This post was originally written for my arts and culture blog on Salon, Buzzkiller. All postings from that blog will also be reposted here.

The New York Times reported today on a new music festival that came and went last week in Lake Tahoe, CA. Called Wanderlust Festival, it brought together loads of famous musicians—Andrew Bird, Jenny Lewis, Broken Social Scene—with, wait for it…the world’s most famous yogis. I myself haven’t heard of any of these yogis, but to be honest, I haven’t really kept up with the scene since Berra retired. What interests me most about this festival is not the weird juxtaposition of attractions, but what it says about the live music scene in America.

As a musician myself, I rarely go out to shows anymore unless a friend of mine is playing. Truth is that high profile bands tend to charge too much (and I can always find their videos on YouTube), and bands I’ve never heard of tend to suck so bad they make me wish that sound waves didn’t propagate through Earth’s atmosphere. However, though I go to fewer and fewer individual shows, I find myself at festivals more and more often.

The website Festival Finder counts more than 2500 music festivals in its database. Many of these, such as California’s Coachella, Tennessee’s Bonnaroo, and the Pitchfork Music Festival, began in the last decade. Others, such as Texas’ South by Southwest, have become as important to the music scene as Sundance is to the film world. Every serious music magazine and website is expected to have a large journalistic presence at all of these festivals (assuming there are any journalists left to cover them). And this is to say nothing of the literally hundreds of niche festivals, such as Tanglewood (classical/jazz), Hardly Strictly (bluegrass, since ‘01), or what used to be called the Newport Folk Festival (folk, duh).

What explains the sudden proliferation? Are we seeing another painfully self-conscious Woodstock-ian rennaissance for Generation Y’ers? Is the music being played so loud that the majority of crowds are neighbors coming over to complain? Are we feeling particularly festive at watching the music industry go down in flames?

Actually, the explanation is far less hippy-dippy. Festivals mean big money for promoters and advertisers, and where the money goes, so goes the music. Because of shared costs and centralization, festivals are more economically efficient than individual shows,  for everyone involved. And it’s not just the sponsors that see benefits, but the cities that host the festivals. According to Wikipedia, SXSW is the highest revenue producing special event in Austin, with an estimated impact of $110 million dollars in 2008.

And musicians love festivals, too. According to Jon Eaton of The Spinto Band: “Festivals have a celebratory vibe that isn’t usually found at a bar or nightclub show. We are usually done with our festival requirements by 4 or 5 in the afternoonand can unwind and head out to listen to the headliners for the rest of the evening.” Glancing at current hipster favorite Andrew Bird’s touring schedule, one finds him at Lollapalooza on August 7^th, Big Chili Festival on the 9^th, Oya Festival on the 12^th, Way Out West Festival on the 14^th, and Haldern Pop Festival on the 15^th. Of his next sixteen shows, only three look to be individual shows at traditional venues. It is the summer, which is when a majority of festivals take place, but that’s still an impressive ratio.

As for the average concertgoer, the choice between a single show and a festival is easy. The first batch of tickets to June’s 3-day Bonnaroo Festival went for about $210, and a driven musicophile with good shoes can see $1000s of dollars worth of shows in that time. This year’s Bonnaroo lineup included many acts that are far more expensive on their own: Bruce Springsteen ($104 at a traditional show), Nine Inch Nails ($55), Phish ($50), Elvis Costello ($65), and a hundred other bands, comics, and performers.

This is to say nothing of the entertainment efficiency of a festival. Let’s admit it, one of the joys of seeing some past-their-prime throwback like The Beastie Boys (also at Bonnaroo) or a ridiculous self-parody like Snoop Dogg (ditto) is to be able to say you’ve seen them. So why not check off a few dozen boxes in one go? Ten years ago, I saw Lou Reed at Bumbershoot perform his musicalization of Poe’s The Raven, and I’ve been bitching about how awful it was ever since. The truth is, I only ended up watching him because there weren’t any other good bands on during that afternoon. Only at a festival can one experience the musical equivalent of channel surfing.

And now one can do it while practicing Yoga. Finally.

The Naked Eye. By Yoko Tawada Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. New Directions, 256 pages, $13.95.

Start Making Sense

In Yoko Tawada’s latest novel alienation becomes downright alienating.

