It had nothing to do with sex

Vernon Subutex, by Virginie Despentes, is a chaotic canvas of characters all falling into orbit around a new messiah. Convoluted as life itself.

"Don't worry, I don't want to be a burden, honestly, it doesn't bother me sleeping outdoors." They look at him as though he were insane. Normal. He would have done the same in their shoes. The real truth was that, physically, he could no longer bear to be enclosed by walls and ceilings, he found it difficult to breathe, every object was hostile, and he was plagued by a noxious vibration. The worst thing was having people around him. He could feel their misery, their pain, their fear of not being good enough, of being unmasked, being punished, wasting their lives: he felt it was like pollen, it insinuated its way into every orifice and made it impossible to breath. Which meant that no, he really, truly had absolutely no desire to move in with any of them. These days he needed space. Solitude. 

After Vernon's record shop shut down, it wasn't long before he ran out of money. He gives up his worldly possessions (or he stops caring about them), and starts relying on the kindness of strangers and old friends. He has charm, charisma, and good looks, and he spins a mean set of tunes. Overlaid with the aural experiments of a rock star friend recently deceased in possibly suspicious circumstances, the sound waves act like a drug on the masses.

The center of the room was filled with people — the silhouettes had converged and were moving, some slowly, others still entwined, or tracing circles around each other. And then she saw — not with the clarity of a hallucination brought on by acid or shrooms, but even so she saw, and could not claim it was a dream since the illusion lasted long enough for her to be entirely aware of it — light waves surrounding the bodies and she could perceive ribbons of energy, writhing and moving between people. She is a rational person. Unless on drugs, she did not expect to see colored streamers connecting people.

She doesn't like it when people read her cards, she doesn't believe in the supernatural, she's got no time for spells and curses. But here, in the darkness, she could see things that did not exist. And the most unsettling thing is that she did not deliberate, did not decide to get up — she simply found herself on her feet, hands in the air, an idiot smile plastered to her face. She was dancing. And although she was not touching anyone, not brushing up against another body, she recognized the feeling — she was orgasming. It had nothing to do with sex and yet this was the most incredible fuck she'd ever had in her life.

These are the ultimate raves, by invitation only, so the inner circle can control the vibe. The hangers on  include former musicians, a screenwriter, porn stars, a stock market trader, a rock critic, a tattoo artist, their wives and lovers, the homeless and the wealthy, Muslims and atheists. It's a panorama of Charlie Hebdo's Paris, where people are contradictions and sometimes even hypocrites.

Over three volumes clocking in at nearly 1,000 pages, this was an engrossing read. Despentes is often compared to bad boy Michel Houellebecq; maybe I'm inured to provocation on the grounds of that holy trifecta of sex, religion and politics, but I don't see it. Despentes's characters are messy and offbeat, but they feel real. I'm not sure if there needs to be a social commentary underlying this thick slab of life; it's simply exuberant.

I just read and kept reading, way past my bedtime.

The brain of a person with irrational goals has greater depth of field than one that functions normally, it's always several steps ahead, it anticipates everything. It's the same thing with alcohol. Even when Véro wants to stop drinking, she knows that her brain will manage to get her into situations that leave her no option, and generally this happens unbeknownst to her own free will — in other words, she does not decide to drink, she remembers she needs to call an old friend going through a hard time, and once she is at his place, she realizes that what she really comes for is a dozen shots of pastis. The brain is devious: it plays tricks on your consciousness, it does things on the sly, that way you get exactly what you wanted while pretending you were thinking about something else entirely.

While Vernon Subutex is no lyrical masterpiece (neither is War and Peace), it holds both beauty ("She is resilient and fragile, and there is something about the tension between these things that makes her overwhelming.") and truth ("You don't batter the mother of your kids because she did something wrong. You do it because you're violent.").

Check out Jennifer Croft's take on Volume 1 with a particular eye on the quality of the translation (Croft translates Olga Tokarczuk):

Part of what makes this book so exciting to read is Despentes's ability to broach so many topics, toggling between them in seamless, almost superhuman fashion. Deftly she tackles sex, materialism, the technologies that are hastening society’s collapse, capitalism, racism, gender fluidity, wounded masculinity, wounded femininity, domestic violence, homelessness, porn, the hypocrisy of the left, and the virulence of the right. Vernon Subutex 1 is about all these things, but it is also about Paris — the people living in the city today, and in particular, those who don’t change when society changes around them.

Excerpts
from Volume 1
from Volume 2 
from Volume 3 

He does not say what he is thinking. He is thinking that no one is solid. Nothing. No group. That it is the hardest thing to learn. That we are tenants of a situation, not landlords.

The approximate quality of our conversations

"What's your passion?" How I hate that question. Passionately. 

It's a phrase that gained traction over the last couple decades or so. (Is Oprah to blame?) We used to talk about hobbies and interests. Now I feel inadequate for not having a driving force that is my singular focus. I am not passionate about reading, or sculpting, or the environment. I care deeply about them, but they do not stir a fire in my belly. (Perhaps I believe my passions should be sexual.)

I've been thinking a lot lately about love and passion, and the words we use to express them, and how words often get in the way. It's one of the great paradoxes of our modern life that we value open and honest communication, and we rely on words to do the heavy lifting, yet we so rarely use them the same way. We are each one of us a giant, fragile talking egg. 

It is a great personal paradox that I make my living by manipulating words; I am regularly paralyzed by their inadequacy.

The fact that he was a foreigner made it all the more difficult to understand his behaviour, moulded by a culture that I knew only through folklore and clichés for tourists. At first, I was discouraged by the obvious limitations of our exchanges, which were reinforced by the fact that, although he spoke fairly good French, I could not express myself in his language. Later I realized that this situation spared me the illusion that we shared a perfect relationship, or even formed a whole. Because his French strayed slightly from standard use and because I occasionally had doubts about the meaning he gave to words, I was able to appreciate the approximate quality of our conversations. From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.

"Passion," to me, has always evoked volatility. A grand romantic passion is doomed to tragedy and forces beyond our control. (Is this why I'm so wary of passion?) My own psychology feeds this definition. And etymologically, passion is linked to suffering. If passion is not those things, then how is it different from love? (Is it?) (Where is the joy?)

Simple Passion, by Annie Ernaux, is a memoir recounting her state of mind in the aftermath of an affair with a married man. It is not about the man or their relationship. It is about her experience of them. 

The book opens on her memory of seeing a porn movie for the first time. The writing is graphic but detached, leading me to feel the absurdity and mundanity of the scene on screen. She remarks on how it normalizes that which was once shocking and shameful.

It occurred to me that writing should aim to do the same, to replicate the feeling of witnessing sexual intercourse, that feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment. 

Surprisingly then, the rest of the book is devoid of sexual content. It is, however, painfully honest.

