Gradual revelations define the style of Patrick Modiano

Full title: The Night Watch

Author: Patrick Modiano, translated by Patricia Wolf, revised by Frank Wynne

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 130 pages, paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The hero of The Night Watch is a young man who has to deal with a fundamental dilemma: to work for the French Gestapo or for the Resistance? He is in a dilemma because he has been offered both options and he’s taken both, each for its separate advantages: on the one hand the pecuniary gains of a life among criminals, on the other hand the chance to become a hero. So he spends a lot of time tossing the options in search for the right answer, and although the right answer doesn’t quite arrive, at least his evolution means something. It means a kind of awakening.

But Modiano doesn’t make things easy. In order to arrive at the conclusion one needs to follow the winding path of the narrator’s own tosses and turns. Modiano’s trademark technique is a slow revealing of essential details. We start off with a narrator in a moral slum. We find no difficulty in not liking him. He’s a textbook petty criminal turned traitor. He’s well aware of his condition but doesn’t seem to be bothered by the nature of his various lucrative, if despicable, jobs. At this stage in the novel he doesn’t even seem resigned. He simply notes down self-observations as if they were notes in a log book:

“Night was drawing in, but my job as informant and blackmailer has accustomed me to darkness.”

Nicknamed ‘The Swing Troubadour’ (after Charles Trenet?) the young man is employed as part of a hoard of former convicts to act as the underground wing of the French Gestapo. It is much later that we find out his motivation: coming from a poor family, he’s been lured by the easy money he could make in the criminal branch. As a result, his morality is simple and aimed exclusively at personal gain.

“It was in the pawnshop on the Rue Pierre Charron (my mother would often go there, but they always refused to take her paste jewellery) that I decide once and for all that poverty was pain in the arse. You might think I have no principles. I started out a poor and innocent soul. But innocence gets lost along the way.”

Here one can already perceive the seeds of self-awareness. But as he grows accustomed to the voice of testimony, ‘The Swing Troubadour’ also gets to the point where he can declare with laudable sincerity the true psychological mechanism behind his actions:

“There is only one emotion of which I have firsthand knowledge, one powerful enough to make me move mountains: FEAR.”

Slowly, slowly, the young man becomes conscious at least of the dubious nature of his profession. Even if he rejects it for a length of time, and even if he cannot find the will to leave the band of bastards who are providing him with the luxury otherwise forever unavailable to him, ‘The Swing Troubadour’ is uncomfortable as a criminal.

Patrick Modiano. Source: The Telegraph

But, as already mentioned above, to reach this stage one needs to read the novel in its peculiar manipulation of chronology. The narrative voice moves back and forth within a relatively tight chronotope, but one generous enough to permit chronological arabesques. Not only does the narrator relate events that didn’t occur in a straight line, he also includes real characters and situations from times that don’t coincide with the narrative’s zero time. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century personages and their deeds (mostly criminal) are mixed with contemporary episodes, in an urban landscape that seems to level all differences and make these cross-chronological encounters possible. All this might sound like an exercise in the universalisation of criminality, maybe in the fashion of Borges’s History of Infamy, although the parallel must not be stretched too far.

Modiano’s narrative oddity appears to be facilitated by the general setting of the novel: Paris. A city with multiple layers of history and mentality, it distributes past and present in ways that make them seem to coincide. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century criminals and WW2 serial killers are brought together, sad apparitions in a tableau of sad colours, described in a future that is outside of the novel’s present-tense narration.

“There are ghosts here, but only those of Monsieur Philibert, the Khedive, and their acolytes. Stepping out of Claridge, arm in arm, come Joanovici and the Count de Cagliostro. They are wearing white suits and platinum signet rings. The shy young man crossing the Rue Lord-Byron is Eugene Weidemann. Standing frozen in front of Pam-Pam is Thérèse de Païva, the most beautiful whore of the Second Empire. From the corner of the Rue Marbeuf, Dr Petiot smiles at me. On the terrace of Le Colisée: a group of black marketeers are cracking open the champagne.”

This passage indicates yet another aspect of the novel: the rapid move between locations. There are numerous moments when the narrator limits the story to a listing of places. As the protagonist moves, the locations too reveal themselves, as if what one is reading were not a novel but the representation of a map of Paris. The progression of the story is thus made to imitate the progression of an urban traveller, a flâneur or picaro who, like Moll Flanders in the eighteenth century, are led forward by the trajectories of their criminal pursuits.

