Western

admin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:01:00 +0000

Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.
- Laurence Sterne

Anybody that doesn't want to get killed best clear on out the back.
- William Munny (Clint Eastwood), Unforgiven

Christine Montalbetti is the best shot in town. She'll slay you in the street at high noon. So if tender, easily digestible reads are your favorite, best clear on out the back. Jane Austen or Suzie Ormond, Western ain’t. However, if what gets your blood going is a hard gallop across open space with terrain so changeable you could get thrown if you don’t pay strict attention, well, then Western is your mount.

The author of Western is French, a literary critic and theorist, and teaches French literature at the University of Paris. Western was—you’ll need a slug of rotgut whiskey to get this down—written in French. (The translation, by Betsy Wing, corrals the novel superbly in English.) Western is, therefore, nothing like an oater scribed by Louis L'Amour. Well, maybe not nothing.

There are genre tropes in Western. For example: a big sky, horses, tumbleweed, a ranch, a street brawl, and a town, called postmodernly enough, Transition City. Imagine these tropes filtered through phenomenology, Roland Barthes, Proust, Laurence Sterne, Jacques Tati, Lucille Ball, and god knows who or what else. The result is that Montalbetti uses and abuses all these tropes pretty much as she does with one cowboy, name of Dirk, who is so laconic it takes him three pages to say nothing. This expansiveness means Western upends what is a terse action genre and becomes hilariously, verbosely literate while making profound observations and asides. Western, therefore, has huge fun decimating its genre, honouring it, while being amazingly intellectually satisfying and wise.

The novel also takes a postmodern tack in narrative voice. It employs a first person narrator, a “writer” who speaks directly to “you”, as though we, the reader, were walking beside her as she creates the action and characters. At times, she fades off into a third person omniscient, only to pop up again as "I" just when you’ve forgotten there was a first-person narrator.

Many sentences in Western roll, twist, divagate, navigate, hesitate, stumble, detour, and come back on themselves for a page and more. Thank goodness, though some readers may be tempted to throw the book at the wall. Go ahead. You’ll be picking it up in a minute eager to see if the narrative will eventually exit that anthropomorphic ant world you’ve suddenly been dragged into with its hexapod characters’ imaginings—though just a sentence ago another cowboy was rocking on the porch waiting for sunrise. Hexapod characters’ imaginings? Yup.

Summing up this book is like trying to sum up life. Instead of trying, here’s an excerpt to give you some idea of the action-adventure you’re in for in Western. Slow down. Savour. This tiny, defiant memory, which distinguishes itself so clearly from the heap of fragile, scarcely sustained subjects briefly popping up in our man’s mind only to disintegrate immediately (those particular subjects would be just as hard for me to catch, in order to show you, as chasing butterflies with a net held out in front of me—picture it—while tripping over lumps of earth pushed up by moles; likely to lose my Lepidoptera if I start paying attention to the ground I’m walking over, but unable to catch anything as I’m falling all over the place), this thought, more vigorous than the others, no longer forming a single long wave along with them, driving its roller onto the beach, this thought, a sturdy residue rather than foam, though still, well, how shall I put it… Me, I put it like this: tour de force.

Written by: Neil Flowers, November 26th 2009

Camera

admin — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:15:00 +0000

By Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Matthew B. Smith

Dalkey Archive Press

Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the reality and interested in telling about it. – Gertrude Stein

Reality is an olive that rolls away to elude your fork. There are ways of dealing with this. Mashing flat the olive helps. When sitting in the john, consider chess moves by the Hungarian master, Gyula Breyer. Even if you’re a guy, pedicures are nice in the struggle with reality. Pap smears too (women only), but, ladies, the smear should be fresh. Don’t wait before mailing the tender Pap to the lab or the results are useless.

Love, incidentally, is a mournful, flu-like state, but when you are wrapped in each others’ arms at a London intersection, and it’s cold and you’re jumping up and down to stay warm, O!, love can be sweet.

All these things and many more of consuming interest you will learn from this risible, mournful, short novel by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, in which the nameless Parisian narrator falls for Pascale in an offhand, but quietly passionate way. Pascale runs a driving school, tends to be sleepy, and has a young son, Pierre, and a father whose hair is disheveled.

Camera has a plot, if you call learning to drive and buying a tank of propane and not having a dinner in an Indian restaurant, and spending a night thinking a plot. The trajectory of the action is mostly linear and forward, though there is a major flashback. And for about two-thirds of the journey you will chortle, as at this deadpan example, in which the narrator plays a one-armed bandit in a British pub.

The interior cylinder would spin around and come to a dead stop, showing an odd assortment of fruit, from which two eternal mauve prunes, ambivalent and testicle-shaped, recurrently appeared before me as an image of my fate.

Must one have ambivalent testicles to appreciate this drollery? I hope not.

Anyway, after much humour, tendresse, and sensibilité things, as I intimate above, turn Camusian. The narrator misses a train. He is forced to walk at night through an empty landscape. He assumes residence in a phone booth and ponders another world, one like ours, but without wounds and aggression and pain. He thinks about thought itself, which he has done previously, as in this astonishing passage.

A few minutes earlier, on the maritime platform, I had stopped to watch the rain fall in a bright projected beam, in the exact space delineated by the light, enclosed and yet as devoid of material borders as a quavering Rothko outline, and, imagining the rain falling at this place in the world, which, carried by gusts of wind, passed through my mind, moving from the shining cone of light to neighboring darkness without it being possible to determine the tangible limits between the light and shadows, rain seemed to me to represent the course of thought, transfixed for a second in the light and disappearing the very next second to give way to itself.

Doubtless you noticed how this sentence goes on, twisting and turning, picking up speed, slowing down, by means of a sprinkle of commas here and there so you don’t have to be constantly guessing at the punctuation, as you do, say, in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses, for example. Oh boy! you will expostulate. And wow! And yippee! Thank goodness for such sentences in Camera!

And thank goodness, you will add, for quotidian reality and its construction in this novel by means of those sinuous snaking sentences and thirteen-page-long paragraphs. Because, really, aren’t you tired of all the commercially inclined routine sentences and paragraphs that are all the same, whether it’s a John Grisham phantasy or any other airport novel, sentences that never take a chance, never take wing, paragraphs that are mere bites so the book pitches to a common denominator, and ergo make a zillion bucks for author and publisher, as though language were a commodity like pork bellies instead of an adventure? Gertrude Stein sure was. Tired of that kind of writing merde, I mean. She was. She was, and, I can tell you, I am too.

“Make it new,” Ezra Pound said. Maybe he should have said, “Make it novel.” Same thing, with pun intended. J-PT sure does. Of course you can’t have media-induced ADD to read Camera. Good. Separates the sheep from the readers. And Camera has ordinary sentences, too. Take that Cussler and Collins!

Anyway, dear friends, you who love the fresh, new, risky, and funny; the delightful, romantic, witty, and clever; the profound, rueful, hilarious, sad, lovely, plaintive, tongue-in-cheek, and complex; the mischievous and deadpan-as-Buster-Keaton; the socially conscious and anti-authoritarian—all good things—will cherish this delectable feast of a novel novel by the very French writer, Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

And yes, there is a camera.

And Matthew B. Smith’s translation is a blast of a blast.

And pass it on.

Written by: Neil Flowers, June 17th 2009