Indeed, it has helped me normalize what I can only call temporary insanity, the obsession I feel for a man I'm sleeping with, not just any man, certainly I don't feel this way about every man I've slept with, but there's been a man or two in the course of my life who's gotten under my skin. The single-mindedness, that everything relates to him or anticipates him, is in service of his being, not like I exist solely to serve him, not that nothing exists outside of him, not that I'm some vapid thing who has no sense of self outside of her man, who forgets her friends and family and obligations for him, but suddenly he is important, and his presence (or absence) shines light or casts a shadow on everything else. And when he is gone, he remains important.

When I was reading, the sentences that gave me pause were those concerning a relationship between a man and a woman. They seemed to teach me something about A. and lent credibility to the things I wished to believe.

I too stand the words on the page beside my relationship, looking for points of intersection to cross-reference my experience. (I gloat inwardly when she misses a screening of Oshima's Realm of the Senses, which she was convinced encapsulated her story; I had the pleasure of enjoying it in the company of my lover.) 

Was that love? Simple passion? Just sex? (When is passion simple? Is it, in fact, always so simple?)

Whether or not he was "worth it" is of no consequence. And the fact that all this is gradually slipping away from me, as if it concerned another woman, does not change this one truth: thanks to him, I was able to approach the frontier separating me from others, to the extent of actually believing that I could sometimes cross over it.

I measured time differently, with all my body.

I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them. Without knowing, it, he brought me closer to the world.

None of it is overwrought. None of it is pathetic or apologetic. It's quite simple really. (Love happens inside one's own head.)

Passion is also patient (for its own resolution?), deep and abiding, despite any of my efforts to tame it a little or deny it entirely.

Everyone is like a bombed-out city

It is not difficult to fall in love. First her eyes staring at him last night, her youth and that faint impudence — nothing vulgar, just enough to pique his curiosity. Then there is the way she carries herself, the urge to stroke her back, to press his lips against her inner thighs; there is the tone of her voice, the mischievous gleam when she talks to him, something just a little rushed about her delivery — but not enough to get on his nerves. And that unconscious ease that comes of being so young — still oblivious to the blows that will destroy parts of her. Past the age of forty, everyone is like a bombed-out city. He falls in love when she bursts out laughing — desire mingled with a promise of happiness, a utopia of perfectly matched tranquilities — she only has to turn her face to his, to let him kiss her, and he will enter a different world. Vernon knows the difference: arousal is a pulsating in the groin, love is a weakening in the knees. A part of his soul falls away — and the floating sensation is both delicious and disquieting: if the other person refuses to catch the body tumbling toward it, the fall will be all the more painful, since he is no longer a young man. With age we suffer more and more, as though our emotional skin, more delicate, more fragile, can longer bear the slightest blow.

— from Vernon Subutex 1, by Virginie Despentes.

The decomposition of my face

Pleasure taken alone can be told, pleasure taken with another is elusive.

This week, I received an unsolicited review copy of a novel in the mail — The Heart Remembers, it's called. This is not about that book, I'm not sure that I'll read it. But I take its arrival for a sign, a message. What does my heart remember? And how could I have forgotten? How is my heart not a part of me? (Sometimes you receive gifts from the universe.)

I had to cover geographical distances to reach parts of myself. I had to go from Paris to Dieppe in a Renault 4 and to sleep facing the sea to learn that somewhere in a part of me that I could not see and that I had not imagined I had an opening, a cavity that was so supple and so deep that the extension of flesh that meant a boy was a boy, and I was not, could be accommodated there.

The Sexual Life of Catherine M, by Catherine Millet, is a (scandalous? sensational?) 2002 memoir in which the art critic and curator catalogues her many adventures with many men, primarily in orgiastic fashion in Paris and the Bois du Bologne, from the late 1960s onwards. 

Led to it by a mention in Bluets, by Maggie Nelson, I expected more reflection, more enlightenment. However, I respect the candour with which Millet divulges intimate details. It fit perfectly with my informal project of reading under-the-radar classic erotic literature.

I hesitate to use the word "erotic" or "amorous" in relation to these escapades that are purely physically sexual. While dripping with pleasure, and there's no evidence to dispute that Millet thoroughly enjoyed herself, there's not a lot of heart in her testimony.

Narration cuts bodies into pieces, satisfies the need to reify them, to instrumentalise them. That famous scene in Godard's Le Mepris, when Piccoli runs, word by word over Bardot's body, is a beautiful transposition of the two-way traffic between sight and speech, each word bringing a part of the body into focus. How many times don't people say "Look!" when they're fucking?  

In some ways, it's an exercise in body positivity, taking pleasure in one's body, in all bodies, no matter their shape, size, age. But there's a part of Millet that wants to be objectified, wants to be Brigitte Bardot. Millet tells us about the bodies, and the circumstances of encountering them, but she neglects the mind, the heart.

A body and the mind attached to it do not live in the same temporal sphere, and their reactions to the same external stimuli are not always synchronised.

She is aware of the performative nature of her acts, but it seems that only late in the game does she recognize the value of being seen, truly seen.

In real life, a man that I met only once gave me such intense pleasure that I have very precise memories of it, and this was because with every thrust he would order me "Look me in the eye." I did as I was told, knowing that he was witness to the decomposition of my face.

Millet also reveals how little she understood her body. Despite the experience, and pleasure of a certain kind, her clitoris remained a mystery for a long time. 

Eventually I cottoned on: the clitoris was not an obvious landmark like a nail on a wall, a steeple in a landscape or a nose on a face, it was a sort of muddled knot, with no true shape, a minute chaos where two little tongues of flesh meet like when a backwash throws two waves together.

She admits also to not having had a real orgasm until very many years into her adventuring.

It took me a long time, a really long time, to identify the caresses, the positions that I liked best. I will venture this as an explanation: I was not right from the start granted a body predisposed to pleasure. First I had to give myself — literally abandon my whole body — to sexual activity, to lose myself in it so thoroughly that I confused myself with my partner so that I could emerge from this transformation having sloughed off the body I was given at birth and taken on a second body, one capable of taking as much as it could give.

(I wonder sometimes how I discovered my clitoris, how lucky I was — how I marvel at the pleasure it brings me. But then, I could always lose myself in my own body; I always had trouble caring about the pleasure of others and understanding how different yet compatible it could be compared to my own.)

It is all the easier to write about discomforts and displeasure because they seem to distend time, and time allows us to focus. Even if they do not register with us straight away, the carve out a furrow within us which represents time.

I'm left wondering what Millet truly gained from the experience. There is a coldness about this book, like she's barely skimming the surface of her psyche, that makes me question the narrative she's told herself, how honest is she being with herself.

