*
WE’LL NEVER HAVE PARIS
REPEATER BOOKS 2019
Edited by Andrew Gallix
CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/well-never-have-paris/
My further comments appear in the comment stream below…
REPEATER BOOKS 2019
Edited by Andrew Gallix
CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/well-never-have-paris/
My further comments appear in the comment stream below…
“…those long-winded conversations about Proust with crazed taxi-drivers trundling across the ‘arrondissements’ in wild abandon you’ve always imagined.”
The Parisian taxi-drivers don’t DRIVE with wild abandon, as the full context makes clear – they are the ‘intellectual’ conversations endemic to Paris that do. The essence or gestalt of Paris here built up by fragments within – as I made clear in the Watt work just linked above today – our Jungian soul, as also embedded in Rourke’s title above. This Rourke work is central, too, to this book, so far. With its dunking in various drinks, the “rhombus” of the croissant, the “Who will wake up at the end of my dream?” of Roubaud not Rourke or Rimbaud, “the importance of your own inauthenticity”, the death-pessimism of Ligotti not Sdrigotti — and even in my prime when studying French subsidiary at university, “You’ve still never been able to speak French fluently…”, my viva voce, notwithstanding. And, as in this Rourke, I often feel that I am in a play with set scripted lines that I speak when in ordinary situations with other people also speaking aloud, viva voce. (My underlining of ‘never’.)
“, making these connections, […] that shaped this particular city.”My previous reviews of Lee Rourke: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/lee-rourke/
Will Self interviewed by Jo Mortimer
“You don’t exist as Jo anymore, in a way.”It is intrinsic to this work that it is couched as an interview rather than an essay written by a self. Concepts intra-mural and extra-mural as the coefficients making London so different from Paris as cities, Versailles as a floor-plan, psychogeography, there being no wild country left in England, leading to considerations of autonomy, the real-time “flow dynamics” of the Gestalt, the nemonymous, our lack of free will – and this work is a perfect coda to the Rourke above.
With the possible backdrop of Canetti and Brexit?
“I want my time with you”…the words written by artist Tracy Emin in a huge seen- or pseudo-neon, seemingly hand-written sign, if not neon itself, proving that footnotes are more important than the text they footnote, a footnote in history, more important than the history that gave it birth? This sign is at St Pancreas Station addressing, it is suggested, those affected by Brexit when travelling to Paris. It is also a significant artistic statement of ALL poignancy, attempted loyalty, good intentions and false missteps. More so than any so-called traditional art statements like sculpture or painting. It also seems ironically moving to me that I have been reading THE BOOK OF DAYS for the last few months (still ongoing review here), a book with a regularly diurnal entry of a statement surrounding guilt towards one’s attitude about or desertion of family and children. A diary entry often a diary exit? The central character in that book is someone called Cal. As in Cal/ Calder above and Calderon (Life is a Dream) and Calendar.
“, but the ordinary should also be experienced at extraordinary times, and above all with no clear reason in mind.”Here a Englishman living in Paris complements the version of St Pancras in the previous work and even mentions John Betjeman again, as he sits with both defined and random ‘psychogeography’ at the still point of the Railway Station, almost as a church, at the other end of the line in Paris, the sea between notwithstanding, and his own connections of not being forgotten along the throbbing railway-line all the way back to London. Meanwhile, radiating out from that eponymous station, we follow his single Joycean day with his mobile ‘still point’ (4G explicitly permitting) towards other stations, other ordinary places, and their backdrop names and histories, the ordinary made extraordinary by this intriguing essay, or should that be vice versa? Or is nothing ordinary any more? Or everything is? Any hospital a way station? A station of the cross? Terminus word.
“Very English, my French,”
The connective Chunnel to Gare du Nord, again, and another neon sign (here of industrial lager), and we sense the frissons or ‘power chords’ between Paris and London after what happened in real-time yesterday in London! (“I sipped my coffee and imagined the Brexiteers swaddled like babies, slotted into an army of prams pushed by a million Boris Johnsons in bloomers and bonnets.”) This writerly random wandering in Paris, by Nadja as narrator, deals with Andre Breton, and the phenomenon of Chance, the latter so prevalent in my reviewing towards patterns, with her meeting here a male writer mentor or friend. But who is writing about whom? I wondered. The narrator narrated? Her tarot cards something even I would not resort to in the seeking for patterns in the phenomenon of Chance. I shall maybe deal them out under the bedcovers as Nadja, as a youth, once read Baudelaire?