A reviewer courts considerable danger when he or she condemns a book that is densely surreal or murkily allegorical. Complaining that the story’s symbols are foggy may invite charges that subtleties in the plot were missed; objections to the lack of a clear narrative will lead some to think that the book’s deeper political or moral themes were ignored. But promises of profundity are no defense for rampant obscurity; I read Yoko Tawada’s “The Naked Eye” in constant suspense, convinced that at any moment it must start making sense. It never did.

This may be a matter of taste, or a lack of patience with arty difficulty for its own sake. The prolific Tawada has a considerable reputation in Europe: her writing — novels, plays, poems, essays, and short stories — has garnered a number of awards, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Goethe Medal.

As far as I can discern, her latest novel revolves around a Vietnamese teenager (known sometimes as Anh Nguyet, or “the pupil with the Iron Blouse”; for clarity’s sake, I’ll just refer to her as “the girl”) who is invited to give a speech on Communism at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. The time period is unclear, as is the duration of the novel (trying to parse the passage of time in the book turns out to be as frustrating as trying to locate the hour on a Dalí wristwatch). Once in Berlin, the girl meets Jörg, a German radical who is either her boyfriend or her kidnapper. She fails to show up for her speech and then decides to go back to Vietnam by way of Moscow. Unfortunately, when a stranger lies down in front of a train to stop it, the girl gets on and ends up in Paris. Here, she takes up with a French prostitute named Marie, and becomes obsessed with the films of Catherine Deneuve.

This is where the novel really starts to get weird.

Each chapter in “The Naked Eye” is titled after a different Catherine Deneuve movie, from Repulsion to Dancer in the Dark. The girl spends her days watching the same films over and over again: “…the silver screen was the bedsheet upon which I did all my living and sleeping.”

As the book progresses, the content of the chapters becomes more and more related to the chapter’s title film, until we are left reading what feel like essays written for an undergraduate cinema studies class. The girl’s philosophy, a childlike regurgitation of Ho Chih Minh’s propaganda, proffers the only readerly fun in these long and tortuous critiques. Upon meeting a prostitute for the first time, the girl isn’t scandalized by the thought of sex being sold for money, but by the fact that rooms are rented out to facilitate the sex. Renting rooms, after all, is a capitalist crime.

Describing a scene from Les Voleurs, the girl narrates, “Juliette is surrounded by many male eyes. The eyes of the policeman Alex are windowpanes made of frozen tears; the eyes of his brother are glasses filled with golden whiskey.” It’s a beautiful image, and there are more than a few of them served up in Tawada’s descriptions, but a couple of trenchant or evocative takes on obscure French cinema does not a satisfying novel make.

“There was no longer any woman whose name was ‘I,’” the girl gushes to the imaginary Deneuve in her head. “As far as I was concerned, the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist.”

This points out one of the major flaws in the book. The nameless protagonist really doesn’t exist. She has no agency, and is content to wander the streets of Paris watching films and suffering. She takes a job as a test subject for beauty products, but the position’s dramatic potential is wasted. She nurses certain homosexual fantasies, but never acts on them. When we find out at the end of the book that she has gone blind, though still goes to the movies just to experience the sounds (“In a film without images, most people are merely footsteps.”) the irony is supposed to be affecting. But we have learned nothing about her, really, and so can’t summon up any empathy.

Tawada asserts in the forward of the novel that she wrote the book simultaneously in Japanese and German (her two native tongues), and then translated backwards to produce two full texts, one in each language. She explains that she began in German, but then “certain parts of the story began occurring to her in Japanese.” This is unconvincing as well as pretentious. A story is a story, and language is language. A story never arrives in words; it must be translated. Perhaps if Tawada had been more concerned with creating a narrative, rather than deconstructing one, the language wouldn’t come off as so forced. Whatever the explanation, Tawada is every bit as culpable as translator Susan Bernofsky for sentences such as this one, to be found three lines into the first chapter: “The gaze of the nameless lens licks the floor like a detective without grammar.” Come again, please?

Far North by Marcel Theroux, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25.00, 314 pages

Fallout Girl

Another take on the post-apocalyptic novel proves that this venerable genre is anything but a wasteland.

“Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol the dingy city. I’ve been doing it so long that I’m shaped to it, like a hand that’s been carrying buckets in the cold.”

