By Jeff Bursey
With the heat easing off, some readers will feel the ebbing seduction of the marketing concept known as summer reading. Autumn reading should bring everyone back to the cooling shade and signal a more even temperament all around.
Instead, in the hands of the right man, suddenly it’s a silly season. On August 11, The Globe and Mail’s book section ran this quasi-panic headline: “And you thought the novel was dying.” The author is Martin Levin, the books editor, who is “wowed by this fall’s dazzling fiction,” from which he’s chosen “15 must-reads.” The refrain that literature is dying is an empty and hackneyed observation, particularly from a man of letters who has seen many publishers’ lists in his lifetime (assuming Levin had anything to do with the headline).
Ignoring the abundant evidence that many worthwhile books get published each year, Levin can only find fifteen to recommend from all over the world. The inevitable faces pop up, such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and J.K. Rowling (author of the coming season’s “big book”), and then comes an exquisite howler. Noting that Alice Munro’s Dear Life is coming out, Levin says: “Didn’t think we’d leave her out, did you?” He hasn’t read the book in galleys, but is confident there’s “no reason to expect this collection… to be anything but superb.” No one would imagine Upper Canada’s national newspaper leaving Munro out; if the Globe’s tongue was any further up her fundament it could lick ice cream off the tip of her nose. The selective blindness shown to works coming out from, to name a few publishers randomly, Archipelago Books, Twisted Spoon Press, and Dalkey Archive, raises questions. Are both The Globe and Mail and Levin becoming insular and provincial? Has there been a corporate decision to invoke brand names to appease readers they fear may be fleeing? Why the almost 100% emphasis on the offerings of large publishing houses?
In March Dalkey published its second book by Edouard Levé (1965-2007), Autoportrait, which is so resolutely a work of art that even The Globe‘s remaining readers would be reassured that literature is doing fine:
Not wanting to change things doesn’t mean I am conservative, I like for things to change, just not having to be the one who does it. I can’t tell whether my fantasies match my capacities. I have spent two summers in a red van. Virtuosity annoys me, it confuses art with prowess. I have thought simultaneously: “I really should learn the trombone” and “there’s a dead ant.”
Later on:
I do not use an umbrella. I take little pleasure in success, failure leaves me cold, but it infuriates me never to have tried, when I could have. I go to the movies not to learn, but for distraction. I don’t think movies are stupid, I just don’t expect much from them. I believe more in literature, even minor literature, than in movies, even great ones. I don’t have time to tell long stories.
Autoportrait is one long paragraph, has no characters except the unnamed narrator (who coyly drops clues about his name), and is written entirely in assertions. The order of the above quotes could be changed without changing the sense of a mind roaming freely. The jacket blurb calls these “facts” but, without access to Levé, we’re on safer ground assuming they are the traits a writer can give one of his characters to make the two look indistinguishable.
While within the walls of this brief book we learn that the narrator is a painter, photographer and writer (these occupations match Levé’s) and that his thoughts, like ours, flit from subject to subject. The connection between an umbrella and movies is that the same mind thinks them. Themes emerge and recur, and they include travelling, women, men, big toes, and so on, but they do so randomly. Style is dominant, and difficulty with the book would arise if one regarded writers as merchants and demanded adequate payout in terms of suspense or a friendly narrator one could warm to in return for valuable time spent turning pages. A reader has to be open to the pleasures of surrendering to Levé’s process.
The artist figure in Autoportrait mulls over serious matters as often as he considers light topics. Humour, like much else, springs out as a surprise, as in the line, “Bad news makes me unhappy but satisfies my paranoia.” Or:
I have not taken the following courses, described in an American brochure for The Learning Annex: Succeed in Hollywood, Become the personal assistant to a celebrity while making good money and traveling the world with the rich and powerful, Speak about anything to anyone, Make money in special events and weddings, Open your own drycleaner’s, Use hypnosis to raise sales… Get past procrastination now, Receive messages from the Beyond.
When someone talks to me about his or her “energy,” I can feel the conversation grinding to a halt.
Some statements look like what we might never quite think or say aloud—“To play with the sun’s reflection in a pocket mirror gives me a feeling of power”; “I do not know the name of the color I see behind my eyelids”—while others come off as faintly apologetic: “I don’t learn the names of cabinet ministers by heart.” Naturally, sex occupies a fair portion of his thoughts. “I have not made love to a man” precedes, on the same page, “I do not foresee making love with an animal.” One is ruled out, one is not.
