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

[rich]

sounds abit like WG Sebald but more deranged and youthful
thx anyway
added to my hold list at the library

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 8:39 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>