So begins author Marcel Theroux’s “Far North,” a novel of post-apocalypse set in Siberia. It’s an interesting geographic choice for this kind of story, as Siberia is one of the few places in the world that already looks as desolate and ravaged as a post-apocalyptic landscape. Theroux, who has both spent time on the Great Steppe, and also filmed a documentary on settlers who have chosen to move back to Chernobyl, does a remarkable job evoking the breath-freezing cold of that world, giving even the novel’s most implausible ideas the ring of truth.

In “Far North,” climate change, along with the attempts to delay climate change, has led to world war, which may or may not have resulted in the end of human civilization (it’s never made entirely clear what has happened to the world outside of Siberia). The protagonist of the novel, Makepeace, is the sole remaining citizen of the town of Evangeline. Early in the book, we learn that this noir-ish, hard-nosed character is not at all what we expect: “Killing always sits heavy with me,” Makepeace muses after taking the life of a violent thief, “Whether that’s because of my being a woman, or because my disposition is naturally softhearted for another reason, I don’t know.”

Far from seeming gimmicky, Makepeace’s gender lends a tension to Far North that most examples of the genre lack. Post-apocalyptic novels tend to center around a taciturn male unafraid of kicking some ass (“I Am Legend,” “The Road,” “Dhalgren”), or if the author does choose a woman for a protagonist, she is invariably described as a passive sufferer (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Unit”) or a maternal wise-woman (“The Stand”). I can’t think of another example of a character like Makepeace, who acts as any woman would if she wanted to survive in a post-apocalyptic world—in short, like a man.

Makepeace’s parents had moved to Siberia before the apocalypse, as part of a social movement aimed at escaping the twisted values and moral decadence of modern life. When survivors of the war arrived in Evangeline, they came into conflict with the settlers already living there. “It was like two different species colliding: the world that had a choice, and the world that had none. The strains between us were ratcheting up in secret. And even those who noticed it didn’t like to admit to it. The trouble lit slow, like one of those lazy damp leaf fires in autumn.”

When the story begins, Makepeace’s position as sheriff of Evangeline has become something of a sinecure, as she’s the only person still living there. So when a plane crashes right before her eyes, the time seems ripe for adventure. Makepeace leaves Evangeline behind and heads off in search of whatever new civilization has re-conquered the skies. What follows is a vaguely episodic account of her travels through the North. Everywhere she turns, Makepeace finds corruption and lawlessness. She is accused of being a spy, starved, beaten, and enslaved. And whenever you think things are about to take a turn for the better, they just get worse.

For example, Makepeace spends several years working as a slave at a place called “the base”. After years of service, she is promoted and made a guard. Her responsibilities in this position including choosing prisoners to work in “The Zone”, a derelict city once known as Polyn, where the most advanced technologies of the old world were collected just before the apocalypse. Makepeace chooses her only two friends to do salvage work in Polyn, thinking it a favor, but it turns out that an anthrax attack during the war has made the place poisonous. All those who enter the city are killed afterwards, just to recover a few batteries or bits of circuitry.

Theroux posits that the wide distribution of knowledge and skills would prove the greatest impediment to rebuilding civilization after a worldwide catastrophe:

“We had been so prodigal with our race’s hard-won knowledge. All those tiny facts inched up from the dirt. The names of plants and metals, stones, animals, and birds; the motion of the planets and the waves. All of it fading to nothing, like the words of a vital message some fool had laundered with his pants and brought all garbled.”

Both the world and the characters of Far North are immaculately designed, so it’s a shame that the plot sometimes comes up short. A short love interest for Makepeace results in an unsatisfying coda to the primary action of the novel, and a tricky reveal in the final chapters seems similarly contrived. Theroux’s decision to make his protagonist a slave removes some of her agency, and slows down the middle of the book. That said, I felt a similar lack of action in Cormack McCarthy’s recent apocalyptic novel, “The Road,” and that book won the Pulitzer, so I suppose it’s not really much of a complaint.

In Makepeace, Theroux has given us a protagonist at once recognizeable and original, struggling to survive as a woman in a world that no longer has much need for the feminine. Her struggle finds a counterpart in the struggle of her world, a wounded creature itself on the brink of barrenness and death. In this way, Makepeace becomes a metaphor, both for the physical degradation of the planet, and the human impulse to survive. As she describes herself, “I thought that whatever hopes and convictions she had cherished, Makepeace was just another mask that life wore as it fought to renew itself, unsentimental, unsparing, fighting ugly.”