The presence of art is even greater: the making of it, the appreciation of it, its value and personal appeal. “I see art where others see things,” the narrator says early on, and this is neither smug nor undervaluing his talents.
I take pictures because I have no real desire to change things… To take pictures at random goes against my nature, but since I like doing things that go against my nature, I have had to make up excuses to take pictures at random, for example, to spend three months in the United States traveling only to cities that share a name with a city in another country…
For two years I painted round paintings that I did not show, soon afterward I stopped painting, since then looking at round paintings has made me sad.
I try to write prose that will be changed neither by translation nor by the passage of time.
One topic of considerable weight is death. Levé killed himself after the acceptance, by his French publisher, of his next novel, Suicide. Knowledge of his end is inescapable if one has the book in hand. “I want this epitaph engraved on my tombstone: ‘See you soon’” is a joke, and the first words of the narrative seem to be joking also: “When I was young, I thought Life A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide A User’s Manual how to die.” However, those sorts of remarks darken the atmosphere as they accumulate: “I prefer going to bed to getting up, but I prefer living to dying”; and, “In my periods of depression, I visualize the funeral after I kill myself, there are lots of friends there, lots of sadness and beauty, the event is so moving that it makes me want to live through it, so it makes me want to live.”
One wonders if this work predicted an end not yet consciously in Levé’s mind. The banter doesn’t argue against the impression, gathered as each page goes by, that this voice, which might almost be answering questions from a hidden interrogator, is evaluating the worth of life. Closing the book is a scene that, without giving anything away, brings everything to a logical and unsettling close.
This slender work, mingling art, mores, prejudices, sex, trivia, life and death, and related in a manner that requires us to accede to the nature of the delivery rather than to resist, invites us into the mind of someone who, like us, is filled with contradictory, wayward, impulsive and mortal thoughts. Autoportrait therefore achieves what literature has always done: make a stranger’s predicament something we follow with curiosity while admiring the manner in which Edouard Levé reveals his state of mind.
Autoportrait, trans. Lorin Stein | Dalkey Archive Press | 120 pages | $13.99 | paper | ISBN #978-1564787071
Adventures with Ice Cream and Suicidal Frenchmen
Columns
With the heat easing off, some readers will feel the ebbing seduction of the marketing concept known as summer reading. Autumn reading should bring everyone back to the cooling shade and signal a more even temperament all around.
Instead, in the hands of the right man, suddenly it’s a silly season. On August 11, The Globe and Mail’s book section ran this quasi-panic headline: “And you thought the novel was dying.” The author is Martin Levin, the books editor, who is “wowed by this fall’s dazzling fiction,” from which he’s chosen “15 must-reads.” The refrain that literature is dying is an empty and hackneyed observation, particularly from a man of letters who has seen many publishers’ lists in his lifetime (assuming Levin had anything to do with the headline).
Ignoring the abundant evidence that many worthwhile books get published each year, Levin can only find fifteen to recommend from all over the world. The inevitable faces pop up, such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and J.K. Rowling (author of the coming season’s “big book”), and then comes an exquisite howler. Noting that Alice Munro’s Dear Life is coming out, Levin says: “Didn’t think we’d leave her out, did you?” He hasn’t read the book in galleys, but is confident there’s “no reason to expect this collection… to be anything but superb.” No one would imagine Upper Canada’s national newspaper leaving Munro out; if the Globe’s tongue was any further up her fundament it could lick ice cream off the tip of her nose. The selective blindness shown to works coming out from, to name a few publishers randomly, Archipelago Books, Twisted Spoon Press, and Dalkey Archive, raises questions. Are both The Globe and Mail and Levin becoming insular and provincial? Has there been a corporate decision to invoke brand names to appease readers they fear may be fleeing? Why the almost 100% emphasis on the offerings of large publishing houses?
In March Dalkey published its second book by Edouard Levé (1965-2007), Autoportrait, which is so resolutely a work of art that even The Globe‘s remaining readers would be reassured that literature is doing fine:
Not wanting to change things doesn’t mean I am conservative, I like for things to change, just not having to be the one who does it. I can’t tell whether my fantasies match my capacities. I have spent two summers in a red van. Virtuosity annoys me, it confuses art with prowess. I have thought simultaneously: “I really should learn the trombone” and “there’s a dead ant.”