At times like that, it is the other body that you leave behind, a body you may have known only a few hours, but which during those hours has nourished you with its solid presence and its smell, it that body which provides you with the ineffable well-being of familiarity. How many times have I thought, as I fantasised languidly about the life of high class whore, that that was one of the advantages of their job. As for the journey itself, the lapse of time we inhabit when we are no longer in one place but not yet in another, can be a source of pleasure measured on the same scale as erotic pleasure.

See also
Guardian: The double life of Catherine M
New Yorker: Doing it in the road
LRB: Hang on to the doily (Jenny Diski: "If sex is just a bodily event, that's slag: if you think or better still write about it, that’s freedom.") 

While I was no longer capable of exchanging a single word with him, or to respond to the touch of his hand, I could still offer him the spectacle of myself indulging in the complete negation of my being.

Fraught with humanity, with frailty, with despair

Meanwhile, I'd taken my courage in both hands, turned my first trick, at home, a chubby little guy, about sixty, who chain-smoked untipped cigarettes and talked a lot during sex. He seemed lonely, and I found him surprisingly sweet. I don't know whether I come across as gauche and gentle or seriously intimidating, or whether I was just lucky, but as time went by, it became clear: with me, clients tended to be warm, attentive, gentle. If memory serves, and I think it does, it was not their aggressiveness or their contempt I found difficult to deal with, nor any of the things they were into, but their loneliness, their sadness, their pallid skin, their wretched shyness, the flaws they couldn't conceal, the weaknesses they showed. Their age, their need to feel young flesh against their wizened bodies. Their paunches, their micro-dicks, their flabby arses, their yellow teeth. It was their vulnerability that complicated the whole thing. In the end, the johns you could hate or despise were the ones you could do while remaining completely indifferent. Maximum cash, minimum time, and afterwards never think about them again. But in my limited experience, most clients were fraught with humanity, with frailty, with despair. And it lingered afterwards, clinging to me like remorse.

— from King Kong Theory, by Virginie Despentes.

I have come to know this truth: there's a profound intimacy in sex founded in loneliness and pity. Too fat, too thin, or just plain ugly. It's a deeply vulnerable exposure. We all just want release from our bodies. Sex is a kindness, we can choose to be kind to one another. 

Free of existence's gravitational pull

She walked through the market stands with her new stride, at once lazy and confident, loose and firm, looking at everything and knowing she'd buy nothing because she and Marko now had to avoid all unnecessary expense, but not wanting anything anyway, neither fabric nor pottery nor metal bangles, simply happy as she thought she'd never been before (because anxiety had always subtly spoiled her most joyful moments, the birth of her children or the completion of her degree), feeling her healthy, familiar, faithful body move freely through the warmth, her thoughts wandering this way and that, unencumbered, weighed down by no worry, no incomprehension.

She could, if she wanted to, or if the miracle of this new outlook had not come to pass, easily find something to torment herself with, she knew that.

But it was as if, rather than deposit her in another land, the plane had delivered her to a universe apart, where she could finally feel the happiness of being herself free of existence's gravitational pull.

Is this what death is like? she wondered. Could she have died and not remembered?

But what she was feeling bore all the hallmarks of life at its fullest, particularly her awareness of her warm, rounded body, lightly dressed in pale lines, which she guided through the stands, she thought, smiling to herself, simply for the pleasure of enjoying its perfect mechanics.

Ladivine is another unsettling novel by Marie Ndiaye. It's emotionally uncomfortable — it seems so foreign until you recognize yourself in it and you wonder, am I so petty, or so proud, so concerned about what others think? Where do the standards and ambitions for myself come from? How many truths do I hide from the people closest to me? What do I hide from myself? Do I even like myself?

It's been months since I read this novel, and it's like I had to rush away from it, cleanse myself of its dark intensity. The book has very distinct phases, covering Clarisse's relationships with her mother, her husband, and their daughter, and then

The mother and daughter are both named Ladivine, but they do not know each other. Clarisse was born Malinka, but only her mother knows her by that name (until later, anyway). As a child, out of shame or disgust Malinka starts referring to her mother as her servant. At age 17 Malinka leaves for Bordeaux and reinvents herself. But her mother find her.

Her love for her mother was a foul-tasting food, impossible to choke down. That food dissolved into bitter little crumbs in her mouth, then congealed, and this went on and on and had no end, the lump of fetid bread shifting from one cheek to the other, then the soft, stinking fragments that made of her mouth a deep pit of shame.

Not exactly a loving relationship. We learn early on that Ladivine's complexion is dark, and clearly Clarisse passes for white, and I can't begin to unravel this aspect of their relationship — maybe it allows Clarisse to disconnect from her mother, her history, maybe it's self-hatred deflected onto a convenient target. Clarisse is also disconnected from herself, emotionless, but driven to become the sort of person she thinks everyone expects her to be. That doesn't bode well for love in the long term.

Clarisse marries Richard, and they are happy and successful with a beautiful home, a daughter, and a dog. Clarisse told them her mother had died long ago. Clarisse thinks the dog has her mother's eyes, and there are some incidents. By the time her marriage falls apart (Richard remarries, to a woman named Clarisse), the daughter Ladivine is emotionally distant from her and living in Germany.

Clarisse really can't figure out where it all went wrong. She still visits her mother every Tuesday.

When she meets Freddy, she doesn't reinvent herself so much as she undoes or erases her previous self. Here things go really wrong, and Clarisse, or Malinka, falls out of the story. We're only a third of the way through. The book is called Ladivine, after all. But I'm already gutted.

Growing up, Ladivine could do no wrong. Permissive parents led her to be something of a wild child. But now she's married in Berlin with two children and going on a family vacation.

They're in place they'd never dreamed of going, somewhere south, and Ladivine is repeatedly mistaken for someone else, and she loses herself utterly. Of course, Clarisse haunts her, and some stray dog always follows them.

The characters are frustratingly opaque, not least to themselves. Families are doomed to repeat their dysfunctional dynamics.

It feels hot and confused, it's surreal and uncomfortable, and I don't entirely understand why. 

What do you know about yourself?

In a man, not liking women is a pose. In a woman, not liking men is a pathology.

Sounds a little like Atwood's, "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." This is Virginie Despentes. But her statement is not about how men and women behave, it's about how society perceives them. Imagine, Despentes prompts us, if a woman wrote about men the way Houellebecq writes about women.

This is not an easy book. King Kong Theory, by Virginie Despentes, is ferocious. Like any good manifesto, it sucks you into its worldview without giving you space to breathe or time to think. 

So I read along, yes, yes, yes! 

Little girls are bought up learning never to hurt men, and whenever a woman flouts that rule, she is quickly put back in her place. No-one wants to know that they are cowardly. No-one wants to feel that in their own flesh. I'm not angry with myself for not daring to kill one of them, I'm angry at a society that educated me without teaching me to wound a man if he tries to fuck me against my will, especially when this same society has drummed into me the idea that it is a crime I should never get over. And mostly I am fucking furious at the fact that, having been faced with three guys and a gun in the middle of a forest with nowhere to run, I still feel guilty that I didn't have the courage to defend us with a little knife.