Surrounded by depravity and petty interests, ‘The Swing Troubadour’ has to find his own way through the labyrinth that leads to decency. It takes a different kind of awakening to bring him to the realization that he might have a better role to play in life. And that is the moment when he is employed to infiltrate a Resistance cell. It is now that a profound transformation takes place. As he starts spying on the cell, the protagonist learns to admire their heroic determination, their rectitude, and their friendship. The transformation is substantial. He is given a new name (the curiously feminine ‘Princess of Lamballe’), welcomed, trusted, asked to spy back on the Gestapo. And that’s when the young man seems to crack under the weight of the dilemma.

“Two groups of lunatics were pressuring me to do contradictory things, they would run me down until I dropped dead from exhaustion. I was a scapegoat for these madmen. I was the runt of the litter. I didn’t stand a chance.”

This dilemma keeps him on edge for the rest of the novel. But the end doesn’t bring concrete relief to him. Only reassurance to the reader that the right shape of things is about to be brought to light. The Resistance cell is gunned down and Lamballe’s double game discovered. Then everything ends in a hot pursuit, the young man driving a car towards the Swiss border, with enough cash to start a new life, but weighed down by an apocalyptic tiredness. We never know if he’s made it. Modiano stops his game of slow revelations and leaves everything on a cliff-hanger. To make things more interesting but also, perhaps, to relativise the trope of the converted criminal.

An apocalypse of penises: another Chuck Palahniuk idea

Full title: Beautiful You

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 224 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Doubleday(2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

As Chuck Palahniuk has already proven so many times, his narrations are nothing if not verging on the outrageous. Most of the time they hang onto some crazy idea which he works on until a world unlike anything we know comes out. And then everything seems normal, because it’s made to work like a world that we know. Case in point, Beautiful You. The subject matter: orgasm. Exactly what I was talking about.
The mad scientist type, one by the name of Cornelius Linus Maxwell (abbreviated, for mass media purposes, to Climax-Well), launches this whole line of personal care products designed to satisfy the world’s female population with the intention of changing forever the fabric of society. As the quote on the dust wrapper makes apparent, “A billion husbands are about to be replaced” by these wonderful inventions. And indeed, Beautiful You, the name of the new line of products, makes female orgasm possible without the input of men. The idea is met with more than enthusiasm (and not only by women). But not before we're given some solid information to chew on for thorough edification.

Crazy items bearing crazy names and performing crazy feats of electronic self-manipulation are tested on the protagonist, Penny Harrigan, a young (somewhere in the twenties) Midwesterner with dreams of making it big as a lawyer in New York. She meets Climax-Well, thinks she’s become her girlfriend but finds out quickly that she is in fact his test subject. There’s a mocking reference, of course, to Fifty Shades of Grey: same social gap between protagonists, same focus on aberrant sexuality, same media involvement, etc. etc. Once the reference is figured out, Palahniuk moves on to something more complex. He plays with biblical dimensions. He emulates the apocalyptic narratives that inundate literature and film nowadays. By having pleasured Penny to an extent never experienced by other women (with the exception of the President of the United State – yes, there’s a first US woman president on stage, which places the novel in a future setting – and the Queen of England – not the current one, of course, but a puppet manipulated by the billionaire, so another fictitious character – plus a film celebrity whose career stops in full bloom), by having pleasured Penny, then, Palahniuk makes sure we understand what Beautiful You is capable of. And once we got the point, he makes the crazy billionaire launch his products to hysterically enthusiastic crowds. Here's where the Zombie-like atmosphere comes to the front stage, to tick the box of futuristic, apocalyptic, mob-crazy explosion. The women of the world, grown so quickly fond of the self-fondling equipment given them by Climax-Well's company, reach a stage of universalized hysteria that takes them out of social and economic schemes of things and plunge them into self-obliterating, intense, continuous sexual arousal. Which makes the world a hell devoid of women. What takes place in New York (the setting of first choice) is akin to Zombie-ridden cityscapes. For example:
"Those thousands of desperate women surged forward and crashed against the pink-mirrored façade of the building, hammering at the glass with the clunky helps of their ugly shoes. They wielded their worn erotic tools as truncheons. They beat with their fists until ominous cracks raced in every direction and the windows and doors bowed inward, ready to collapse."
And so the Big Apple is taken by a storm of overly-excited yet insufficiently-pleased women, asking for more sex toys the way their Zombie counterparts would ask for more brain.

There’s social and cultural commentary to be had here, with a de-rigueur sarcasm that suits so well Palahniukean texts.