Later on:
I do not use an umbrella. I take little pleasure in success, failure leaves me cold, but it infuriates me never to have tried, when I could have. I go to the movies not to learn, but for distraction. I don’t think movies are stupid, I just don’t expect much from them. I believe more in literature, even minor literature, than in movies, even great ones. I don’t have time to tell long stories.
Autoportrait is one long paragraph, has no characters except the unnamed narrator (who coyly drops clues about his name), and is written entirely in assertions. The order of the above quotes could be changed without changing the sense of a mind roaming freely. The jacket blurb calls these “facts” but, without access to Levé, we’re on safer ground assuming they are the traits a writer can give one of his characters to make the two look indistinguishable.
While within the walls of this brief book we learn that the narrator is a painter, photographer and writer (these occupations match Levé’s) and that his thoughts, like ours, flit from subject to subject. The connection between an umbrella and movies is that the same mind thinks them. Themes emerge and recur, and they include travelling, women, men, big toes, and so on, but they do so randomly. Style is dominant, and difficulty with the book would arise if one regarded writers as merchants and demanded adequate payout in terms of suspense or a friendly narrator one could warm to in return for valuable time spent turning pages. A reader has to be open to the pleasures of surrendering to Levé’s process.
The artist figure in Autoportrait mulls over serious matters as often as he considers light topics. Humour, like much else, springs out as a surprise, as in the line, “Bad news makes me unhappy but satisfies my paranoia.” Or:
I have not taken the following courses, described in an American brochure for The Learning Annex: Succeed in Hollywood, Become the personal assistant to a celebrity while making good money and traveling the world with the rich and powerful, Speak about anything to anyone, Make money in special events and weddings, Open your own drycleaner’s, Use hypnosis to raise sales… Get past procrastination now, Receive messages from the Beyond.
When someone talks to me about his or her “energy,” I can feel the conversation grinding to a halt.
Some statements look like what we might never quite think or say aloud—“To play with the sun’s reflection in a pocket mirror gives me a feeling of power”; “I do not know the name of the color I see behind my eyelids”—while others come off as faintly apologetic: “I don’t learn the names of cabinet ministers by heart.” Naturally, sex occupies a fair portion of his thoughts. “I have not made love to a man” precedes, on the same page, “I do not foresee making love with an animal.” One is ruled out, one is not.
The presence of art is even greater: the making of it, the appreciation of it, its value and personal appeal. “I see art where others see things,” the narrator says early on, and this is neither smug nor undervaluing his talents.
I take pictures because I have no real desire to change things… To take pictures at random goes against my nature, but since I like doing things that go against my nature, I have had to make up excuses to take pictures at random, for example, to spend three months in the United States traveling only to cities that share a name with a city in another country…
For two years I painted round paintings that I did not show, soon afterward I stopped painting, since then looking at round paintings has made me sad.
I try to write prose that will be changed neither by translation nor by the passage of time.
One topic of considerable weight is death. Levé killed himself after the acceptance, by his French publisher, of his next novel, Suicide. Knowledge of his end is inescapable if one has the book in hand. “I want this epitaph engraved on my tombstone: ‘See you soon’” is a joke, and the first words of the narrative seem to be joking also: “When I was young, I thought Life A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide A User’s Manual how to die.” However, those sorts of remarks darken the atmosphere as they accumulate: “I prefer going to bed to getting up, but I prefer living to dying”; and, “In my periods of depression, I visualize the funeral after I kill myself, there are lots of friends there, lots of sadness and beauty, the event is so moving that it makes me want to live through it, so it makes me want to live.”
One wonders if this work predicted an end not yet consciously in Levé’s mind. The banter doesn’t argue against the impression, gathered as each page goes by, that this voice, which might almost be answering questions from a hidden interrogator, is evaluating the worth of life. Closing the book is a scene that, without giving anything away, brings everything to a logical and unsettling close.
This slender work, mingling art, mores, prejudices, sex, trivia, life and death, and related in a manner that requires us to accede to the nature of the delivery rather than to resist, invites us into the mind of someone who, like us, is filled with contradictory, wayward, impulsive and mortal thoughts. Autoportrait therefore achieves what literature has always done: make a stranger’s predicament something we follow with curiosity while admiring the manner in which Edouard Levé reveals his state of mind.
Autoportrait, trans. Lorin Stein | Dalkey Archive Press | 120 pages | $13.99 | paper | ISBN #978-1564787071