Deux hommes et une femme et leurs livres (Best of 2014: Books, Part 2)

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn stands as the best book I read this year, because it was every bit the thrill ride it was cracked up to be (previous post), but I had the good fortune of running across a lot of other interesting books this year. By some coincidence, the best of them came in pairs by French authors: Michel Houellebecq, Francoise Sagan and Milan Kundera.


Michel Houellebecq:

Early in the year, I discovered Michel Houellebecq, whose books in the UK editions have covers with a shameless sex-sells aesthetic. Nonetheless, they’re eye-catching, and a good book cover is worth nearly as much as a good book:

 

Atomised (The Elementary Particles in US editions) follows the lives of two brothers. Michel is a molecular biologist with almost no interest in love, while his brother Bruno is a loser obsessed with sex. They are both, as the title expresses, isolated from their fellow human beings by the conditions of modern life, among them market forces dominating everything from economics to sex. Largely set in today’s world, the story reaches beyond into science fiction. Michel discovers a method for cloning humans, thereby separating reproduction from love and sex.

It’s a book of ideas with a lot of explicit sex, which is all well and good, but what hooked me was the author’s blatant misanthropy and pessimism. Let’s face it, more often than not the world is a crock of shit, and Houellebecq isn’t afraid to say so. I’m not as much of a pessimist as I once was, but I can’t deny that in Atomised I encountered passages echoing many of my own dark thoughts. The author’s voice was a familiar one, and as one that doesn’t sugarcoat, I found it a great relief.

Platform is also about a man named Michel, and he too is sex-obsessed. An unrepentant sex tourist, he and his girlfriend embark on a sex tourism business venture, but it doesn’t end well. While Houellebecq’s portrayal of the lonely men who ache for sex with young women is at times compassionate and eloquent, the novel often comes off as propaganda in favor of sex tourism without an honest look at its downsides, such as how awful the lives of many prostitutes must be. Platform, while interesting, was less inspiring than Atomised. Often, I put it down feeling dirty.

 

 

Francoise Sagan:

 

The works of Francoise Sagan are also sordid--but less hard-core. Bonjour Tristesse is about Raymond and his daughter Cecile who spend their summers drinking, partying, lazing about and sleeping around on the French Riviera. Their dissolute lifestyle is scandalous for the times and alienates them from respectable society. When her father makes a bid to marry a proper woman, Cecile will have none of it and hatches a plot that ends in tragedy.

Bonjour Tristesse is fluff, and A Certain Smile--about a young girl’s love affair with an older, married man--is fluffier still. But I enjoyed these books. Their literary heft and insight into the human spirit is debatable, but the voices of the young protagonists are charmingly affectless and carry you along for short, sweet rides. Perhaps it’s just me, but I believe the languorous and free-spirited nature of Sagan’s characters are visible in the eyes of the author herself:

 

 

 

Milan Kundera:

While Milan Kundera’s Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being were both written in Czech, the author is usually described as French-Czech, so he makes it into this post on a technicality. Immortality is a book that reaches in many directions, and while I’ve already posted on it twice, I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface. Check out my earlier posts (4/10/2014, 4/20/2014) or just check out this cover illustration for Immortality because it’s excellent:

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with an original take on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence and goes on to relate the changing fortunes of a doctor named Tomas, his wife Tereza, and his lover Sabina against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia. As the years pass, they make decisions that burden or lighten their emotional state, and along the way they have many amorous and erotic encounters.

While Lacanian psychoanalytic theory can be applied to anything, I was surprised to find Kundera intentionally applying it as the framework underpinning his characters, right down to chapters headed “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words.” Since words like “music” or “fidelity” mean different things to each person, we often fail to understand each other. One of Jacques Lacan’s famous pronouncements is “Communication is a successful misunderstanding.” And so it goes for Tomas, Tereza and Sabina. They inevitably fail to grasp each other, but sometimes they get along well nonetheless.

Not only does Lacan’s theory of signification factor heavily in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but there were also clear references to the Mirror Stage, objet petit a, foreclosure, and other Lacanian concepts without ever mentioning Lacan or using his curious terminology. No doubt others have noticed this in the 30 years since the book was published, but I hope to go into it more in a later post.

None of that was part of the reading I had scheduled for myself this year (I did finish the Dune arc laid out by Frank Herbert and take down a handful of Michael Moorcock’s Elric books as planned), but it was unscheduled reading in French literature that turned up some of the best reading in 2014.

 

 

Would You Bed Your Celebrity Crush? (More on Milan Kundera's Immortality)

When I posted "Milan Kundera's Aside on Journalism in Immortality," I didn't expect to blog any more about the book, but I was wrong. I keep thinking about a question toward the end that Professor Avenarius poses to the author:

“Imagine that you are given the choice of two possibilities: to spend a night of love with a world-famous beauty, let’s say Brigitte Bardot or Greta Garbo, but on condition that nobody must know about it. Or to stroll down the main avenue of the city with your arm wrapped intimately around her shoulder, but on condition that you must never sleep with her.”