This is the kind of feminist the world needs! Or is she? Though I was swept up in her diatribe, when I stepped back to unravel what I'd read I found myself not always wholeheartedly agreeing. For example, she defends prostitution for the agency it lets women claim over their bodies. To which I can only say, yyesss but that's nnnott exactly the whole story.

Despentes is angry. In this series of essays, she tackles rape, porn, and prostitution. Capitalism, the beauty industry, the marriage contract.

If we do not push on towards the unknown that is the gender revolution, we know exactly what we will be slipping back towards. An all-powerful state that infantilizes us, meddles in our every decision, for our own good — keeping us in a state of childhood, of ignorance, fearful of punishment, of exclusion. The special treatment so far reserved for women, using shame as the primary tool to enforce their isolation, their docility, their inability to act, could be extended to everyone. To understand the mechanics of how we, as women, have been made to feel inferior, and been trained to become a crack team that polices itself, is to understand the mechanics of control of the population as a whole. Capitalism is an equal-opportunities religion in the sense that it subjugates us all, and leads each of us to feel trapped, as all women are.

Several of her arguments are simply uncomfortable, not because I disagree with them but because I haven't formulated a stance on my own, and I'm not sure I always need to (my personal relationship with porn is near nonexistent and I don't feel compelled to change that). Despentes writes that "the true history of porn, what creates and defines it, is censorship." Clearly, society's relationship to porn is convoluted at best — to be expected of an industry that we demand reflect reality while embodying pure fantasy — and it's hard not to agree on the necessity to smash the stigmatization of porn. It's just hard to keep up with her — for example, in a paragraph on female nymphomania, she concludes that it's men "who rack up conquests in the hope of one day experiencing something approaching a real orgasm." Which, OK, yeah, but then she just moves on to Paris Hilton and how her social status trumps her gender. 

All this to say, this book is loaded with theories sprung from analyses on top of throwaway observations, and I wish some of them had a little more room.

Despentes puts a lot of responsibility on women, which doesn't seem fair, but that's the point. Who else is going to fix things?

I realize that what other women do or don't do with their clitoris is none of my business, but I'm still slightly troubled by their indifference to masturbation: if they don't get themselves off when they're alone, at what point do women connect with their own fantasies? How much do they know about what really turns them on? And if you don't know that, what do you know about yourself? What connection can you have with yourself if even your pussy is systematically controlled by someone else?

Excerpt. 
Author profile.
#fuckthepatriarchy

To all the polyamorists I ever loved

"It's not a cult, but the victory of reason over myth. It's not a movement of the senses, it's an exercise of the mind. It's not an excess of pleasure, but the pleasure of excess. It's not a license, but a rule. And it's a morality."

Eroticism. This is not the dirty book I expected it to be.

Yes, Emmanuelle spends the early pages having adventures with men on airplanes and with women in squash courts and other places.

She has great sexual appetite and, for the most part, celebrates it. But she also thinks about it more than she acts on it.

Then she meets Mario.

And suddenly, that great classic of erotic literature, Emmanuelle, by Emmanuelle Arsan, reveals itself to be a philosophical treatise on sensual pleasure.

"Eroticism is not a handbook of recipes for amusing yourself in society. It's a concept of human destiny, a gauge, a canon, a code, a ceremony, an art, a school. It's also a science — or rather the choice fruit, the last fruit, of science. Its laws are based on reason, not on credulity... on confidence, instead of fear... and on a taste for life, rather than on the mystique of death. Eroticism is not a product of decadence, but a progress. Because it helps to desanctify sex, it's an instrument of mental and social health. And I maintain that it's an element of spiritual elevation, because it presupposes character training and renunciation of the passions of illusion in favor of the passions of lucidity."

Mario lectures Emmanuelle on not giving herself too freely while also encouraging her to indulge herself.

He exalts beauty because it is a man-made construct. Since the reproductive act itself is so absurd, he exalts sexual acts which are against nature. Sex grounded in impulse, habit, or duty cannot be erotic.

To be erotic, sex must have an aesthetic, not a biological, purpose. Eroticism, Mario claims, demands a systematic mind.

Eroticism then is not about love or pleasure, it's about freedom from the constraints of nature, of the body, from aging and gravity. It's an exercise of the mind and of consciousness. (But how, I wonder, can you remove the body from sex? Mario's philosophy is frustratingly paradoxical at times.)

What's erotic is what's unexpected, and therefore always shifting. What's erotic is not a matter of positions, but of situations. What's erotic is the journey, not the end (a tenet of tantra).

This is where it gets complicated: there's a difference between sensuousness and eroticism. Eroticism is rational, it's what separates us from animals. But in the end I fail to see the difference between a sensuous and an erotic act. Maybe the only difference is in intent? Sensual is primal, but erotic is elevated, evolutionarily advanced.

Monogamous attachment, not unexpectedly within the code that is being laid out, is learned behaviour. Adultery is erotic because a third party is always present (in the relationship).

Over the past year, I've chatted with several men, met some of them. They label themselves variously: polyamorous, ethically nonmonogamous, sensualist, hedonist, eroticist. "Open-minded." These terms are used flexibly, to mean what they want them to mean, but by naming their outlook, they feel they have established a framework for their behaviour. They are like Mario, strong in their beliefs, but occasionally faltering in contradiction. Perhaps they are nothing more than selfish, armed with words. (Coincidentally, I have not seen the film adaptation of this book, but it seems every teenage boy of my generation has.)

Emmanuelle wonders why she can't simply do as she pleases, sexually speaking, without having to devise a moral code around her behaviour. Why should a morality founded in eroticism be better than no morality at all? (I ask myself this every day.)

And then [SPOILER] Emmanuelle and Mario smoke opium and have a threesome with the driver.

Where is love in all this? I don't know.

I read and I dream about hell

I sleep to my heart's content, day and night. Between naps, I read. A huge fatigue turns up between books, between naps. A black hole to swallow me up. The poets keep me company, I'm damned along with them, in the books and in my room in the country where I read. I read and I dream about hell and about the scarlet sky at the end of hell, like a bright border of flames.

Sometimes you find what you need. Am I Disturbing You? by Anne Hébert was that book, in a second-hand shop I'd never been to on a stretch of street I rarely walk.

Overly poetic, dreamlike, confusing, empty of plot, characters too slight to make sense, too much white space. And yet.

What I take away from this slim novella, though, the relevant thing I need to process is how someone can enter your life for so brief a period and suddenly leave it and leave an indelible imprint on you and dredge up long-forgotten (long-buried?) aspects of self, despite never really knowing each other, never having a claim on each other (that is, no explicit claim).