The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy Other Press, $14.95, 262 page

The Old Maid’s Tale

Ninni Holmqvist’s  speculative novel about the treatment of the elderly is harrowing but implausible.

The use of the term “speculative fiction” as a more respectable sounding synonym for “science fiction” is attributed to Robert Heinlein, writing for The Saturday Evening Post in 1947. But since then, the two genres have diverged: “science fiction” now describes stories about the future, aliens, and quasi-magical technologies; “speculative fiction” concerns itself with alternate versions of our present reality—dystopias (worlds that suck), anti-utopias (worlds that are supposed to not suck, but actually do suck), and alternate histories.

The greatest exemplars of the latter category don’t test the limits of believability any more than do the greatest literary novels. George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 use exaggerations of actual historical and cultural phenomena to comment on the present. Because of this, speculative fiction must always be, first and foremost, believable. An implausible character in a novel is easy enough to ignore, but an implausible reality is like a shirt five sizes too small—no matter how elegantly it’s designed, we’re not going to get into it.

All great anti-utopian novels focus on a disturbing aspect of the present, pushing it to its most horrific conclusions. In 1984, it’s the panoptic police state. In Brave New World, the sexualization and Americanization of England. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the subjugation of women through the sanctification of childbirth. In Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, the issue in question is the way the childless, especially the childless elderly, are looked down upon as irrelevant.

Dorrit Weger, a moderately-successful novelist, begins Homlqvist’s book becoming part of the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. Here, women over the age of fifty and men over sixty—if single, childless, and without “important” jobs—are sequestered for their final years. The Unit is a glorified retirement community, with restaurants, movie theaters, and indoor gardens. The only catch: all the residents are expected to take part in potentially fatal medical tests, and over the course of five to ten years, donate their vital organs to less “dispensable” people (i.e. those with kids).

It was this term that first signaled to me the weakness of Homqvist’s anti-utopia. Any government sponsored program like the unit would come up with a far more convincing euphemism than “dispensable” for their test subjects: “the selfless” maybe, or “the martyrs.”  And just why would the elderly be desirable organ donors anyway? Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, creates a far more convincing organ farm, where cloned children are bred from birth to be donors (a plot explored with far less subtlety and far more explosions in Michael Bay’s 2005 thriller, The Island).

Not all of the political stuff is as tough to swallow, though the more plausible aspects of it may be unfamiliar to American readers. In a description of all the legislative developments that led to the unit, Dorrit tells us “first of all there was the law stating that parents must divide their parental leave from work equally between them during the child’s first eighteen months.” Many readers won’t know that this is an actual Swedish law (though the “minority” parent, generally the father, is only compelled to rear for two months at present).

Dorrit goes on to explain how this law led to compulsory day care, which then led to the expectation that everyone should have a child, and thus those who didn’t were labeled dispensable. But isn’t compulsory day care the very opposite of paid maternity/paternity leave? And doesn’t that just mean it would be so easy to have a kid that there would be plenty, so it wouldn’t matter if some people chose to be childless? In general, it seemed to me that Holmqvist was less concerned with creating a plausible reality than with making a philosophical point.

“I’ve never understood the point of winning just for the sake of winning,” one of Dorrit’s friends tells her early in the novel. “What’s the point in putting all your energy into being better than other people at just one thing, which is in fact completely irrelevant?” The Unit is a polemic against the world’s strivers, filling the world with their children and waste and infuriating presence. Dorrit mourns for her lost relationships with her sister and her dog, for her many novels which didn’t make her famous but brought her joy. Her very happiness in lonely dotage becomes the question at the heart of The Unit: how does one define a successful life?

When she meets a man in the unit, falls in love, and manages to become pregnant, the question becomes less academic. Holmqvist skillfully steers the novel away from a simple escape thriller, but the anti-utopia begins to fall apart at the seams. If Dorrit had a baby, she would no longer be “dispensable,” so why isn’t she allowed to keep the child and leave the unit? And why doesn’t she anyway? The answer is that it wouldn’t serve the plot, which ends with an unconvincing repudiation of Dorrit’s rebellious nature.

