The smell of irritation and boredom

There's a Jewish joke that says God often rereads the Torah to try to understand what's going on in this world he created.

On the 561st day of German lessons, the sickness finally comes. It announces its impending arrival by text from a friend already ill. And its presence is confirmed by phonecall from Public Health.

I keep looking at the photo he took of me at Jazz Festival that Saturday evening. I look so happy. And pretty. And it warms me, to know he saw me that way in that moment. He infected me with his glance.

She wishes she could abandon her body and dissolve into everything outside.

That afternoon I'd been running errands and stopped by the old park with a coffee. But it was fenced off, under construction. How many hours I'd spent there in the cold of last winter, nipping scotch from a flask, stealing time with my old lover, under curfew. All those conversations and kisses now to be excavated. Time to find a new park.

I feel light. I have music in me, jazz, these are the good old days.

Monday, in line at the walk-in clinic, I'm reading The Anomaly, by Hervé Le Tellier (due out in November), pretentious in its intentional stance of antipretentiousness. It is the French intellectual version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, clever but not very funny. I'm symptom-free, and nervous to be huddling among the potentially infected. But he'd messaged to say he'd tested positive, I should get checked too. Protocol 42 is invoked after a plane lands three months after it originally landed, carrying the same passengers, after experiencing turbulence, presumably a glitch — not in the matrix (the virtual manifestation fed by human energy), but in the coding of the program itself (Slartibartfast asleep at the wheel). Purportedly Oulipian in its design, this wasn't obvious to me, which may be either a strength or a weakness.

It's election day. It wouldn't be right to vote, to potentially expose others; the directive is to isolate while awaiting results. It's Helena's first election. I wait it out at a distance, she is in line for two hours, polls have officially closed and the election is already decided by the time she casts her ballot. It's late and chilly, and my throat feels a bit sore.

The passengers meet themselves three months older, with the exception of one passenger, an author who killed himself. They can see their futures, and try to change them. On Tuesday they tell me I'm already sick, but I'm not sick yet.

We must kill the past to ensure it is still possible.

My contacts are traced, and people worry illogically. How I could infect someone if I hadn't been exposed to the virus yet?

I attend my usual (virtual) meditation session Wednesday. My mind wanders; it is designed that way, our guide reminds me. I practice breathing. I'm good at breathing, I can beat the illness by breathing. For months already I have been feeling that I cannot breathe enough out. My capacity to breathe in is capped; I have first to expel what I have been holding in. There is always more to breathe out, I could breathe out forever. I visualize the viral particles expelled from my body.

She brandishes the empty bottle in her hand, leans forward in a deliciously unfocused way, and blows her warm, hopscented breath at his nose.

"Breathe it in, Adrian, that's the smell of irritation and boredom."

(What if it attacks my lungs? I need to practice breathing.)

I have permission, for the first time in about 600 days, to relax. Because I am physically sick. Never mind wellness culture; however much I try to care for my spirit, every mote of indulgence is tied to a strand of guilt. Work harder, call your mother, be productive, put food on your table, have purpose. 

I force myself to exercise my senses. I had no appetite last night, but I cook sausage so that the house reeks of it. This morning I have quince spread on baguette, just so I can describe it like grainy, tangy chocolate. I've never had quince before.

Over just a few weeks, a graphomanic Victor Miesel fill hundreds of pages in this style, fluctuating between lyricism and metaphysics: "The oyster that feels the pearl knows that the only conscience is pain, in fact it is only the pleasure of pain. [...] The coolness of my pillow always reminds me of the pointless temperature of my blood. If I shiver with cold, it means my pelt of solitude is failing to warm the world."

I spend afternoons on my balcony gazing through the trees at the sky. My temperature climbs another tenth of a degree. Will it stop now? What if it doesn't stop?

I'm fully vaccinated. The friend who exposed me to the virus is fully vaccinated. We were supposed to be allowed to live a little, again. I'm supposed to go to Ireland this week. I need a vacation. I think I have to cancel my flight. Maybe I'll read Ulysses. Maybe I'll sleep. 

There's a helicopter overhead. Maybe it's here to lift me out of myself.

I feel like I'm having weird dreams, only I don't remember them. I feel like I'm on drugs, certain sensations come into hyperfocus and time distorts. Moments of intense clarity. And then they're gone.

We're prepared to warp reality if the stake is not losing altogether. We want answers for even our tiniest anxieties and a way of conceiving the world without reexamining our values, our emotions, and our actions. 

The Anomaly: Excerpt.

A girl who doesn't exist yet

I found Life Is Short and Desire Endless, by Patrick Lapeyre, to be a quirky and infuriating little novel. And yes, there's something decidedly French about it. Somewhere between the lightly philosophical musings on human relations of Hervé Le Tellier and Michel Houellebecq's more blatant crude and caustic cynicism. Gentler than Houellebecq, definitely, but I am beginning to discern a spectrum of contemporary French male novelists.

The story centers around Nora — a free spirit and aspiring actress, a little bit Holly Golightly. But we never really get to know her. Rather, we try to home in on her by triangulating the perspectives of Blériot, her married French lover, who is "prepared to uphold that any man who hasn't loved two women at once is condemned to remain incomplete"; Murphy, an American in London, works in finance, whom she's "left"; and the more peripheral Vicky, a childhood friend. They each of them have had their turn at playing house with Nora, and they pine for her, with varying degrees of disabling obsession.

Despite the distance separating them, it's as if Murphy and Blériot are moving on either side of a thin partition, as transparent as a paper screen, each aware of the other's existence, inevitably thinking about him, but unable to give him a name or a face, so that they both seem to be groping their way like sleepwalkers along parallel corridors.