The story is of Delphine, evidently pregnant, and obsessed with Patrick Chemin, who has allegedly proclaimed his love for her but is recently married to the Fat Lady. Édouard and Stéphane find Delphine in the square.

There was a girl who hadn't moved for quite a while, who was sitting on the rim of the fountain with the water streaming at her back. There was something surprising about her stillness. From her entire little person there emanated a kind of obstinacy at being there in the mist from the fountain, an unwillingness to exist anywhere else — elbows on her knees, folded in on herself, slightly shocked at finding herself in the world.

Stéphane falls for her fast; for Édouard it's a slow burn. Édouard's a copywriter. Delphine has eyes only for Patrick and speaks only of her dead grandmother. Delphine never really disturbs anyone, until she does. Édouard finally dredges up some deeply painful (and painfully vague) childhood memories that explain nothing.

I have enjoyed reading Hébert in the past. Reading her now I'm reminded of Patrick Mondiano, but with characters more ephemeral, less grounded in reality.

My heart was beating at a slight remove

I didn't realize it at the time, I told myself, but Ange's shadow was already very discreetly darkening this room where the three of us used to sit, happy and serene, it was already there, lurking in a corner, remaking our future, because, though I surely didn't realize it at the time, my heart was beating at a slight remove from the two others, imperceptibly less innocent, less constant, less convinced.

I read a review of this novel one morning, and bought myself a copy that very afternoon.

My Heart Hemmed In, by Marie Ndiaye, is an intensely claustrophobic, paranoid novel. I carried it with me in my soul, it weighed on me, it dragged me down.

This is how I felt all week long:

What? What's going on? Why are people treating me this way? What did I do? Did I do something? What happened? Why does everyone think I know what happened? Why don't they believe me? Why won't anyone be straight with me? Are they afraid of me? Repulsed be me? Why won't they tell me? Why has my period stopped? What happened?

This was a spiritually exhausting read. Brilliant.

It starts with Nadia and Ange, teachers, on their way home from school. As they settle in at home it becomes evident that Ange has been seriously injured. Narrated by Nadia, we're as much in the dark as she is. Who did this (and what is it exactly they did) and why?

It seems everyone — the neighbours, the pharmacist, the school principal — is well aware of what transpired. Nadia alone is oblivious. And it's hinted that it's all her fault.

Nadia admits that she and Ange were guilty of arrogance. It's also suggested that they are outsiders to this community. But is that sufficient to bring on this level of harm and ostracization?

Is she an immigrant? But she was born in a nearby Bordeaux neighbourhood. Is it because she's fat? (Or possibly pregnant?) Does her ex-husband have something to do with it? Nothing is clear.

I was sympathetic toward Nadia at the beginning, but she can be inappropriately brash (a sign of weakness?) and she makes some odd decisions. While the sentiment expressed toward her seemed to be part of something bigger, at some point I had to consider whether she as an individual had in fact brought any of this on herself.

She's not exactly likeable.

I extend an uncertain hand. She brushes hers against it, not squeezing it, and I shiver at the touch of a warm, tender skin, telling myself that my own dry, dimpled, frightened little hand must make her feel like she's touching a lizard.

"Good trip?" she asks.

But she's already turned around, uninterested in my answer, or even whether I answer, and so I say nothing, impotent and desolate, feeling my capacity for reflection and judgment and perspective being drowned by the tidal wave of unconditional admiration and painful obeisance that hadn't washed over me for so long, protected as I was by Ange's assurance, he who could never be felt to feel reverence for anything or anyone.

This reading experience called to mind a few other novels:

• Magda Szabo's The Door, for it's depiction of "community" from one specific — and warped — perspective, as well as the narrator's way of introspection — self-probing but somehow still always at a remove or missing the point.
• Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. (which I've not finished), for it's distortion of time, it's urgency, but also the sense of the self being swallowed by the self — all that introspection having a deleterious effect.
• Herman Koch's The Dinner, to a lesser extent, for that pressing sense that this story is bigger than just what happens to one or two little people — that it's important. Also possibly because I was on some level aware of the a racist element in this book.

The ending is quite baffling, but that comes after a long string of bafflements.

1. Why the italics? Is that her heart talking? Is it what's muffled, screaming to get out? Is this her innermost voice? But no, it expresses some very banal things.

2. Who is the great Noget? A writer of treatises on education, he espouses something like tough love, but his treatment of Nadia and Ange could be construes as the opposite. He coddles them, shields them. At times, it seems, with sinister purposes. Is he taking revenge on Ange, or rewarding him? Is he trying to teach Nadia a lesson? What lesson?

3. What happened to Yasmine? Nadia's mother hints at something terrible? Did Wilma devour her? Metaphorically or literally? Why must Nadia not eat the meat?

4. Food plays a role. Nadia eats Noget's food, despite feeling there's some hideous intention in his cooking. Such rich food, she's been tricked. There's the charitable food of a stranger. There's the meat, bloody meat at her son's home. At long last there's the restorative food at her parents' house, prepared by honest fingers.

5. So many smells! The ongoing and intensifying smell of Ange's putrefaction. "He can't smell the stench of his own infection, but he's repelled by the aroma of fine food." The fog, permeating the city with a metallic smell. A woman's accent like a revolting smell. Some healthy, sweet smells, and warm intimate smells. The smell of the dog's saliva, strong and sour. The way the dog reacts to her, Nadia must smell like a dog.

6. There is no humour in this book, just absurdity. Trams don't pick her up. Streets become unrecognizable. The very city seems to want to expel her.

7. What exactly happened? (I have some ideas now.) Nadia may have missed something in the news, because they don't have a television.

At heart, this is a book about owning one's self, owning one's heritage, one's past.

Oh, her poor heart!

This is a figment of my overwrought mind, and I know it. I'm perfectly sane, perfectly capable, even in my mistrust and trepidation, of grasping its outlandishness. But knowing that doesn't stop my heart, my poor fat-encased heart, from racing ach time someone pops up before me, looking slightly haunted (is that real or feigned?), and fixing me with the wide-eyed stare of someone who doesn't see the person he was expecting.

No, I'm not out of my mind. Why should I be so convinced that everything I see has some direct connection to me? I can't rid myself of the feeling the whole city is spying on me. And my heart is cornered, surrounded by the baying pack, and it's hammering on the wall of my chest, wishing it could break out of its cramped cage, my poor aging heart, my poor trembling heart.

How does one come to know one's own heart? Or anyone else's?

The heart of the city: "I've been walking the heart of this city, its black old heart, its cold old heart, for the past half century" — "its old, dark, ungrateful heart," "dark and perversely changeable, the heart of my city.""

Her son's heart: "("my little heart," I so long called him, and now here he is forsaking his mother's old heart)."

Her ex-husband's heart: "his devoted but unformed heart, his rudimentary heart."

