chance (honestly!) to be exactly 100 works of literature, including all of the last nine chapters.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The book contains a list of the 100 books used but (perhaps understandably to avoid 2,000+ footnotes) not which books particular quotes are taken from, nor even (perhaps less understandably) any typographical indication of which parts are quoted and which are Gavron’s own words, leaving the interested reader with a dual detective of spotting then sourcing them.<\/p>\n

The subject of the book — usually narrated in the third person but sometimes in the first, depending on what the quotes require — is the writer, or listener, in residence at a prison, “this writer who does not write among these men who are here because they have lost the plot, lost the thread of their own lives, but\u00a0then there came both mist and snow and it grew wondrous cold” (see above) and shortly after three of the men show him a newspaper story:<\/p>\n

\n

Looks down at the newspaper. Takes in a headline about a body found in the snow, the blurry mugshot of an adolescent boy.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s Felix, isn\u2019t it.<\/span><\/p>\n

He was in here until not so long ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

A hiker, the newspaper calls him, caught out in the storms. In the hills in the north.<\/span><\/p>\n

What was he doing up there?<\/span><\/p>\n

Most of the residents of the prison young men from the city who had seldom been out of their neighbourhoods until they were sent away.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s the question.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not hiking, not dressed like that.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Felix, per his prison records, had “loose notions concerning the rights of property”\u00a0starting his police record with shoplifting age eleven and was “seventeen when, with accomplices unknown, he committed the offences for which he was sent away,” a burglary which led to the death of an old woman. Released after almost five years in prison on parole, he died of exposure on the hills at “twenty-two years of age. Last known address a hostel in the east of the city. In breach of his licence.”<\/p>\n

Our writer goes in search, not of Felix himself, now buried in his grave, but of Felix’s story, trying to piece it together and record it from the fragments he discovers. And here the voices from other books start to play a greater role. In the following passage I’ve added those I can source (I’ve no doubt missed some), as our writer records what he finds in:<\/p>\n