“Artificial overstimulation seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available. Whether the victims were men or women, arousal addiction seemed to have become the new normal.”

The novel also takes pleasure in imitating forensic and medical drama. The parallels are to be found in the narrative voice, which provides descriptions of anatomical parts with a care for details that would make the producers of House, Bones, or Body of Proof blush with embarrassment at their shallow knowledge of biology.

Chuck Palahniuk

Those who don’t want to accept such exercises in emulation will perhaps miss the play with similarities that Palahniuk appears to be offering his readership. There’s a scene, for instance, where book burning is referenced as well. Yet in the scene the flames don’t consume volumes; they devour artificial penises. All caught on camera (the 21^st-century version of Inquisition’s all-seeing eye):

“The camera drew closer, and Penny witnessed what looked like any male’s vision of hell. Innumerable multitudes of severed penises were writhing in the conflagration. Phalluses squirmed in the intense heat, blistering and twisting as if in prolonged torment. Aflame, some suffering man-parts crept, inchworm-like, from the fire as if attempting to escape to safety. They flopped. Flipped. Jumped and twitched. As if in agony. These were caught by the surrounding men and summarily flung back to their doom. Still other dongs erupted in the heat, spouting pink molten lava.”

Palahniuk is quite vivid. We’ve got to give him that. It has to be said, though, that there are moments when it isn’t quite clear that what he's doing is pure mockery of popular genres or just a lack of will to finish this work well. To climax it well – if you get my pun (lol). There is the matter of motivation, for instance, that needs to be clarified. No spoilers are going to be provided, but the denouement isn’t as fabulous as one would expect – a rather common way of finishing a story, something not unlike certain Hollywood productions that handle endings in terms of unexpected discoveries and dues-ex-machina resolutions (old tricks in use since Greek comedies). There’s also the question: why the hell is a female mystic living in the Himalayas needed at all? Because one such appears, out of the blue, and even features in the end, where she dies dramatically, but not before having the chance to tell the story of everything from a perspective we haven't been aware of. I know it sounds familiar. Because it is. Mockery again? Point taken. But still: why? And why, also, the continuous postponing of the ending? The story misses (metaphorically speaking, if we take this to be intentional) three or four chances to finish, but every time more seems to be the case. This is not the classic multi-ending narrative but rather a story which refuses to end. Hold on. There’s something that just struck me, as I was writing the line above. Is this continuous ending meant to be something akin to a never-ending orgasm? Which is what happens to the women in the novel? Since Palahniuk likes to play with possibilities, it’s likely we’ll never get an answer to these questions. But what a thought! The never-ending orgasm and all that...
So let's leave it here.

"The ping and the pong of America"

Full title: The Making of Zombie Wars. A Novel

Author: Aleksandar Hemon

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 320 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

When you see the title you know straight away that there’s fun to be had from reading this novel. And the fun begins alright, yet slowly, gradually – because nothing can proceed unless we have some good introductory chapters first. So here it goes: Joshua Levin, a young would-be writer based in Chicago, is facing the mother of all creative impasses. He’s tried his hand at various genres, but after a while decided that film scripts are the go-to enterprise. So he proceeds to writing them. No success. Projects die one after another. He’s joined a group of other would-be’s, with whom he shares this destiny of being in an eternal bottleneck. They get together to discuss writing that never takes place and end up, almost invariably, with their minds assaulted by sexual ideation or drowned in cheap oxidized wine.

Case in point, the following dialogue:

“’American movies always have happy ending,’ Bega said. ‘Life is tragedy: you’re born, you live, you die.’
‘This could be like a European art-house movie. Which would be good because you could show tits,’ Graham said, pausing to picture the tits.”

Of course, what Hemon wants to point out here is the cultural break that divides these two cultures he’s concerned with: the Easter-European one (a culture of immigrants who have too many stories to tell and no chance to do it properly) and the American one (where things make sense only if they’re showy, over-the-top, kitsch). In fact, Bega, the Bosnian, doesn’t lose a single opportunity to highlight, in his accent-ridden voice, this division. He does so with the typical air of contempt that behooves respectable immigrants:

“’I was thinking, Josh,’ Bega said. ‘Why America now must have superheroes? Why can’t you just have normal heroes? John Wayne was not good enough, now you must have Batman?’”

And a couple of pages further down, again, because nothing is sweeter than the taste of cultural revenge:

“’Tell me why is that,’ Bega said, ‘last eight presidents have simple names: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, two with Bush. You used to have Washington, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, and then something happened. You can’t elect your president with complicated name anymore. Idiot voters have to be able to spell fucking name.’”