A wonderful ‘story’, this.My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/paris-dostoyevsky-wannabe-cities/#comment-16278
“…a museum to a movement that loathed museums.”This is NADJA from the previous work above taken to a Bloomsday theme and variations – a story about surrealism without surrealism? More a synergy of Metro maps, where the ‘trap streets’ of the text truly intrigue us. All told to us by a narrator in a possibly ‘fictionalised biography’, reenacting as Nadja the streets of Paris, after a broken love affair, starting with imaginary train ride. Finishing with a still proposed encounter with a friend in a cemetery. Meanwhile, I cannot emulate Breton with the synergy of photographs, as I am not likely to visit Paris any time soon and indeed I have only visited Paris once – in 1967 – when it was not quite so easy, as it is explicitly easy in this ‘story’, to tweet such images. Instead I have included a previous photo of a book I am concurrently reviewing (here) cropped or ‘trapped’ to emphasise its title, a title so in keeping with this review you read now.
“I planned to have a break in Montparnasse cemetery to photograph writers’ graves.”I think there was another cemetery assignation due in the previous work above. And also elsewhere in this book. For example — it seems so long ago now, even like unto my sole visit to Paris in 1967, and this author seems to have a less haphazard, if still equally deathly lackadaisical, history of visiting Paris since 1981, judging by what he says here, bruised penis or not — when I reviewed the Eley Williams story earlier in this review, I also linked to my review of a new novel entitled GRAVES that I am sure this author would ‘enjoy’. And the fact that he could not find the grave of Emil Cioran is very intriguing and ironically appropriate to a Ligottian ‘lover’ like me. But did he find it in the end? I can never be sure. Even if I reread it. Stories continue after they end. Only death brings the final exhaustivity. And for reference, here is my review of the strangely luxuriant book entitled WOUND OF WOUNDS: “an ovation to Emil Cioran”, a review that I perpetrated in 2017: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/12/16/wound-of-wounds-an-ovation-to-emil-cioran/
Not a deathly lackadaisical fitful visit to Paris, as above, but someone who lives there, in an illuminating, sometimes over-my-head, essay on, I guess, the paradoxes of pyschopolitics in France as an adjunct of psychogeography, inward and outward, with the backdrop of history, especially during the fitful panoramic plane rides OUT of Paris at the remove of visits away, with “the distinct feeling of finally being free from trying to be free.” Written, it seems, pre-gilets jaunes.
“I met Linda Ronstadt, Henry Winkler, Carole King, Ringo Starr.“
Not H.P. Lovecraft or Poe? Yet this avant garde word-portrait of Quasimodo in a Paris of Instagram and Spotify, a man who once played Charles Laughton in a biopic, is a fine way to learn about a hunchback’s lovecraft with not necessarily Hugo’s Esmeralda but a straddling woman called Dahlia ……. while meeting D’Artagnan along the way who did not have anything good to say about muskets. Not so much sanctuary in Notre Dame these days, I guess. The bells, the bells, the brazen bells.
++++++++++
My previous review of H.P. Tinker: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/best-british-short-stories-2012/#comment-11931
“‘But I wonder,’ I wondered, ‘if this strange meeting of ours might not be more than just mere chance. I mean, unexpected things do happen – all the time – for a variety of hugely improbable metaphysical reasons nobody actually understands. So perhaps you and I being here, together, like this, is part of some totally unfathomable higher plan . . .’”Was the gun in Chekhov a musket?
“When I breathe I breathe distinctly out…”I happen to have just reviewed here a story called EXHALATION. This story is like that one, but only after all has gone out the window, including the grand piano, using a sort of stroke-damaged language when in your mind, as if YOU are stroke-damaged, talking about Laurel and Hardy – or shall I arbitrarily mention Jacques Tati just to keep it on locationary topic? About noggins as melons or tack hammers as tampers. Three separate pieces that GO pear-shaped only inside you as you take them in. When first written, they were probably in perfect English. Can these paper pages of otherwise set text breathe and change tack?
MIRABEAU PASSING by David Hayden
A highly poetic prose poem, that reminds me of our Proustian selves as creatures or wordtangles in the river, (Cf Sermon to the Fishes in Mahler’s Second?) and, as prompted by research, Apollinaire.
“Verbs dissolve in the river, giving its water a flavour we, its inhabitants, cannot identify.”
– from previous review above.
FLOWING, SLOW, VIOLENT — A FANTASY by Daniela Cascella
“Inevitable inaudible counter-bones to breaths of refraction.”
