Hallucinating Foucault

I had no idea what to expect going into Hallucinating Foucault.  I’ve never read anything Foucault wrote and I generally know very little about him.  I don’t think these facts impacted upon my enjoyment of the book too much.  I could sort of tell that there was a layer to the book that was just out of reach, maybe an odd reference here and there, but generally all the pertinent bits are explained by Patricia Duncker for us slightly ignorant types.  At least I think they are.  It could be that there’s some whole other meaning to the book that’s only apparent to those with an intimate knowledge of Foucault.  If so I’m happy in my ignorance, it’s still a pretty good book.

Hallucinating Foucault is a tale of obsession and the line where that blurs to love.  The unnamed protagonist is a scholar writing his doctoral dissertation on fictional author Paul Michel.  At the behest of his equally anonymous Schiller obsessed girlfriend, he moves from studying the books to studying the man.  All this leads to the protagonist breaking Michel out of a mental institute and embarking upon an Autumn-Spring love affair.  All the while both Michel and Duncker are obsessing about the relationship between author and reader.

In a nutshell, this is a story about the importance of the reader to the writer and vice versa.  Paul Michel obsesses over Foucault and his work just as the protagonist obsesses over Michel himself.  It’s a cyclical tale.  Or rather it’s a tale of evolution.  While Michel only imagines a relationship with Foucault the man, the narrator seeks him out and lives that relationship.  Michel’s obsession with Foucault as his reader also contributes to his madness.  When his reader dies, believing that there is no-one to listen any longer Michel has a psychotic break- going on a rampage through the Pere Lachaise cemetery.  Once Foucault died, ‘there was no-one to listen and [Michel’s] language vanished along with [his] reader.’  Maybe these themes aren’t universal to authors and Michel was mad to begin with, but it kind of makes you wonder just who Duncker’s writing for.

Of course, Michel isn’t the only mad and obsessed figure in the book.  I’m unwilling to give away what is actually quite a clever twist, but it’s safe to say that every character has their own passion driving them and the narrative.  And as Michel remarks, ‘madness and passion have always been interchangeable.’ 

This is more than just a clever book about clever people getting a bit too into the things they’re reading.  It’s funny.  In fiction, lunatics out of their asylums always leave brilliant anecdotes.  And it’s sad.  After all, it is a story centred around doomed love.  The whole affair leaves you with a sense that the characters are even more lonely at the end than they were when the story began.  The narrator is a man to whom things happen surrounded by people who make things happen.  Both his girlfriend and Michel leave him for their other loves, his girlfriend for the intellectual life studying and translating Schiller.  Michel leaves him for Foucault.

My next book on the list is Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries.  I’ve also finally retrieved my actual book copy of the 1,001 list from my parents’ house, so now the next book selection process is set to be much more enjoyable for me.  Of course, if anyone has any suggestions, I’m open to those too.

Get Shorty

Having heard that the book of Get Shorty is brilliant, I’ve never seen the film.  When both versions are highly acclaimed I’ve always wanted to read the book first.  I’m not sure if it has to do with books being my first love, or the fact that books are so much more open to personal interpretation.  The reason that I can’t stand the Harry Potter films is because they’re nothing like I imagined the books when reading them.  So, coming into Get Shorty, I didn’t know that much about it.  The only real experience I have of Elmore Leonard is the fact that I’ve seen Jackie Brown (adapted from Leonard’s Rum Punch) several times.  And knowing what Tarantino’s like, I assume that a hell of a lot of that’s not in the book.

As I’ve said before with the New York Trilogy, I love the hard-boiled style of noir and that’s rampant here.  Leonard was frequently compared to authors like Raymond Chandler who define the genre.  But this isn’t just a detective story.  I can see what would draw someone like Quentin Tarantino to his work.  Get Shorty is post-modern and knowing, I can only assume the film is even more so.  It’s a story about getting a film made and, although the main cast are fictional, it’s jam packed with references to real people and places that still stand up twenty-odd years on.  Despite it being published in 1990, it’s painfully eighties Hollywood, but in a sense that it now feels almost like a period text.  At this point, it’s basically retro.