Nadia's "petty old heart." "My stolid heart, my weakening, stolid heart, keep on bravely beating in your prison of fat!"

"I find I have to stop and rest until my heart, my scandalized, insulted heart, starts to beat a little slower." "But my heart is uneasy, the side of my heart that's still decent, appalled, and humiliated, but meek, so very meek." "My heart clenched, a heart that's not so old anymore, my old heart now young again, stupidly beating in time with what inhuman heart?"

"I feel my agitation and doubts, my confusion and hatred, flowing away with my tears, draining my fat, heavy old heart of the questions that had been choking it."

In the end, Nadia expels the tumour (whatever its nature — rancor?) growing inside her.

Because I say to myself, where could that thing — that black, glistening, fast-moving thing I saw slide over the floor of my room one night as I was undressing for bed — possibly have sprung from if not my own body? A quick, black, glistening thing that left a faint trail of blood on the floor, all the way to the door.

It's a bloody horror novel.

Revisiting Ravenscrag

The other week I attended the launch of Alain Farah's Ravenscrag at Drawn & Quarterly (although the term "launch" seems to be used rather loosely by the store, as the book has been available since January).

The conversation with author Alain Farah (left) and his translator, Lazer Lederhendler (right), was moderated by Catherine Leclerc. Interestingly, it's Lederhendler who held the floor for most of the evening, probably because 1. his command of English is superior to that of the other parties, and 2. as translator, he's had to read and interpret the text particularly closely. He could've carried the evening on his own with his insight into the problems of translation.

Lededhendler notes that the novel may seem crazy — or better, "madcap" — but it's not insane. It holds to an internal logic.

The novel in French is titled Pourquoi Bologne, which I would think makes the thing as a whole something other than Montreal-centric, whereas the English takes for its title the name of a city landmark, grounding it very firmly. I can't help but think the title, and the impression it creates, affects the reception of the novel. Is it a different novel in English than it is in French? In fact, Farah occasionally refers to the translation as "Lazer's novel."

What I hadn't considered is how much the schizoid experience of the book is meant to reflect a francophone's experience in English Montreal — I can't tell if I didn't recognize this because I'm still so much an outsider to this city that I can't see some of its essential paradoxes, or that I'm so much of here already that the issues appear commonplace and don't strike me the way they would if I were reading about some foreign place.

The underground geography of the McTavish reservoir, its pipes and tubes, Farah says was inspired by Terry Gilliam.

This novel is not a linear narrative because that's not Farah's experience of the world.

[I had several issues with the event: it started late (about 30 minutes or so, though I'd stopped checking the time); the way chairs were set up severely restricted movement, particularly access to the author (for a subsequent event I attended, someone had the sense to stack chairs to clear floorspace once the formal portion of the event was through); in fact, the author appeared to be at a cocktail party rather than a book-signing (I had every intention of buying a copy of the book for a friend, but I didn't, because it was difficult to interrupt his small talk and more awkward to ask that he bestow the favour of his signature (at the subsequent event, the author sat at a table and there was a clear lineup for signings). Keeping it casual can be cool, but I'd bet it's detrimental to book sales.]

Things I would've liked to ask the author (but didn't, because the question period was cut short because it was weirdly silent and I'd already asked a question, and because I failed to schmooze my way into conversation with him):

• What exactly is retro scifi? Is it a thing your marketing department came up with, just because you mention Philip K. Dick?
• What is the relationship between insanity and time travel? You seem to be deeply influenced by Philip K. Dick; to what extent is the relationship between insanity and time travel in your novel inspired by or modeled after Dick's depictions?
• Although he has a cult following, Dick has never really been accepted by the literary establishment (to the extent even that none of the reviews of your novel I've read appear to recognize his influence): Does that hold true among French readers? (To what extent is genre an English problem?) How do you feel about the genre-ification of literature, that Dick should be ghetto-ized? How would you feel if your book were shelved in SF?

Serious sociological reflection

Georges Simenon was born on Friday, February 13 — 102 years ago. Last Friday, A Different Stripe posted a great quote about it:

"It's a boy," she stammered. As for him, with a complete lack of self-restraint, he said, crying all the while:

"I shall never, never forget that you have just given me the greatest joy a woman can give a man..."

"Désiré... Listen... What time is it?"

The child had been born at ten past twelve. Élise whispered:

"Listen, Désiré... He's come into the world on a Friday the thirteenth... Nobody must know... You must beg that woman..."

And that was why, the next morning, when Désiré, accompanied by his brother Arthur as a witness, went to register the child's birth at the Town Hall, he told the clerk, with an innocent expression:

"Roger Mamelin, born at Liége, at No. 18, Rue Léopold, on Thursday 12 February 1903."

That's from Pedigree, Simenon's novelization of his own life, which I have not yet read.

As if to chide me, there's also an excellent essay by Elliott Colla on "Maigret's Jurisdiction" in the LA Review of Books:

By mapping out the emergent networks of French modernity as a sprawling social geography, Simenon turned crime writing toward serious sociological reflection. Take, for instance, the enigmatic opening lines of Pietr the Latvian: "ICPC to PJ Paris Xvzust Krakow vimontra m ghks triv psot uv Pietr-le-Letton Bremen vs tyz btolem." Maigret translates the phrase, which, we learn, is composed in the language of a continental network of police agencies. Rendered legible, the words read: "International Criminal Police Commission to Police Judiciaire in Paris: Krakow police report sighting Pietr the Latvian en route to Bremen." The next memo reads: "Polizei-Präsidium Bremen to PJ Paris: Pietr the Latvian reported en route Amsterdam and Brussels." These memos and others sketch a colorful map of overlapping networks: a rail that could take a Latvian national through Poland and Germany, then Holland and Belgium and on to France; a police network linking the national polices of these various countries in a single system of knowledge and surveillance; and, of course, a communication network linking these two systems — rail and policing — to one another in real-time.

The rest of the novel fills out this geography, and indicates just how exhilarating and terrifying it was for Simenon to witness the emergence of this interwar landscape where polyglot nations intersected and interpenetrated each other by way of crime and interdiction. Bodies, goods, and information travel back and forth across borders with near infinite possibilities. This movement is what makes crime possible, by allowing men to leave their pasts behind or to inhabit more than one identity at a time.

All those Maigret reissues to explore. And I still have a few old Simenon paperbacks that I dug up in second-hand shops lying around, unread. And there are several untranslated works also available to me to practice my French. I have a feeling I'll be getting back to basic, serious sociological reflection with Simenon very soon.

One of the most amazing people on Earth

I have a slight obsession with reviews of an unreliable biography about an obscure (at least to most Westerners) Russian countercultural dissident antihero with unpalatable politics written by a man who, if the other works of his I've read are any indication, examines the external world primarily as a means of examining himself.