Mocked, Joshua flexes his artistic muscle even harder, trying to achieve the impossible. He keeps a record of all the ideas that cross his mind at various points in time. There are many of them. He has them numbered, neatly catalogued in the memory of his personal computer. He brings them out every now and then as personal reminders that work needs to be done if artistic immortality is desired. But there’s no joy in the exercise, because he never gets to the point of materialization. His writing sucks, to put it bluntly; and he knows it. Nothing has come out yet from under his unconvincing finger tips. Nothing, that is, except this script idea for a film called Zombie Wars.

Aleksandar Hemon. Source: KCET

Steeped in American dullness, Joshua has a life best described as minor. His food is bland, his family is concerned with inconsequential Jewish problems, his whole life’s a sub-product better imagined as part of a low-budget B-series movie. He can’t even enjoy the prospect of dreams.

“Joshua hated sleeping, but waking up was worse. Nightmares were not the problem: he never really had any. Nobody ever bothered to chase him in his dreams; he never plunged from a tall building to wake up just before exploding like a pomegranate, nor did he ever experience even the vaguest presence of death. There was little violence, only occasional vanilla sex, his dreams damp rather than wet, his subconscious a Wilmette where he was forever sleepily immortal.”

Trapped in this dreamless Americanness, it’s a miracle Joshua doesn’t turn into a Norman Bates or some solo-act of Bonnie and Clyde.

Truth is he doesn’t have a chance to become wild, simply because he doesn’t have the guts. He flees conflict, avoids his mad landlord, avoids his family, avoids the happiness that seems likely to catch roots in the company of his near-perfect Japanese girlfriend, avoids – ultimately – writing the script of his own life. Hence the general feeling of his being completely and utterly (excuse the word) fucked: a looser in the most specific sense of the word, eligible to feature in the world’s best galleries of all-time losers.

After a while, though, things get moving and everything that was dull in the beginning turns into a fast-paced Hollywood-like production. There’s drama (Joshua’s father discovering that he has prostate cancer), romance (a lot of it, but of the problematic kind, with the Japanese girlfriend gone from perfect match to utter hater, aided by a Bosnian contender impossible to resist), adventure (featuring the colourful landlord by the name of Stagger, who brandishes a samurai sword and gets his butt kicked big time, and not just once), and even bits of thriller (with a bunch of other Bosnians in close-up, just to make sure we don’t forget who Aleksandar Hemon is).

With action cropping up at superhighway speeds, The Making of Zombie Wars turns hilarious and sad at the same time. A sympathetic reader will surely feel for the protagonist’s sorry ass, but will LOL at the encounter with Stagger, the novel’s best, if not only, truly comic character (“If ever a man was entitled to a cape and light saber, it was Stagger.”)

Then one must admire Hemon’s talent for destroying every cliché that ever comes his way. There are moments when one is reminded of those comedies in which a seemingly melodramatic plot ends with a turntable scratch that makes the audience aware that this ain’t nothing but a joke. Take this, for instance, for a ruined bucolic:

“All across the wide world, spring was landing on its fairy feet. Everywhere, trees were budding and coming into leaves, ground thawing and earthworms stirring, dog shit defrosting and releasing the pungent stink that brought back memories of springs past.”

As per example, Hemon knows irony well, and proves to be a good adept of the new American wave of novelists, who take the Mickey out of everything but do so with intelligence, elegance, and sophistication. (See Chuck Palahniuk, George Saunders, Gary Shteyngart, Junot Diaz etc. etc.) Some of Hemon’s metaphors, let’s admit it, rock. Take “clouds floated like meringue zeppelins” for an example. But metaphors aren’t everything that stands out. Hemon also engages perfectly with the critical vein of the American club, seeing where America is weak and hitting precisely there, for maximum effect:

“Hope sold, of course, and well; it was the corn syrup of existence, fast burning and addictive. On the other hand, it was cheap and everywhere. Hope and war: the ping and the pong of America.”

There would be numberless other occasions to quote Aleksadar Hemon, now at his sixth book, already a victor of American letters. Part of his talent is that he knows how to scatter quotable bits throughout the text. The novel expertly apes the prose of religious sermons, it mimics Spinoza, it offers brilliant philosophical gems, it mixes script excerpts into the novelistic fabric. It does all sorts of novel-writing prestidigitation, and a lot of it comes out well. A multi-voice enterprise, The Making of Zombie Wars is a novel worth keeping in one’s personal library for some time.