Holmqvist raises provocative issues, and Dorrit is a pleasant guide down the thorny philosophical slalom. Unfortunately, inconsistencies and implausibilities keep the novel from joining other classics of anti-utopian literature. It’s always fun to speculate, but somewhere along the line, The Unit leaves both speculative and science fiction behind, and enters the realm of fantasy.

This is a new-ish song of mine, sung in an airless cube in the Stanford music building. No external microphones! No amps! Absolutely no talent involved!

The Twin By Gerbrand Bakker Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. Archipelago Books, 343 pages.

One is not the Loneliest Number

This brilliant Dutch novel explores themes of loneliness and connection

It isn’t easy to write a compelling novel about loneliness, for the simple reason that loneliness is boring. It makes for something of a paradox: the feeling of aloneness, both literal and figurative, counts among love, loss, and taxes as one of those ineluctable human experiences. We need to read about loneliness in order to understand our own; we connect to the disconnected, which hopefully keeps us from jumping off a building when we get dumped, or when a loved one dies. Yet both love and loss involve dramatic action of some sort; aloneness, on the other hand, is generally characterized by stasis.

In “The Twin”, Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker has accomplished the difficult task of rendering the static solitude of his protagonist into something dynamic and readable. In a prose style unhurried but visceral (translated without a false note by David Colmer), he creates and explores a loneliness that any reader would recognize as his own.

The loner in question, Helmer works on his family farm somewhere in the Dutch countryside. Though he lives with his sickly father, whom he loves and hates in equally depthless measure, Helmer suffers from a terrible sense of loneliness, which springs from a wound decades old: the death of his twin brother, Henk, killed in a car accident when the boys were still teenagers. Henk was their father’s favorite, and after he died, Helmer was compelled by guilt into leaving university and returning home to work on the farm.

The novel begins more than thirty years later. Helmer has moved his father into an upstairs bedroom so that they don’t ever have to speak, and a hooded crow has taken up residence in a tree, a sure sign of the infusion of loneliness into every aspect of Helmer’s existence. Here’s Helmer hanging out with his one friend, Ada, who lives next door. As she talks, his gaze wanders towards the window and he ponders his sense of alienation:

It’s a Saturday, the sun is shining and there’s no wind. A clear December morning with everything very bare and sharp. A day to feel homesick. Not for home, because that’s where I am, but for days that were just like this, only long ago. Homesick isn’t the right word, perhaps I should say wistful. Ada wouldn’t understand. Not coming from here, she doesn’t remember days long ago that were just like this, here.

The main action of the novel begins when Riet, the woman responsible for the car crash in which Henk was killed, sends a letter to Helmer. Riet, who was Henk’s girlfriend at the time of his death, initially seems to be seeking out a romantic connection, but eventually reveals that she’s hoping that her son, a teenager with—who would have guessed?—emotional problems, can work on Helmer’s farm for a few months.

Over the course of this boy’s stay at the farm, Helmer finally reengages with the world around him. It is the pacing of this reawakening that is the real wonder of Bakker’s book, accomplished through an insight into his protagonist that renders even the hoariest concept fresh, and the most banal event revelatory. For example, it eventually becomes clear that Helmer is gay, yet no line is drawn between his sexuality and his loneliness. Instead, Bakker subtly links Helmer’s orientation to his relationship with his twin, whose sexual awakening with Riet eventually alienated the two brothers.

Particularly poignant is a flashback from Helmer’s youth that he is constantly reliving, the day his twin told him they could no longer share a bed. It is the figurative death that prefigured the literal one, a trauma experienced backwards and so healed when Riet’s son (who is also named Henk) slips into bed with Helmer one night.

Everywhere are these thematic ripples, quiet but resonant. Helmer keeps two donkeys, whose surface similarity provides a self-indulgent recreation of his childhood relationship with his brother. Midway through the novel, he almost drowns beneath a pig, and is saved by Riet’s son. The hooded crow eventually disappears, but not before claiming its victim.

When a man from Helmer’s past finally convinces him to leave the farm behind, spiriting him off so suddenly that it practically feels like a deus ex machina, the reader doesn’t feel dissatisfied. Again, Bakker eschews the cliché; instead of ending the story when Helmer finds love, he goes a step further. Like everyone, Helmer still feels his loneliness acutely at times, even when he isn’t actually alone. In the final scene, Helmer leaves his lover in a hotel room and goes out to wander the empty streets and watch the sun set:

I know I have to get up. I know that the maze of paths and unpaved roads in the shade of the pines, birches and maples will already be dark. But I stay sitting calmly. I am alone.