According to Matt Taibi, "Edward Limonov is one of the most amazing people on Earth, the author of a few truly great books, a man who has lived a fuller life than any 10 of your most interesting friends combined."

Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia, a fictional biography by Emmanuel Carrère.

Matt Taibi, NPR:

Carrere wonders: What could Limonov be thinking? "Does it amuse him," he writes, "the outlaw, the mad dog, to play the virtuous Democrat?" He spends the rest of the book trying to answer the question: Is this last part the act? Or was it the earlier part?

Carrere struggles with that theme throughout, and in the end toys with a horrifying surprise conclusion: Limonov is above all else a failure.

Julian Barnes, The Guardian:

The conformist loves the transgressor, the bourgeois loves the punk, the careful man the adventurer; while the Parisian intellectual (see Sartre and "Saint Genet") typically loves the intransigent despiser of all that Parisian intellectuals stand for. Some, if not all of these themes play out in Limonov. [...]

Why, then, is he interesting? Flaubert, asked to justify his interest in Nero and the Marquis de Sade, replied, "These monsters explain history to us." Limonov is not a monster, though would perhaps like to think himself one; he is a philosophical punk, a chancer, a blood-and-soil patriot who imagined himself a cleansing political force. Carrère, reflecting on his subject's escapades, decides that:

He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag; I suspend my judgment on the matter. But ... I thought to myself, his romantic, dangerous life says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about everything that's happened since the end of the second world war.

José Teodoro, National Post:

Of course a writer wants to write about a writer who, to such an extraordinary degree, writes his life into being, writing always with audacity, always for maximum drama and dynamism, always working to ensure that he’s at the nucleus of the narrative.

M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review:

Carrère doesn't see himself in Limonov, but he sees them as kindred writing spirits, obsessed with themselves and presenting themselves in their writing. Significantly, Limonov has also lived the life that was closed to Carrère, because of his ultra-bourgeois background and limited experience. Carrère has a writer-crush on this buffoon who has 'lived' so much.

Rachel Donadio in The New York Times:

Some critics have found Limonov too flattering a portrait, though Mr. Carrère says he finds Mr. Limonov's politics unpalatable. "We are not on the same side of the barricades," he said, adding that Mr. Limonov told him, "If I were in power, I would send you to the gulag."

Michael Dirda, The Washington Post:

The book interweaves a social and political history of post-Stalinist Russia, chunks of Carrère's autobiography and a hodgepodge of reflections on art, sex, ambition, the punk aesthetic, fascism, mysticism and old age.

Interview.
Excerpt.

Mad, bad

Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad is a heart-pumping novel. Extremely violent. Damaged people.

Hartog — architect, businessman, philanthropist — plucks Julie out of an insane asylum to care for his ward, his 12-year-old orphaned nephew, spoiled brat (or worse — things don't seem quite right with the boy) and heir to the family fortune. On her first day of work, Julie and the boy are kidnapped. Once tranquilizers and alcohol aren't available, Julie's forced to rely on her wits to survive, and she has plenty. She escapes death and her captors, with the boy in tow, only to face more dangers.

Here's a passage I quite liked from late in the novel:

Julie poured herself a bowl of coffee, touched it to her lips and burnt herself. She put the vessel down and left the kitchen. She almost lost her way in the web of corridors and rooms. Then she stepped into Fuentes's room. The failed architect was lying on his back in bed, wearing khaki shorts. Empty beer bottles were strewn across a good half of the room. He had dried beer on his chest. His thoracic hair was sticky with it. He was snoring. Julie contemplated him with commiseration and chagrin. She regretted the fact that he was not a handsome young man and that he had not tried to possess her. She would have struggled, scratched his face no doubt, and in any case men did nothing for her, but, all the same, she regretted it.

This is the second Manchette novel I've read (after Fatale). Both have a female protagonist. There are shades of feminist thinking to their motivations and their competence and self-reliance, but some gratuitous objectification as well. I wish I could find a feminist critique so that I'd know what to think. I know one woman who read Fatale, and she was a bit put off by the violence. A scan of the internet suggests that not many women are interested in Manchette.

Check out His Futile Preoccupations for a closer look at Julie's character.

James Sallis writes in the introduction to this editions

There's much that's quintessentially French about Manchette: his political stance, the stylish hard surface of his prose, his adoption of a "low" or demotic art form to embody abstract ideas. Like any great illusionist, he directs our attention one way as the miraculous happens in another. He tells us a simple story. This occurred. That. But there's bone, there's gristle. Floors give way, and wind heaves its shoulder against the door. His stories of cornered individuals become an indictment of capitalism's excesses, its unchallenged power, its reliance on distraction and spectacle.

All true.

Everything happens so fast it's hard to read any of it as social commentary. But it's not much of a stretch to see how Manchette might be considered as a successor to Simenon. In their world, darkness lives in everyone's heart, and everyone is capable of anything. Manchette is credited with launching the neo-polar wave. For me Manchette's style calls to mind Delacorta, who was writing just a few years later (among other things he wrote Diva, which is perhaps better known as a film adaptation).

I am furious with NYRB Classics for divulging a major plot point in the description on the back cover. It's just barely hinted at in the early pages, and not fully confirmed until page 140. I made the mistake of rereading the description a few chapters in — someone had asked me about what I was reading — at which point, all the steam was taken out of the ride, the drive to find out who was behind it all deflated. The novel lost its purpose for me.

Still, something very compelling about Manchette's writing, the feeling that there's more to it than meets the eye. His novels are fully loaded. I'm packing this one away for a reread some day.

A suggestion, and lots of beer

Funny how it takes reading a stylized French crime thriller of another era to learn a little about local history.

The Mad and the Bad, by Jean-Patrick Manchette, was first published in 1972. The protagonist, recently released from an insane asylum and now implicated in a kidnapping and worse, is on the run, literally, across the countryside of France, and in one small village she ducks into a conference hall where some kind of evangelical rally is underway:

"Would you like to know what happens in a big city when there are no more police? That is what occurred in Montreal on October 7, 1969. The police were on strike. Did citizens respect the law once they knew the police were no longer there to make arrests? Not at all! Right away Montreal became the scene of rioting, arson, looting, and fighting among taxi drivers. The rioters armed themselves with clubs and rocks and engaged in an orgy of senseless destruction. They smashed the windows of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel and stole merchandise. They vandalized the fine IBM Building. They plundered the Windsor and Mount Royal hotels. Without police, respect for law and order completely vanished. According to government spokesmen, the city was 'on the verge of anarchy'!"

While the preacher's rhetoric is intended to argue that only God can bring order, the author is no doubt making some kind of commentary on power, authority, and freedom. Meanwhile, I'd never heard of Montreal's night of terror.