“, oh no, not the Oulipoists, to exhume a place in Paris,”A true tour de force as an incantatory prose refrain, with a tiny bit of real verse built in: Apollinaire again and Pont Mirabeau. And other references handily listed at the end. But perhaps my own gestalt is different, forced between the stitched bleeding mouth of preternatural synchronicities. I have been recently reviewing Chiang’s Exhalation (the Chiang of the film ‘Arrival’ relevant to this Cascella work?)
“Exhale? I only hear my constrained breath against teeth, teeth, teeth. […] I will leave the coincidence as it is.”
An engaging poetic sort of ‘found’ or ready-made set of lines, others original, I infer, lines about or from Hélène Berr, and I think of her as a Parisian Anne Frank. And I honestly thought of this before checking. I had never heard of her before now. A woman who gave a lecture once about Walter de la Mare. But that is more than just an inference; it is a miracle of my instinct, if true. As all great fiction or poetry should be.
“…the carefully constructed fantasy. It is as fragile as a bubble and can be burst by simply turning your mind to it.”
So I tried not concentrate on it to fully experience this tenuous journey emerging as an explicit blend of a Parisian Beckett with D.P. Watt, Jon Padgett, David Lynch, and with an eyepatch, Joyce, even T.S. Eliot. Including dreams, red curtains, puppets, ventriloquisers… please search in my search box for my reviews of the short prose of Beckett, and fiction of Joyce, Watt and Padgett.
Joyce and Lynch have Finnegans in common, by the way, search again.“…but you will have to make the crooked-backed, cold-footed journey to the end of the corridor soon,…”
“Fuckit, the whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.”
An endlessly re-readable (“I went on with it.”) Beckettian-like vision in short prose of Beckett and Beckett’s Paris. Or so I infallibly infer. Well, endless, till the reader defunges.
“There are other blanks I registered:”(My 2016 real-time review of The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/the-complete-samuel-beckett-short-prose/
My various reviews of, what is to me Beckett-related, Brian Evenson fiction: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/brian-evenson/)
Not-a-review. A littoral two-pager, mentioning ‘biographical fallacy’, Wimsatt, I guess, something that stirred me to start Gestalt real-time reviewing in the first place. And a muscle memory of a lecture on not-Beckett in Paris. As an aside, would Google have stopped Proust in his tracks? And I agree about Pound, a word not completely dissimilar to Proust. But hardly similar, either.My previous, much longer, review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/6-shorts-2013/#comment-13495
A fascinating personal rite of passage about living in Paris about writing about Isou about Debord about the Romanian avant garde about the subject’s Jewishness amid the mania of the 20th century about yet more…
Particularly interested by “His most tragic belief was that through the philosophy and practice of ‘lettrisme’ he could find the secret of immortality.”
Thus sadly go I, at the age of 71, with an example of my own version of ‘lettrisme’ that you are currently reading now…
And in case it is relevant, here is my Gestalt review of Condous’ Letters From Oblivion that is concerned with such Romanian, mania matters: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/letters-from-oblivion-andrew-condous/
And my own humble brushes with the avant garde: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/the-avant-garde-and-me/
I simply loved this visit in a decrepit red van by a rock group of three (one a woman) from Ohio to Paris, their characters, the triumphant suspension of disbelief at the end of their concert, and the ‘dying fall’ aftermath, a fall, except the narrator picked up the loose ends for a new summer of life…And it has a tellingly oblique reference to ‘Le Roi en jaune’… my erstwhile review of this, a literary landmark for me: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/the-king-in-yellow-a-real-time-review/
Brexit, plunge, transmigrate to the Louvre, urchin shenanigans, and a spiral staircase that flew into the streets, and off she glided with the angels to the Annals of the Absurd – well, these spiralling words of a poem, about the eponymous girl, reminded me of what I wrote yesterday (shown below) in another review here, despite the change of gender…
‘In oblique connection, another happening in our own real-time — and I make no judgement on it other than to feel its seriousness and sadness — a few days ago a 17 year old boy seemed gratuitously to throw a (for him, disconnected) six year old French boy off a high level storey of the Tate Modern gallery of absurd and conceptual art towards the ground below…
Something absurdist in the wind. Something tragic, too.’
“— already a star
inon thefictional heavenliterary firmament at the time —“Unedited, this is my own use of google (I rarely do this when reviewing a book, but this work somehow induced me):
“I have an essay in this book called ‘Existentialism Is Gay’, about class, the normativity of a lot of Euro philosophy, and adult learning courses. Out with @repeaterbooks next week”This is yr Sartre for today. Internet as a sort of Huis Clos. I like the Frank character taking the plural pronoun. I rarely read things twice, but this strangely off-putting yet engaging portrait of a EU student in paraBrexistential London induced me to do so. (I am a 71 year old adult living in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, still learning, of course.)