I am alone, he tells us. Yet we feel the less so for that.

Wetlands By Charlotte Roche. Translated from the German by Tim Mohr. Grove Press, 240 pages.

Ick. Just Ick.

Charlotte Roche is one of the most famous authors in Germany. Thomas Mann must be spinning in his grave.

On the subject of literary criticism, Martin Amis has written that “quotation is the reviewer’s only hard evidence.” But I’m going to quote “Wetlands” sparingly in this review. And that’s for your sake. I could explain why myself, but it’s probably more efficient for me to give you a sample: “I also love it when someone goes down on me while I’m bleeding. It’s kind of a test of mettle for the guy. When he’s finished licking and looks up with his blood-smeared mouth, I kiss him so we both look like wolves who’ve just ripped open a deer.”

Yep. I know. Yuck. (Just be glad you’re not Tim Mohr, the translator, who probably had to read that 15 times in the German, then try it out five or six different ways in English. Kudos, Mr. Mohr).

But let’s not be premature. After all, were not James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov both decried as pornographers in their time? Is not a single photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe likely to prove more viscerally disgusting than even the naughtiest bunch of words? Do not the films of Catherine Breillat receive critical plaudits, even though they invariably feature graphic sex and violence? As a fan of all the artists mentioned above, I would never knock something just for grossing me out. Important work is important work, whether it turns the stomach or not.

Yet my response remains: yuck.

“Wetlands” is the story of 18 year-old Helen, an unapologetic sex-maniac who is laid out in the proctology unit of a hospital for the entirety of the novel. Her injury relates to a shaving accident about which the less said the better. Over the course of a couple hundred pages, we are granted a close-up look at every part of Helen’s anatomy, but very little in the way of her character. Her parents are split up, and though she says time and again that she wants to get them back together, the reasons for this are never fully explained. Why did they divorce? Are they still in love? Do they love their new partners (alluded to but never described)? Helen doesn’t care. She doesn’t even know what her parents do for a living. Fine for her, but this reader would have preferred a little context.

The emotional hinge of the book is meant to be the revelation that Helen once came home to find her mother and brother passed out on sleeping pills in front of an open gas oven. But any pathos that Roche might have rung from this memory is ruined by her bathetic writing. When Helen tells her brother about the incident (he was too young to remember it), he gives a two-sentence response and leaves. Now, I’m not sure what I would say if I found out my mom had tried to kill both herself and me at the same time, but I’m willing to guess it would be a bit more dramatic than, “That’s why I always have those fucked-up dreams. She’s going to get hers.”

“Wetlands” is being touted as a novel of feminist liberation, but it ends up saying a lot less about gender than it does about mental illness (one reviewer compared it to Plath’s “The Bell Jar”, which is apt). Unfortunately, I don’t think Roche planned this. In interviews, the 30 year old ex-TV personality has said that her book was inspired by the wall of feminine hygiene products on offer at her local pharmacy. This isn’t surprising, as “Wetlands” reads far more like a polemic than like a novel. In a pinch, it might do for the syllabus of a Gender Studies or Psych class, but it hardly qualifies as literature.

Many thanks to all those who made this video possible, especially the fantastic friend and dastardly director Chad Peiken, the gorgeous gendarme Judy Courtland, the crafty cinematographer Kelly Jones, and the phenomenal photographer Suzan Jones! Woo!

Julien Parme By Florian Zeller Translated from the French by Christopher Moncrieff. Pushkin Press, 246 pages.

Allons’y, Alonzo

Two French writers take on the notion would-be writers on the run. Only one gets away with it.

I wasn’t planning to review these two books together, as I happened to read them one after the other only by coincidence. However, they have so much in common—and their differences perfectly point out why one is successful and the other is not—that I felt reviewing them at the same time would only help to clarify my opinions about them.

First, the similarities. Both authors are French. Both arrived on the literary scene at the age of 25. Northombe’s first novel was “Hygiène de l’assassin”; in Zeller’s case, it was actually his third novel, “La Fascination Du Pire”, that earned him the attention of the literati. Both novels are about would-be writers (in Northombe’s case, herself). Both novels are about the notion of escape, of what it means when we choose to run. Both novels are sparing in their use of description, and eschew a serious plot in order to develop a character.

