An event mingling the beginning of worlds and their apocalypse

Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, is a massive, sprawling monster of a book. I have been reading it since March, and I'm finished.

It's 832 pages, and I read most of it on my phone (for various reasons, and that may have been a mistake). For all it's length, the reviews of this book are remarkably short. Most of the reviews call this novel subversive. I'm not sure I understand how.

I found this to be an incredibly difficult read (perhaps in part because I was reading it on my phone). I won't say it was rewarding, but it was certainly entertaining and for the most part engrossing.

He stuck the wax tip of the tube in one of his nostrils; when the shaman blew down it, he was immediately thrown back on the stretcher. After a few seconds of an intense burning sensation spreading through his sinuses, Dietlev had the very clear impression that the right side of his brain had frozen with no hope of it ever unfreezing. Opening his eyes, he was alarmed to see the sepia tones of the forests: the harmony of an old photo abruptly torn apart by sudden flashes of lightning, revealing incredible perspectives in which amber and mauve shaded into infinity. A Piranesian delirium, architectural tumors ceaselessly proliferating. He could hear the slow grinding of icebergs, the overthrust of continental plates. Distant whirlwinds started to stir up space with their spirals, cracks appeared all over the earth, which opened up like a round loaf under the irresistible force of the mountains. Stones rose in the air! Before he lost consciousness Dietlev was award he was witnessing something grandiose, an event mingling the beginning of worlds and their apocalypse.

The reviews identify several (five? seven? more?) narrative threads. Myself, I note three of consequence: the manuscript Eléazard is working on (i.e., the story of Athanasius Kircher), the story of Eléazard's ex-wife traipsing through the jungle on some esoteric archeological pursuit, and that of their daughter experimenting with sex and drugs on the beaches of Brazil. Yes, there are a couple other storylines, but they don't get the page-time these do, so while I think they're meant to have more weight, they are weaker and out of balance.

These three threads could almost stand on their own as separate novels. (Certainly, they're long enough.) Apart from a couple plot points, I fail to see how they fit together, or how they need each other thematically. I don't see the necessity for the sprawl.

However, I absolutely loved reading about 17th-century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher.

This novel feels Important. It also manages to make me feel dumb. I don't understand who the tigers are supposed to be, or where they are. I mean, there's some great story in it, but it doesn't hang together for me — I just don't see the point.

Thoughts and excerpts
No one can walk beneath palm trees with impunity
A slap in the face from fate
We haven't got anywhere yet
Returning to the bosom of obedience
Looking for the amazing
List of minor Chinese officials

Reviews
Three Percent Review

[T]he various narratives that radiate out into seven different directions, each a quest of varying and dubious goals, but all of it conveyed with seriousness, more often with dark humor.

Cleveland.com

In the fictional biography, Kircher is an audacious blend of Don Quixote, Baron von Munchausen, Sherlock Holmes and Buckaroo Banzai, with a ravenous "taste for the fantastic, the extraordinary, the mysterious."

The friction Blas de Robles creates between facts and nonsense highlights one of his novel's primary themes: the fluidity of identity and history; the elusive solidity of reality; the uncertainty of veracity.

List

Eléazard is not only reviewing a manuscript concerning Athanasius Kircher. He keeps a notebook:

Minor Chinese Officials:
Official in charge of the Confines
Official in charge of insignia made of feathers
Inspector of medicine taters
Commissioner in charge of demanding submission from rebels
Head Clerk of the office for receiving subjugated regels
Grand Master of reprimands
Officer of the tracks
Official in charge of the Entrance and the Inside
Grand Rear Secretary of the Grand Rear Secretariat Official charged with embellishing translations
Official charged with showing and observing
Observer of draughts
Sub-director of the multitudes
Superintendent of frogs
Condemned man of noon
Official charged with keeping his eye glued to the cupboard keyholes
Official charged with preserving and clarifying
Official charged with making good the emperor's oversights
Leader of the blind
Minister of winter
Shaker of hands
Superintendent of leather boots
Regulator of female tones
Participant in deliberations on advantages and disadvantages
Fulminator
Official charged with speeding up delayed dispatches
Musician for secular occasions on a short tour of duty Grand supervisor of fish
Fisher of rorquals
Friend

— from Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès.

(Hah! Anyone else remember Mr. Shake Hands Man?)

Windows onto time

I've just seen Uraniborg, an exhibition of the work of Laurent Grasso at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. The exhibit is named for Tycho Brahe's island castle-observatory.

According to the museum website,

Grasso continues his exploration of space and temporality as he seeks to create what he calls a "false historical memory." In this in-between place where true and false intermingle, the all-pervading observation of the sky underlies a broader examination of seeing, watching and surveillance, at the same time as it opens up a path to possible worlds.

Please see Canadian Art for a most excellent summary of this conceptual installation.

