NP but it's "in the air".

[Mark Kohut]

Cautionary introductory dialogue:
Mulder: "these are the collective tears of sky ghosts." Scully: "that's the
ocean, Mulder. We're on the coast."

A---And I forgot: the narrator of* La Place De L'Etoile* declares he has an
urge to eat razor blades, shades of Katje's lips
in that section, and this reappears near the end.

A---and, I have just started the second volume of his Occupation Trilogy
which is called *The Night Watch*
and the opening few pages involve a group of people in darkness, dancing
and dancing and talking and being
talked of by the narrator and then this section ends and folds in what sure
seems a direct allusion to "Dancing in the Dark",
---that song must have appealed to many fine writers for its 'real
meaning'--GR.

This novel published in 1971.



On Mon, Jul 4, 2016 at 6:42 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have just read Nobelist Modiano's first novel,
> *La Place De L' Etoile.*
>
> A satiric comic novel--love the Groucho Marx allusions, including to the
> narrator's appearance
> --- with an incredibly unreliable narrator, published in 1968, it
> certainly, subversively, courageously, said Take That or Fuck Y'all to the
> French
> public, particularly the Intelligentsia, particularly Sartre (among others
> I don't
> know and can't get an easy take on because of the quicksand narrator....)
> almost as if there is no beach under all those paving stones of
> intellectuals....
>
> But a couple tropes emerge: "perverted' sex happenings get used
> metaphorically for
> control and collaboration of WW2 Leaders, reminiscent of our Plist writer
> (and the book ends with an appearance of Freud himself) including, maybe
> (if I read it right) , homosexual act(s) for
> "perverted' control/Dominance and
>
> Skewering stereotypes, the Jew, the Nazi, compliant women, the Jewish
> white slave trade in women,
> 'strong' men,  makes this another example from that rich comic tradition.
> Lists of people, some real, some fictional scattered around to take his
> jabs.
>
> "in Europe we'll be happy. We'll be able to read Kafka to our children" is
> just one joke a double agent kind of woman sez who tries
> to smuggle our narrator away....
>
>
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