I was also surprised by the character Karen Flores.  Crime books learn towards misogyny and, at first, she does appear to be there solely as a sex object.  She’s a failed actress famous for her breast and her screams, ex-wife of the actor that the main characters are actually interested in and initially kind of stupid.  But she is the one who succeeds.  When they take a script to the studio, they pass on it but give Karen a job because she is Hollywood-smart.  She isn’t as naïve as she seems and has learnt from her years in the industry.  The studio executive is another hard as nails woman who has the job she does because she’s the most competent person for it.  It’s wonderful that in a book largely about men threatening one another there are these strong female characters, even if they’re only peripheral ones.

Again, and I know I sound like a snob when I say this, it’s nice read something that’s not too dense.  Leonard once said something like, ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’  And stylised as Get Shorty, it’s not a dense book.  There’s no real poetry to it; it’s just a good story told well.  This makes it a terrific page-turner.  Basically, this is a good genre book in one of my favourite genres.  Added to all of this there’s a sprinkling of Hollywood glitz and sleaze.  And who doesn’t love that?

Up next time, Hallucinating Foucault; debut novel of Patricia Duncker.  She used to teach at UEA (my old stomping ground).  Not to be biased, but I like it already.

Around the World in Eighty Days

When I was younger I was somewhat precocious about the books that I read.  I was a snob.  I still am if I’m honest with myself.  I started reading adult fiction when I was about 13 or 14 and never really looked back.  All this meant that I effectively missed out on a hell of a lot of classic literature that’s been re-appropriated for a younger audience.  So, until now, I’ve never actually read any Jules Verne.  I mean, when you’re a pretentious teenager, it’s much cooler to read The Inferno or The Bell Jar than it is a quaint little adventure now more closely associated with ten year-old boys than its original adult audience.

All of this sounds dismissive.  I don’t mean it to be.  It’s been an utter treat to read something that is just a simple and fun adventure story without the dark angst or introspective streams of consciousness.  It’s clear from the beginning that Phileas Fogg’s in it for the shits and gigs.  There are no worries even when everything thing is going wrong. Fogg’s cool demeanour is a point belaboured throughout the book.  When anything goes wrong, he’s Mr Cool with his contingency plans and easy come easy go attitude.  Despite all this, the climatic dash across the Atlantic Ocean is still marvellously tense.

I was also shocked by the lack of racism in the book.  I mean this, of course, in the period typical sense.  The book was written in the 1870s and, aside from a few playful snipes about the English and few off colour remarks about the Indian tribe from which Mrs Aouda is rescued, there seems to be a remarkable respect for other cultures.  In fact, the narrator is obsessed with providing the reader with facts and statistics about other cultures.  I don’t know if it’s because it’s a French book, I haven’t read that much French literature of the time which is specifically writing about other countries, but it’s such a contrast to the British stuff.  During the days of the Empire it seems we were unable to set a story abroad without an air of ‘we own that,’ as a side note.  The treatment of America is most notably different, Verne writes about them from the perspective a revolutionary brother in arms, as opposed to many British writers of the time who treated them like a wild runaway child.

My only criticism of the book is the characterisation of Fogg himself.  Whereas with his valet Passeportout and the dogged Mr Fix we’re given inner monologues and experience, Fogg has few scenes to himself.  He is means to an end; he acts with a single-mindedness that only serves to further the plot.  This means that despite being the hero of the book, he is unknowable.  And while the only possible ending to the book is his marriage to Mrs Aouda, there’s a lingering question of when they had time to fall so deeply into the love they profess to feel.  At best she loves an image she holds of him, which is as likely as not to be completely false.  Even so, it’s a crackingly entertaining read.  I’m just a little sorry I didn’t get around to it sooner.

I’m currently blasting my way through Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, so come back soon for that.

Shroud

It looks like the period of my reading books I enjoy will be short lived.  To be fair, I read The Sea by John Banville previously and wasn’t that impressed, so my expectations were quite low coming into Shroud.  It doesn’t help particularly that there’s a ludicrous author’s photograph on the dust jacket.  It’s hard to take someone who screams fusty 1920s Oxbridge professor so loudly seriously.  But it’s not just that.  The main character in the book is just as fusty and dry as Banville’s photo appears and, in short, I just don’t like him.

Within the first twenty or so pages Axel Vander, hero of the novel, has managed to complain incessantly about being old, tell a less than hilarious anecdote in which he demeans his now dead wife, and make any number of those xenophobic slurs only the elderly can expect to get away with.  How this is meant to endear anyone, other than old xenophobic widowers, to him is beyond me.  And this isn’t one of those Jane Austen Emma type things.  You’re not meant to hate Axel Vander.  In fact, for all her precociousness, I prefer Emma Woodhouse.