Later, Avenarius talks about how most people would answer:

“Everyone, including the worst no-hopers, would maintain that they would rather sleep with her. Because all of them would want to appear to themselves, to their wives . . . as hedonists. This, however, is a self delusion . . . No matter what they say, if they had a real choice to make, all of them, I repeat, all of them would prefer to stroll with her down the avenue. Because all of them are eager for admiration and not for pleasure.”

As playful as the question may be, it does strike close to the serious theme of Immortality, which the title of the book states. Much of the book consists in reflections on the care we take for our image: how we look to others and how our image lives on without us. According to Kundera’s character Avenarius, being seen with your celebrity crush is more important than actually bedding him or her. Kundera’s point is well made, and I find it intriguing that however one answers the question, the answer conceals a desire for admiration.

Answering with a preference to sleep with the great beauty is the result of a wish to look like a hedonist, the sexual conqueror, the lucky dog. Answering with a preference to be seen with the great beauty, rather than an admission of the truth, is the expression of a desire to come off as a nice person more interested in purely emotional interaction than sex.

In both cases, it's the appearance that counts. But is all appearance rather than reality? Avenarius presents a bleak outlook:

 

“Reality no longer means anything to anyone.”

I would add that perhaps we do not even know our own true desires. Perhaps, as psychoanalysis claims, part of us hides other parts of us from other parts, so that all this concern for our image, for appearance, isn’t hiding any solid core of true desire or motive. Perhaps tending the image, projecting a fantasy of ourselves, sometimes even to ourselves--as we do through endless posts on social media about what a positive, healthy, intellectual, witty, or weird person we are--is as substantial as we get.

For my part, I can’t decide whether I would prefer a meaningful encounter in seclusion or a night on the town that ends when the great beauty withdraws into a taxi, leaving me on the sidewalk feeling like a million bucks and needing a stiff drink. Either way, it would just be what I want you to think of me.

 

Milan Kundera’s Aside on Journalism in Immortality

I recently finished reading French-Czech writer Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality. It proved fascinating for its unconventional narrative, insight into the human condition, philosophical reflections, and social critique. While it’s hardly a good indication of the overall book, a passage describing the recent history of journalism leapt out at me.

To summarize the narrator, journalism early in the 20th Century, back when Hemingway was on the beat, was about drawing near to the facts, asking questions with pen in hand, noting down what you were told, and then faithfully conveying it through print or radio, and later television. Ask a question, receive an answer, pass it on. This first stage of modern journalism strikes me as somewhat passive.

Later, journalists learned there was power in asking questions. Kundera raises Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigation into the Watergate scandal and the way it eventually led to a president resigning from office. Despite the Nixon administration’s attempts at a cover-up, the two dug until they uncovered the defining political misdeeds of modern times. Journalists learned to ask the tough questions, and the answers could have a powerful effect.

The legacy of this second stage of journalism is visible today in every television or radio interview covering topics even remotely debatable. Have you ever watched Stephen Sackur on the BBC program HARDtalk? This is my least favorite style of interview, but there’s a lot of it going around. Sackur seems to have gotten his job for the alarming way he can begin every sentence with “but.” “But your opponents would say . . . ” “But doesn’t that strike you as a little . . . ” “But surely you don’t believe that . . . ” “But I have a quote from you here that says . . . ” I long for just a moment when a statement can simply stand.

When it is balanced, aggressive journalism has its merits, but when Immortality was first published in 1988, this second stage of modern journalism was just getting warmed up and would soon slough its objective skin. The following decades have seen journalism and activism mixed thoroughly through the rise of radio talk show hosts, 24-hour cable news, and the Internet’s bewildering array of blogs, articles, blurbs and worthless tidbits. This type of journalism is so active it only asks questions so it can then provide the answers itself.

The worst of this is represented by Fox News Channel, but other networks are guilty as well. The only facts they are interested in are those that support their interests, and when the facts aren’t on their side, they’re willing to peddle fantasy. Kundera’s second stage of journalism has reached the point of propaganda.

Which brings me to what I believe is a third stage--or mode--of journalism. I believe the antagonistic mode of the journalist’s interview has evolved into a curious performance in which the two sides pretend to engage in a duel in Q&A form but all the questions and answers are known by both sides from the start. The next time Wolf Blitzer interviews someone on Capitol Hill or out on the campaign trail, he and his guest should come to me so I can write up their exchange ahead of time and spare them the trouble of coming up with something to say.

And that’s what makes the farce complete. We the audience collude in this cover-up of truth. We know the questions and we know the answers, so nothing is coming to light and nothing results. It’s like watching an episode of an old sitcom for the umpteenth time. It isn’t funny anymore, but at least we know what comes next.

Immortality isn’t really about journalism--it’s about life and love, with significant doses of big ideas--so I feel bad about focusing on a brief aside for a blog about something as bleak as the state of mass media today, but there you have it. Maybe I’ll have more uplifting things to say after reading Kundera’s better known novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.