It becomes rather clear that Nora's lovers, and there are others beyond those three, know her as little as we do. But they are desperately in love with the idea of her. And this seems to be something she cultivates.

The actors who play Nina Zarechnaya, she explains, mostly take their inspirations from other Ninas they've seen at the theater or from people they've met, imitating the way they speak or move. As a result, the effect is almost always disappointing. Because everyone already knows Nina.

Now she'd like to incarnate someone who doesn't exist yet.

"Do you understand?"

He understands and he doesn't understand. Either way, he's take with the idea of loving a girl who doesn't exist yet.

Then just when you think you've pinned her down, she's gone.

Neither Nora nor Blériot are particularly likable (and it's a bit tiresome to read about Blériot's constant groping. Really, is that all men — and French men in particular — ever think about? I'd only just started believing we'd got past all that...), and the others don't have enough screen time for me to pass judgement. This story doesn't cover any new territory, and ultimately it's something of a downer, but it is compelling in its exploration of desire, what drives people to each other, and what it is that makes relationships work (or not).

Read Guy Savage's thoughtful review at His Futile Preoccupations.

L'Amour

With no trace of irony, she clinks her glass against his. He would rather not know what they are drinking to. To his leaving? To the peacefulness of their breakup? To Scotland's mild summer? Silently, he drinks to l'Amour, and everything he knows about it. Its 2,700 miles, from its source in the Argun region to its mouth on the Tatar Strait, opposite Sakhalin. He keeps his bad joke about the River Amour to himself. A pity he doesn't realize that the river's English name, Armur, is closer to the word "armor" than to "love," and — worse — that armur means "muddy" in Buriat.

Our hero takes a sip from this dark, bitter beer that he does not like, which is precisely why he chose it. He had to give the whole debacle a degree of harmony.

— from The Intervention of a Good Man, by Hervé Le Tellier.

Slight, but a mostly pleasant read. It continues to astound me that 20- and 30-year-old women would want to associate with or attach themselves to 50-year-old men, but that's not a problem of the novella, that's life. The story gives a nice play-by-play of the thought processes of one party to a such relationship as it disintegrates.

I hate the title. En français, c'est Je m'attache très facilement — much better. I suppose it's an intervention of sorts, but I think "intervention" is semantically loaded with things not present here. And I don't think he's a particularly good man. We have only his word for it, and his carrying on an affair with an as-good-as-married younger woman in a very insecure and needy way doesn't exactly speak to his goodness. The Slight Disturbance of Some Pathetic Chump, more like.

And there's that thing with the Polish girl who works at the hotel. Do you really have to bring up Nazi concentration camps just because she's Polish? That was weird and out of place.

Although Le Tellier is an Oulipo member, I didn't recognize any of the qualities related to that group in this novella. However, I did very much enjoy his Enough about Love, and I see the Oulipo in it in retrospect, and I look forward to reading more by him.

Read Le Tellier on what exactly is French love...

About enough

"An attentive reader will always learn more, and more quickly, from good authors than from life. "

I thought I should say a few things about Enough about Love, by Hervé Le Tellier, set for publication in February. My review copy (in e-book format!) has already long since vanished into the ether. I read this back in October, and enjoyed it immensely.

Do I have anything more to say about it? It's proven to be mostly forgettable, but that shouldn't diminish the enjoyability factor. Reminds me a lot of Kundera — kind of philosophy lite, in a relationship-y context. The many reference to weightier works (including none other than Madame Bovary, which I was reading at the time).

[Of her husband, "Anna wants him to be more outgoing, more dazzling. She is actually less eager for him to be successful than for him to want to be successful." It's Emma and Charles all over again!]

On the extensive bookshelves against the far wall, literature rubs shoulders with psychoanalysis in peaceful conflict. Joyce mingles with Pierre Kahn, Leiris is shoehorned against Lacan, a book by Queaneau which has been put back in the wrong place — a good sign for a book — leans up against a Deleuze.

That's a lot of name-dropping. I won't pretend to know the first thing about half the figures Le Tellier mentions. He seems to do so with purpose, and the references do seem to bear some relationship on the plot and character issues at work, whether the nature of love, power politics, creativity, identity, destiny, whatever.

Thomas shakes his head. In these few minutes of his life, he can see a fork in his own destiny. That was the word Anna used in her last session, when she said, "I don't know whether Yves is my destiny." Coming from Anna, the word is ambiguous, somewhere between freedom of choice and the inevitability of fate.

Thomas does not believe in fate. He would have the power of speech and actions shape our lives. To him, that is the point of psychoanalysis, giving the analysand the strength to become the driving force in his or her own life. If the accident just now had actually happened, he likes to think that, against all the odds, he would have known how to play it right, to become one of the people Louise would lean on.

As a teenager, he had endless discussions about the elasticity of individual fates and History (with a capital H, as Perec used to say). The budding Marxist confronted trainee Hegelians. If Hitler had died in a car crash in 1931, would some inertia in the powers that be have doggedly set the war and the Holocaust back on track? Was Stalinism conceivable with a different Stalin? Who could have replaced Trotsky?

Other questions hover. Where did he stand in Louise's story? Did a lover have to turn up at this particular point in her life? Was he interchangeable? Thomas has no idea.

See the review at The Complete Review for a fuller notion of what's going on in this book, and this passionate endorsement.

Excerpt.

It's a romance novel, but with a very mature approach to love as it is among very real, and very smart, grown-ups. I can see myself picking up this novel again.