Again, though, the book isn’t quite so easily written off.  It’s divided into three sections, the first and last being set in Vander’s old age and the middle one his secret filled and scandalous youth.  Naturally, the middle section’s really good.  I’ll try not to go too overboard with the spoilers, but it’s so difficult to see how the character develops from a pretty awesome refugee who hooks up with and subsequently steals from a member of the British nobility to a gnarled and embittered old bigot.  The blurb claims the book is about a young woman blackmailing Vander, but this is soon forgotten as would be blackmailer is easily seduced by the old coot.  To be quite frank, it feels like some kind of grotesque wish fulfilment for Banville’s assumed male audience rather than a feasible plot.

Another of my issues with the book is the sense of anti-climax.  Early on in the tale we establish that Vander lives in lies, hence the inevitable blackmail.  When would be blackmailer Cass Cleave is introduced she is a wonderfully mysterious femme fatale.  Her power comes from the supposed knowledge of Vander’s secrets.  Naturally it turns out that she doesn’t know them all, any power she has is just an illusion.  She can’t outsmart Vander.  Again, throughout the entire book women just aren’t treated with respect.  The whole thing has a rather cloying air of triumphant misogyny.

I think what is at the root of all why I don’t like the book is the sense of entitlement that goes along with Vander.  He acts as though the world owes him a debt.  And it works for him; he’s a magnificently successful man of letters, who gets away with his secrets intact.  He’s not destroyed by the blackmail, in fact, he gains from it.  It’s just immensely frustrating to read about a character who is loathsome and yet loved by all and who doesn’t get his comeuppance. 

I’m currently reading Around the World in Eighty Days.  It’s fantastic.

Cat's Eye

Confession time: I quite like being really scathing.  It’s been quite a treat these last couple of weeks, reading things I haven’t enjoyed and thinking of ways to insult them.  It’s that whole thing Roger Ebert said, about negative reviews being fun to read and fun to write.  That being said, I was very glad to get back to reading something that I could actually enjoy.  The panacea comes in the form of Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, with a great dollop of nostalgia for my own childhood hitting me the midst of what I can only assume is a quarter life crisis.

Atwood’s book itself is (like The Blind Assassin) essentially the story of a Canadian woman living her life.  I have a real thing for Canada, so this is fine by me.  The story follows Elaine Risley on a trip from Vancouver to Toronto and subsequently down memory lane.  Elaine’s early years are spent following her entomologist father around the wilds of Canada, sleeping in motel rooms and tents, playing with her older brother and collecting bugs.  When she finally starts school in Toronto, she’s wildly out of touch with the other girls and falls in with a group of girls who are more sophisticated that her and bully her through the guise of friendship and education.  It’s this part I can relate to- growing up in a tiny village; we had to amuse ourselves climbing trees.  When I reached secondary school in the local town they had things like shops to entertain them.  The girls there would have been just horrified by the leeches in the village stream.

As Elaine grows up, the balance of power shifts.  The girls go to different high schools, leaving Elaine alone with her prime tormenter, Cordelia, who is now dependent on her for companionship.  As the two grow up and drift apart, with Elaine becoming an artist in Toronto’s feminist scene and Cordelia disappearing into a mental hospital after an unsuccessful suicide attempt.  Although Elaine refuses to help her escape, leaving her in an asylum, Cordelia remains present throughout the rest of the novel.  We’re left with this aching nostalgia for the way things might have been, missing something that will never happen and that would probably be unwanted if it did.

There are a couple of reasons why I’ve been so into this book.  Like I said, it reminds me of being and kid and fills me with a ridiculous longing for my teenage years of backstabbing quasi-friendships.  I know things are better now, what with my independence, personal financial security and friends that I actually like, but it made me miss being twelve nonetheless.  Part of it’s the feeling of getting older that comes every year around my birthday.  Elaine’s obsessed with her own aging and the feeling she’s not quite managing it right.  She says early on that she can’t believe she’s had her life and that goes along with another idea; “that everyone else [her] age is an adult and [she is] merely in disguise.”  It’s the same feeling I get every time one of my Facebook friends gets married or pregnant.  I think my love for Cat’s Eye comes back to that idea I had about Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions- this is a very good book, read at exactly the right time.

Next time it's Shroud by John Banville,,.