The exhibit is a marvelous experience — the space is labyrinthine, it's dark, it's full of ambient sound, it feels like a mystery and a discovery. It feels like the videogame Myst — mysterious islands, weird technology, messages from a future past.

It's a perfect fit with the odd manuscripts lately invading my mind. Today I read about Kircher leading his blindfolded biographer into a labyrinth beneath a basilica, and as part of a science experiment. My discovery today of Uraniborg embodied the same spirit.

Looking for the amazing

METAPHYSICIANS OF TLÖN: Kircher is like them, he is not looking for the truth, nor even the probable, he's looking for the amazing. It never occurred to him that metaphysics is a branch of literature of the fantastic, but his work belongs entirely to fiction and therefore also to Jorge Luis Borges.

THE ESSENTIAL CLOSENESS to death, a fleeting insight from this homemade hell where my struggles take place.

— from Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès.

Weird manuscripts

The Voynich Manuscript has become a beacon for a secular community of quasi-Talmudic scholars whose interpretive ingenuity and stamina have few parallels.

After my recent immersion in the culture of the Codex Seraphinianus, it seems I am everywhere encountering references to the Voynich Manuscript.

There is an increasing body of evidence that the manuscript is a hoax, and the persistent belief that it's a code to be cracked is based on faulty assumptions, for the simple reason that we want to believe.

Wilfred Voynich, a Polish revolutionary, "discovered" the manuscript that came to be named after him in 1912. He claimed to have bought the manuscript in an Austrian castle, but later Villa Mondragone was disclosed as the source. A letter inside the manuscript indicated that Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar, had been asked to try his hand at translating it.

Aside: What little I've come to learn about Voynich makes him sound like a character out of Prus, a composite at any rate, that I wonder if The Doll didn't inspire Voynich in his person and in his attitude.

Meanwhile, I continue to read Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, which presents sections of a manuscript chronicling Kircher's life. At this point: Kircher and his young Jesuit biographer are at Villa Palagonia; Kircher discovers a weird (demonic, or scientifically advanced) manuscript and destroys it.

Also, Kircher is in attendance at a feast that is getting out of hand in all sorts of ways, and Caspar finds himself in a delicate situation with his beautiful, and married, hostess, and just when you think it might be starting to get a little bit naughty, he switches to Latin. I cannot decide if this is funny, sexy, or simply weird.

Returning to the bosom of obedience

"Do you know what word the Jesuits use to describe one of their order who has renounced his vows? They say he has become a 'satellite,' by which they mean that despite himself he remains in orbit around the Society, in a trajectory in which the forces of repulsion are in equilibrium with an attraction which he will never manage to eliminate. One doesn't leave the Society, one moves a greater or lesser distance away without ceasing, basically, to belong to it. And I have to admit that there is some truth in that way of looking at things. One can escape from slavery, although with difficulty, but never from several years of domestication; and that is what it is: training the body and the mind with one aim in view, obedience. So to 'disobey,' you know . . . Under those conditions the word doesn't have much sense. All it expresses is a mere temporary rejection of the law, a digression to be condemned, true, but that is remissible within the body of obedience itself. And if you think about it, you will have to admit that it's more or less the same for everyone. Breaking a rule, all the rules, always comes back to choosing new rules, that is, to returning to the bosom of obedience. You have the feeling you are liberating yourself, profoundly changing your being, when all you have done is to change your master. You know, the snake biting its own tail."

— from Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès.

I have been very much enjoying Where Tigers Are at Home, but it is a dense read, and I'm short on time and patience this month, so I still feel as if I've barely made a dent in this massive novel, and I'm not anywhere close to having any idea how to go about synthesizing its varied parts.

The above passage is part of a modern-day exchange involving Eléazard, who is editing a strange biography. Woven throughout the novel are sections of the manuscript, chronicling the life of Athanasius Kircher.

Imagine my delight to discover that he really existed. Kircher is a colourful character with esoteric knowledge. The novel has been alluding to his interest in Egyptology and Sinology. His research methods are a little unorthodox, or at least uncomfortable for some more bookish sorts, as evidenced in his study of volcanoes. Also, he appears to be rather lucky, or watched over by a guardian angel.

He has been written about by Umberto Eco, is cited in connection with the Voynich Manuscript, and seems to enjoy something like cult status around the web:

400 years after his birth there is a revival of interest in Kircher, perhaps because Kircher can be considered as the premodern root of postmodern thinking. With his labyrinthine mind, he was Jorge Luis Borges before Borges. In the years before Kircher's death and for 300 years afterward, he was derided as a dilettante and crackpot. The rationalism and specialization of Descartes had taken over. But at the start of the 21st century Kircher's taste for trivia, deception and wonder is back.

Kircher's postmodern qualities include his subversiveness, his celebrity, his technomania and his bizarre eclecticism. In an age of polymaths, Kircher was perhaps the most polymathic of them all. Like other Jesuits, Kircher was a religious man and a world scholar trying to prove that Aristotle and the Bible were right. He knew Hebrew, Aramaic Coptic, Persian, Latin and Greek. But Kircher was also a wild man, he got away with all-out heresy.