Michael Ondaatje: “Images only from memory”

Full title: The Cat's Table

Author: Michael Ondaatje

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 293 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Jonathan Cape (2011)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Michael Ondaatje’s most recent novel (four years old at this point in time) is a book of passages. It tells the story of three boys travelling between Sri Lanka and England on the transoceanic Oronsay, during the summer of 1954. It tells the story of what went on, during that three-week journey that’s been never forgotten. It tells the story of how the people on board passed from one small island at the end of the Indian subcontinent to a bigger island at the end of Europe.

A sense of a spectacle full of surprises mixed with water and patches of moon permeates through the narrative suppleness and the poetic subtleties of Ondaatje’s prose. The ship itself is a big floating stage, where the passengers play their roles in a space where there is, really, nothing else to do. Once the boys are boarded and the Oronsay starts floating on, they find themselves in a different world, one of freedom but also one of apprehension, where they are “no longer free of the realities of the earth.”

Because of this encounter with the unprecedented (born in Colombo, not far from the sea, they still remember their homes as grounded certainties: territories of earth, not of water), the passengers gather together to construct a universe whose meaning is limited to the time and space of the ship. The narrative gives sufficient hints to inform the reader that nothing of what they are witnessing is the characters’ normal way about things.

The voyage is a game; a game for the boys, who see through events as if they did not matter beyond their immediate happening; a game for the other passengers too, who put on various masks in order to enjoy a short-term life of differences and quasi-anomalies.

The passage, the narrator insists in this story told years later, was not what one might call splendid. Not in its original unfolding. Like all formative events, the formativeness of this passage becomes significant only in hindsight:

“It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen through their eyes, even something significant in a life.”

It is important that we keep this in mind while reading The Cat’s Table, because this way the question of childhood (inexperience, naivety, and everything else that comes with it) can be brought up again and again. Now, at maturity (the novel’s ‘time zero of narration’), the events are recounted to minds as young as those of the protagonists, participating in the unlikely formation of this generation that grew after the events.

What we’re made to understand from this series of stories remembered as if they were coming from a different world, is that everything – everything – is the product of memory. Impractical, restorative, unreliable memory.

“For us, this was an era without the benefit of photography so the journey escaped any permanent memory. Not even one blurred snapshot of my time on the Oronsay exists in my possession to tell me what Ramadhin really looked like during that journey. A blurred dive into the swimming pool, a white-sheeted body dropping through the air into the sea, a boy searching for himself in a mirror, Miss Lasqueti asleep in a deckchair – these are images only from memory.”

This state beyond documentation lays the ground for fiction. It is, in fact, the perfect incubator for fantasy and for imagination. Without facts, the universe is open to speculations: forms of creative remembering.

Michael Ondaatje. Source: University of North Texas

Autobiographic by default, every writing gesture questions the relevance of memory and its ability to go back to a beginning that is forever fragile. “Whatever we did had no possibility of permanence,” the narrator says at some point. The impermanence of events is the one true theme of The Cat’s Table. Impermanence aided by the fact that this voyage towards an unknown place is recounted as an event in itself: a series of incidents with their own internal logic, held together not by linear biography but by a floating device. That’s why the novel ends at the arrival. In three pages, the episode of Michael’s meeting his mother (who has been waiting for him in London all this time) is done with; without emotional charge, without a mother-son love collision.

That’s because what really matters is not the reunion but the breaking of the party: the fact that the journey ended and, with it, the magic of the show broke up as well. At the arrival, certainty takes front stage again. No more room for fantasy and artifice, no more imagining about. All of that was the ship’s magic, a thing of the past. Now, giving the sea its due, the land puts everybody’s feet to the ground; literally, ordinarily, most prosaically.

But let’s return to the voyage. Given the lack of means to record the events, the narrator’s recollections will have to be regarded as the only accounts of the journey, the only reliable (to an extent) sources of information about a three-week period that was never memorised otherwise.

And so, the boys seem to be under the constant pressure of a duty to witness. Throughout the voyage, they watch and listen. They stand hidden in the darkness of a life boat, covered by the tarpaulin, furtively seeing and listening to events as they unfolded. This sense of witnessing becomes apparent everywhere in the novel. Sometimes, it suggests confusion – like the confusion in the minds of the young protagonists:

“We were never sure of what we were witnessing, so that our minds were half grabbing the rigging of adult possibility.”

At other times, the sense of testimony appears as a necessary training for a future when the events are meant to gain significance:

“Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.”

This is the core of Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table: the facts of fiction adding memory to existence.