NP During the break, I thought this book sounded interesting for many plisters

[Mark Kohut]

Book Review: Arriving in Avignon
Arriving in Avignon by Daniël Robberechts, translated by Paul Vincent (Dalkey 
Archive Press, $13.95 trade paper, 9781564785923/1564785920, October 14, 2010)
Read a Flemish novel recently? For sheer unconventional, thought-provoking 
oddness, you couldn't do better than Daniël Robberechts'sArriving in 
Avignon. But don't call it a novel, though you'll probably find it in the 
fiction section of your local bookstore. It's sort of autobiographical, but not 
a memoir. Not a book of philosophy, either, although Robberechts's contention 
that the moment you write about life you falsify it is the most compelling 
aspect of the book. It's not a history, either, although it chronicles the 
nightmarish succession of corrupt popes when the papacy moved from Rome to 
Avignon. Nor is it a guidebook or travel writing, although the author names all 
the once-walled town's major streets and gates, as well as the train and bus 
timetables.
What is it, then? Robberechts calls it "a record," and refuses to tailor his 
work to fit into any genre. Taken for what it is, this is the longest 140-page 
book you'll read this year, fascinating, daring and boring all at the same time. 
Ostensibly it records the travels of a shy, horny young man who at age 18 runs 
away from boarding school hoping for an adventure, an experience that will 
change him. Between the ages of 18 and 24 he makes nearly 20 visits to Avignon, 
visiting the surrounding villages; listing all the people he sees; watching 
attractive women on trains and in cafes, waiting for them to make the first 
move, too inhibited to admit his helpless, embarrassed desires.
Robberechts's genreless "report" is a troubling, troublesome book, leaping back 
and forth in time, searching for a plot in real life. The narrative unfolds 
through blocks of prose without paragraphs, in which chapter numbers may occur 
mid-sentence and memory is always unreliable. This maddening, experimental book 
falls somewhere between the existentialism of Samuel Beckett (can anyone ever 
really know Avignon?) and the scientific detachment of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The 
book is haunted by a searing loneliness, as the young traveler describes all the 
people he sees and can't connect with, though the reader knows from flash 
forwards that he will ultimately marry the nameless blonde girl who fascinates 
him from the beginning, whom he calls Beatrice.
Dante isn't the only one referenced. Rodin, Rilke and the Marquis de Sade, 
Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, Petrarch, the Knights Templar and a 
procession of those corrupt popes are all included in Robberechts's exploration 
of the once-papal city, not to mention the constant wars, the torturing of 
heretics and the devastation of the Black Death.
"We live badly, we live unsatisfactorily," says Robberechts. Life is "the raw 
material with which we have to make do.... Is art no longer anything but the 
servant of life?... the more words one writes down... the greater the chance of 
one's being wrong, the smaller the probability that what has been written 
tallies with some reality."
No matter how thoroughly Robberechts explores Avignon, he's convinced he can't 
quite seem to arrive there. Being trapped in Robberechts's mind is scary and 
upsetting (he took his own life in 1992) and you'll be relieved when you finally 
arrive at the ending--if it's possible to ever arrive anywhere at all. --Nick 
DiMartino
Shelf Talker: An unconventional, maddening and thought-provoking book about a 
young man's search for connection, filled with history, popes, artists, train 
timetables and existentialism.