Indeed, a taxi driver's union staged a protest regarding unfair competition (a legitimate issue that wasn't resolved till years later). And the police, who were on strike (regarding pay negotiations), weren't around to prevent it from getting out of hand.

(If video does not appear, try Google Chrome.) More facts related to the incident are available in the CBC Digital Archives.

In 1987 Montreal journalist and city councillor Nick Auf der Maur recalled the riot in Saturday Night magazine: "The bunch of us had thrown in our lot with something called the Mouvement de libération de taxi, a group dedicated to ridding the airport of its Murray Hill limousine monopoly... It seems that all it took back then to organize a full-scale riot in Montreal was a suggestion, and lots of beer."

The most important French writer you've never heard of

The Guardian calls Emmanuel Carrère "the most important French writer you've never heard of," and I quite agree. (Except for all the important French writers I've actually never heard of.)

It's an interesting profile for a few reasons, which are maybe all the same reason.

1. Major themes are identity and memory. The Moustache was brilliant on these points. (There's a novel that has really aged well in my memory.)

2. He seems to have found his niche writing nonfiction novels. Whether he recounts episodes from his own life, or somebody else's, what's the difference? (Must get my hands on his book about Philip K. Dick.)

3. He seems particularly interested these days in exploring his Russian heritage, which interests me in hopes that it may shed light on my own desire to know my Polishness. Which has nothing to do with the culture per se, but rather the need to know from whence you come.

I stopped writing fiction and began to write "non-fiction novels." I tried to write about the world and about myself, describing reality through my own experience.

Check him out in interview with the CBC's Eleanor Wachtel (Writers & Company).

The movements of men are not analogous to the stars

Aimee (not her real name) is a grifter. She's killed several times, for money and for justice. She is "the avenging angel of her own nihilism." She rides into town, settles in with the ruling class, and proceeds to dig up the dirt to drag them down.

"When I break this decanter of mine," he said, "I'll replace it with one with advertising on it." He held out one of the glasses to Aimée, who reached for it with one hand as she continued towelling her hair with the other. "I am very interested in promotional items and free gifts," continued the baron. "Also in trash. I have no income, you see, and a man with no income is bound to take a great interest in free gifts and trash." He took a sip of brandy and clicked his tongue appreciatively. "Given the present state of the world, don't you know, with the increase of constant capital as compared with variable capital, a whole stratum of the poor is bound to be unemployed and live off free gifts and trash, and occasionally off various government subsidies. Do you know what I am saying?"

"I am not sure," said Aimée.

"Nor am I," said the baron.

Nor am I entirely sure what to make of Fatale, by Jean-Patrick Manchette. Every now and then it veers into something like social commentary, something like the above, which is just a little bit weird. Some passages are clearly anticapitalist, while Aimée herself operates on capitalist principals — she is the ultimate self-made woman. Is she being held up as a model or as an object of ridicule?

Similarly, it's difficult to discern if Manchette is espousing feminist sympathies. There must be more to his characterization of this female James Bond–type protagonist than simple male fantasy. What message is Manchette trying to communicate when he ends the novel with the line, "SENSUAL WOMEN, PHILOSPHICALLY MINDED WOMEN, IT IS TO YOU THAT I ADDRESS MYSELF"?

These oddities, other weird narrative insertions, and occasional seeming contradictions in character made this slim book a goldmine for bookclub discussion.

A little later, a little calmer now, as the pair went back down into the hall (on a wall of which hung a Weatherby Regency under-and-over double-barrel shotgun), Baron Jules further informed Aimée that, although the movements of men are not analogous to the stars, it sometimes seemed to him that they were, this on account of the posture that he had adopted, or rather that he had been obliged to adopt. These strange remarks made Aimée a little nervous, and she wanted to get away from this place. It was not long before the baron drove her back to Bléville. Yet when he left in his banged-up old 4CV, Aimée was sorry.

Fatale has a definite noir feel, but perhaps it's a little too clipped. It'd be nice to see Aimée a little closer up, insinuating herself into society, stalking her prey, to know her modus operandi better.

My sense of time and space were a little disoriented in reading Fatale. Written in the seventies, the noir tone may take you back a few decades earlier. It's set in a remote coastal village in the north of France, but "whichever way you go, there is a big hill to climb before you get out of Bléville" (I believe the hill is metaphorical).

The book reminds me of Simenon's romans durs in the moral ugliness of its characters, with a hint of existentialism underlying it all. It also brought to my mind Claude Chabrol's film La Cérémonie (based on a Ruth Rendell novel) in the violence and senselessness, the dark side of French provincial life. (Interestingly, Chabrol had adapted another Manchette work for film, so I may have sensed a common vibe.)

I really enjoyed this novella. It may ultimately prove to be forgettable, but it succeeded in lifting me out of my everyday in spectacular fashion. There are worse ways to spend a couple hours.

New York Review Books has just released Manchette's The Mad and the Bad. I need to get my hands on a copy.

See
Manchette: Into the Muck, by James Sallis, in The New York Review of Books.

Also
Analepsis
NoirWhale

The Zola project

I am enthralled by The Paradise. This television series pushes all the right buttons for me, though I can't identify them all. Music is one positive factor, and the beautiful people are another. For some reason I find the department store setting fascinating. Exquisite production value, fine acting, etc., but why I should be so enamored of this program while others leave me cold (ahem, Downton Abbey) is due to some ineffable je ne sais quoi.

(I'm watching on PBS Masterpiece Theater and we're nearing the end of season 1, but I've just discovered that most of the series is available on YouTube. I expect I'll be binging on season 2 before Christmas.)

The Paradise is based on Émile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames, the eleventh novel in his 20-volume Rougon-Macquart series. The television program has transposed the story from Paris to somewhere in northeast England. Of course, this leaves me wondering how much else has been changed. And what better way to find out than to read the source material for myself?

Meanwhile, my other half has been reading up on L'Assommoir, another novel in that series, after we were speculating about the origin of the name of a local bar that goes by that appellation. And he's become somewhat obsessed with Zola's concept.

The Rougon-Macquart cycle follows the life of a family during the Second French Empire. It includes a couple of Zola's best known works: Nana (which I in fact read, about 25 years ago) and Germinal, and lo they are interconnected.

In Différences entre Balzac et moi, Zola noted:

In one word, his work wants to be the mirror of the contemporary society. My work, mine, will be something else entirely. The scope will be narrower. I don't want to describe the contemporary society, but a single family, showing how the race is modified by the environment. (...) My big task is to be strictly naturalist, strictly physiologist.

The challenge then, for me and my other: to read the whole Rougon-Macquart cycle. Also, to read it in French. (This may take years.)

I will be following Zola's own recommended reading order with the following exception: I will pick up Au Bonheur des Dames first. The fact that I have some familiarity now with the story should help ease me into the language. Plus, I want all my pressing questions answered.

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.

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.