“You’re saying that the Jackie we used to know is living in Paris inhabiting Jacques Derrida’s body? And when we catch them together, they become one and the same?” When I studied such things with Anne Cluysenaar (rest her soul) in the late 1960s at Lancaster University, I did not know she would later sadly be murdered by her stepson. I owe a lot to her, such as my knowledge (since mainly forgotten) of many of the names in this hilaringuistic escapade in Paris, and find myself explaining to a hotel receptionist about the academic dispute on transformational grammar and the intentional fallacy for which I, as a digital ignoramus, am ringing New York with an over-sized telephone number to help with a petition about Derrida….
But that is getting fiction confused with my personal life, where, like this protagonist called Martin, I am confused about even things I was once an expert on, now myself being old, deriving, as I do, from a strict working class background, whereby my father once cleaned out sewers in the 1950s when I was at school and later delivered post, as well as his being a very noble man. Vive la différance! But not that causing any European divide.
“France playing in the World Cup is the reason we’ve run into all these cordoned off streets and squares.”I think this review started with the World Cup Soccer that France was holding at the time of starting this book, so remarkable later in the same book someone else is now writing about it! I always have said – please check – that book print can change in the night. Here, we have a story of the nature of memory and the truth or falsity of it, as a sort of Proustian complex syndrome, where someone accuses you of kicking a pigeon when walking towards her (cf the literature of pigeons in Lee Rourke, a writer who also appears in this book), such a kicking scolded by a woman whom you do not know or whom you know very well, in one of those cordoned off Parisian squares. Or as you claim, you were practising kicking a football. Trivial memories, also, as a trigger for bigger ones, or vice versa, a mnemonic art form leading to major repercussions in one’s personal life. The parting sea of pigeons. A gory image. But not in the Lavender-Smith story.
CELESTEVILLE’S BURNING: A WORK IN REGRESS by Andrew Gallix
“a lungful of absence”…apt that I recently finished reviewing Ted Chiang’s ‘Exhalation’ book (the man who wrote the story on which the film ‘Arrival’ was based). And, if many of the previous stories in this not-Paris book had not been quite so inspiring as they have been, then I would have thought this excellent Gallix story was the sole reason why I was MEANT to read this massive book (a book that I picked up at a whim!) — from the “Zut, zut, zut” of Marcel Proust to the Putain! Putain! Putain! of Sostène Zanzibar, this work is an astonishing delight. Zanzibar is a writer with a chequered career, a sexual fling with young lady journalist etc., a rivalry with another exponent of the writerly or filmic arts, car chases across Paris, and much more. Yet, the biggest delight was his John Cage connected search for a tune within silence, or vice versa. And his publication of blank literature…………I always claim to have published the world’s first blank story (four and half pages) in Nemonymous Two in 2002 with the title of Cage’s famous composition. And my first and last novel was entitled Nemonymous Night (Chômu Press) and has never been read by anyone. Or so I gather by another complete silence!
By the way, Zanzibar’s ‘Le Roman Invisible’, “The fact that it doubles as a handy memo pad turned it into a top seller…”
I LOVED this story. And so much more to tell you about it.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/well-never-have-paris/#comment-16325 and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/paris-dostoyevsky-wannabe-cities/#comment-16376The image above is today’s mnemonic, a copy of Nemonymous Five from 2005. An anthology book doubling as a memo pad.
A relatively short piece intriguingly evoking the different world where we pin steps on real streets while holding real maps, and the real world of google maps I know only on the internet where I pin unreal stars on different steps via different links. Translations, too, are different from translation to translation of the same text. Any other reviewer would have done this review differently.
I empathise with the portrait of Paris given to us here, as a one-time visitor of Paris pre-1968, and as a recent reader of this mighty book (nearly finished, but not quite). The names of writers, musicians etc. and the books, the books, the books. Hearing the bells rushing to Notre Dame, no longer from “a stupid voice.” But the part of this book represented by pages 515 – 518 is the real essential reading. Many of today’s stupid voices in Britain now named and hopefully nailed. Thanks to author and publisher for doing this. We’re nearly finished, but never quite finished. Hopefully never finished by dint of Zeno’s Paradox. Paris as a still. A still point.