Kircher was, of course, a Jesuit, and his definition of "obedience" was broad, yet exacting, or so Blas de Roblès makes it out to be. I do not yet know to what degree he became a satellite.

See also: Kircher's Cosmos: On Athanasius Kircher

We haven't got anywhere yet

"For whom or for what are you in mourning?" she asked him point-blank, aware that this unexpected question shook him.

Eléazard felt his scalp tingle. He had reached the point of seeing the previous metaphor as representing his attitude to Elaine and of trying it out at random on the thousand and one aspects of his anguish, and with one word this stranger had hit the bull's eye.

"You're amazing!" he said with genuine admiration.

He thought: I'm in mourning for my love, for my youth, for an unsatisfactory world. I'm in mourning for mourning itself, for its twilight and for the soothing warmth of its lamentation. . .

But what he said was: "I'm in mourning for everything that has not succeeded in being born, for everything we do our best to destroy, for obscure reasons, every time it puts out a shoot. How can I put it . . . I can't understand why we always see beauty as a threat, happiness as degradation. . ."

The rain stopped, replaced by a silence spattered with drops and sudden trickles of water.

"We haven't got anywhere yet," said Loredana, screwing up her eyes.

— from Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès.

Why think one thing, but say another? Some days I too am in mourning for my love, for my youth, for an unsatisfactory world. What do you mourn?

A slap in the face from fate

Elaine, his wife, had never been able to bear this place where everything bore, like a stigma, the mold of deterioration, and this epidermal discharge had doubtless played a part in their separation. One more item in the multitude of faults that had been hurled at him out of the blue one evening the previous September. All the time she was talking, his mind had been filled with the standard image of a house eaten away by termites that suddenly collapses without the least sign of the impending disaster having been visible. The idea of trying to vindicate himself never entered his head, as it doubtless never enters the head of all those who are surprised one day be a slap in the face from fate: can you imagine justifying yourself when faced with an earthquake or an exploding mortar bomb? When his wife, suddenly an unknown woman, had demanded a divorce, Eléazard had submitted, signing everything he was asked to sign, agreeing to all the lawyer's requests, just as people allow themselves to be transported from one refugee camp to another. Their daughter, Moéma, was no problem, since whe was of age and led her own life that is, if one can call her way of shirking all obligations day in, day out, "leading a life."

Eléazard had chosen to remain in Alcântara and it was only recently, six months after Elaine had left to go to Brasilia, that he had started to go through the debris of his love, less to see what could be salvaged than to find the cause of such a mess.

— from Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès.

No one can walk beneath palm trees with impunity

No one can walk beneath palm trees with impunity

and ideas are sure to change in a land where

elephants and tigers are at home

This is the epigraph to Where Tigers Are at Home, Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès. It is taken from Goethe's Elective Affinities.

The novel is about Eleazard von Wogau, a retired French correspondent in modern Brazil, editing a biography of 17th-century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher.

According to the description on the publisher's website,

The rest of his life seems to begin unraveling — his ex-wife goes on a dangerous geological expedition to Mato Grosso; his daughter abandons school to travel with her young professor and her lesbian lover to an indigenous beach town, where the trio use drugs and form interdependent sexual relationships; and Eleazard himself starts losing his sanity, escalated by loneliness, and his work on the biography. Patterns begin to emerge from these interwoven narratives, which develop toward a mesmerizing climax.

Jesuits! Strange manuscripts! Sex and drugs! What's not to love! (Plus the comparisons to Eco and Murakami.)

The following passage from Goethe, in a different translation, gives slightly more context:

Many times when a certain longing curiosity about these strange objects has come over me, I have envied the traveller who sees such marvels in living, every-day connection with other marvels. But he, too, must have become another man. Palm-trees will not allow a man to wander among them with impunity; and doubtless his tone of thinking becomes very different in a land where elephants and tigers are at home.

Where Tigers Are at Home was written in French. Originally published in 2008, it won the Prix Médicis that year. It is released in English by Other Press on March 5.

I will be reading it beneath palm trees. With impunity.

Beach reading

Seven days, one beach, 2261 pages. Packed, and ready to go.

I suspect I'm being overly optimistic. It is a family vacation after all.

The page breakdown is as follows:
1439 pages, The Stand, by Stephen King
822 pages, Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

I had decided weeks ago that it was time to read The Stand. So I bought it, and I've been meaning to take it for a test drive, make sure it feels right, but I haven't really had time.

On the other hand, I have started reading Where Tigers Are at Home, but as much as it intrigues me, it's an e-ARC in image PDF, so not easily zoomable and causing me some eye strain. (At this very moment, I'm leaning toward not taking it, but...)

I only hope everyone's right about how good The Stand is, or I may be sitting there, on the beach, with 2261 pages and nothing to read.