“Tokyo Fiancee” by Amélie Northomb Translated from the French by Alison Anderson. Europa Editions, 152 pages.

The characters thus developed are where these two novels begin to distinguish themselves. The protagonist of Zeller’s book is Julien Parme, a 14 year-old boy with a criminal streak and ludicrous literary aspirations. His narration evokes a Holden Caulfield raised on a strict diet of Hemingway: “I was afraid I’d get his voicemail, but luckily it rang. But it just kept on ringing. And in the end I got his voicemail. Shit. I hung up. He couldn’t have heard his phone because of the music. I tried a second time. He still didn’t answer.” Parme fascinates mostly due to his acrobatic evasion of self-awareness; he is the kind of kid who rails against bullies even while stealing cash from a half-blind old woman.

The story takes place over a little less than two days. Julien steals his stepfather’s cash card and embarks on a brief adventure. In spite of the boisterous tone with which the book opens (First line—notice the missing comma: “At the risk of surprising you I’d like to tell you about the incredible thing that happened to me last year.”), very little happens on Julien’s odyssey. He goes to a party. He runs into a teacher outside of the classroom. He feels up a girl. He almost runs away to Rome. His decision not to flee comes on the second to last page; the book ends with the end of the rebellion.

“Tokyo Fiancee” finishes on a similar but entirely opposite note. The protagonist, twenty-three year old Amélie Nothomb (Nothomb calls the book fiction, but that seems more like a legal precaution than anything else), has spent the novel being romanced by a Japanese man while living in Tokyo. Though she agrees to marry him, she eventually decides her freedom is more important, so jumps on a plane back to her homeland of Belgium, never telling him she’s not planning on coming back.

Does that make Nothomb sound a bit unlikeable? You don’t know the half of it. Though we’re never made aware just how much of the story is fictionalized, “Tokyo Fiancee” references its author’s novels, her heritage (Belgian writer who writes in French and was born in Japan), and numerous details of her biography. So when Nothomb’s “character” waxes poetic about her beauty, brilliance, and athletic ability, it’s difficult to hold back the incredulity. The cover of the book doesn’t help: Nothomb framed by the rising sun of a Japanese flag, gazing at us with the gamine semi-seriousness of a deservedly more famous French Amélie.

All this would be forgivable if the book were a pleasure to read, but this is not the case. In fact, the first two-thirds of “Tokyo Fiancee” might just be among the worst published writing I’ve encountered. Here are two short bits that follow one after another on the same page:

#1: “The next morning, the punctuality of the Mercedes was equaled only by its white sheen.”

#2: “Rinri had changed. His profile as a driver was no longer as immobile and impassive. His silence deepened, with an interesting awkwardness.”

Describing gradations of writerly error can be difficult. For example, to explain why Thomas Wolfe is a better writer than Tom Wolfe, it is necessary to go into the minutiae of style, which most people couldn’t care less about. Explaining why Nothombe is terrible, however, poses no problem at all. Consider the first passage. This is a car that has already been described as “magnificently white” “too-white” and “whiter than ever”. But punctuality cannot be compared to whiteness, nor can a car be punctual, nor is a white sheen the same as white paint.

In the second passage, we have “profile as a driver” standing in for “face.” And while that face is described as more emotive than usual, the character’s “silence” is said to have “deepened”. This is both a cliché and an inanity. How does a silence deepen? And what makes that awkward? And what makes that awkwardness interesting? And how is he less impassive but more silent?

Amélie Nothomb takes pains to portray herself as a free-spirited, deeply emotional woman. Julien Parme, on the other hand, initially comes across as a brutal, selfish child. So it’s ironic that Nothomb eventually betrays herself as a brat, while Zeller reveals Parme to be a sage. “So what if flight is not very honorable?” Nothombe pontificates at the end of her book. “It’s still better than allowing yourself to be caught. The only dishonor is that of not being free.” But Parme, at fourteen, returns from his adventure to face his mother, having recognized the cowardice of flight: “I took a deep breath to drive away my fears. And I got into the lift, hoping very much that she’d forgive me. That she’d forgive me for being who I am, and not someone else.”