“…the roary road by the splashy Seine.”To the writerly insane. Well, not really. This is an engagingly humorous, sometimes cringeworthy portrait by interview and inferred intrusive thoughts of a curmudgeonly and often deliberately (disguised as involuntarily) confused English writer giving a talk in Paris at the world famous bookshop often mentioned in this tome. We get inside the bookshop with him as he stays in the eponymous genius loci bedroom or ‘house’ therein, if not a genius’s loci. But plenty of past-it or pungent characters to meet. The bookshop is across the Seine from the Notre Dame, with references here to the hunchback, if not, this time, the hunchback’s ‘stupid voice’ from the previous story. It is made explicit that the rickety wooden bookshop is not on fire, implying that the opposite Notre Dame is! Although I suspect this was written prior to Notre Flame, but amid the earlier terrorist scares. “Shakespeare never did this.” Although Don DeLillo does! Our curmudgeon spends his time between shoulder chips and witty asides (by post or email) to his relatives, about his lack of writerly stardom, although worthy of interview in such a famous bookshop. Big Ben’s kill strike, compared to Notre’s. Meanwhile, he answers some of the interview questions about his book with toilet-plug scatology, if not DeLillo’s to-let plug-in eschatology. A bar maid compared to that in Manet. And making Benny Hill faces. And much more. Including sirens. Make of that what you will.
“I fantasized a city that bristled with profound, radical, stylish thought. I simply wanted to be near it all – why?”This author himself reads his own work to audiences these days at that famous bookshop portrayed in the previous story. And this engaging description of his first naïve visit to Paris, in the early 1990s, with a friend, reminds me of my own, hitchhiking with Neil Hannah, in 1967. I, too, was interested in Tzara, at that time, but not Barthes. I am amazed that Barthes, judging by what is said here, was a later phenomenon, long after my initial skirmishes with literary stylistics under the guidance of Anne Cluysenaar in the 1960s. Better check his Wikipedia… Ah, I see he had had a long influence leading up to the laundry van in 1980. Maybe I forgot about being taught Barthes in the 1960s. Or that fruits de mer weren’t fruit, as I thought they were when ordering food in Paris in 1967. I honestly did this! I was naive, too. Still am.
I never went back to Paris. This author did.
“My homeland is the laughable landmass, a nub of an island. Me, I was born in a cartographical cartoon.”Anyone who was born somewhere sees its cons as well as its pros, its geniuses as well as its dicks, and this Northern Irishman, presumably writing it before the Backstop became full-blooded, writes this amazing work about Paris and its effects on him, effects good and bad, mainly good, also bearing in mind he comes from a land once of bombs, marches and imported soldiers – a work that will affect you deeply – and this author writes it in real-time BOTH pre- and post-Charlie Hebdo, making that cartoon reference above obliquely relevant at least. He feels guilty that his writing was prescient, and I myself sometimes feel guilty, too, when my own gestalt real-time reviewing träumtrawls unwelcome or inconvenient preternatural synchronicities by dint of its process. To lighten the load, there is also talk here of the word ‘dudgeon’, and this makes an inadvertent synchronicity with Ewen’s earlier curmudgeon…
“That is why I keep moving, I think: to find new places to miss.”
I am already missing this book, the not-Paris of my nemonymous soul. It has been a long, challenging, eventually most fruitful journey, my fall now truly broken by the grillage of many different authors contributing structure to this French polished gestalt of a genius loci that can only exist for me as a city in print, print that changed overnight each time I put the book back on the shelf between each reading. That print is now probably frozen as in the early photographs described in this thoughtfully scintillating last work, contrasted to the photographing revolution since those nostalgic days, a revolution where I dabble with my smartphone or iPad photos, and I have placed them here over the last few years, the gestalt of a place and a person.
Rob Doyle, my final friend here, shows me, via his narrator’s words, the photos of Atget (died 1927) and what these photos get-at. He even has a substantive footnote that refers to the male equivalent of the female one in the simple act of my providing Courbet’s painting link here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Origine_du_monde (beware!) — a painting that is hung in Paris. But women’s parts, I naively ask: can they be tumescent? Also Doyle’s wistful thoughts on the word ‘wistful’, reminding me of an earlier story’s use of the word ‘insouciance.’ These two words don’t mean the same, but they are semantic bedfellows, I guess. And watching a porn film in a cinema (place), along with the coated brigade, only to find it an arty masterpiece of cinema (genre). New wave, again? Did I misunderstand, but am I right in thinking that the narrator found himself in one of Atget’s photos? And there is a military jet in the sky reminding me, I think, of a doomed passenger liner earlier in this book. Or is that complete fake news? I’ll get my coat.
And that is why I keep moving, too. In each book, I find a new home.
I stayed in this one longer than most.end