The Editor’s Note describes this book as “an uneasy synthesis between fiction and journal, confession and travel guide”: it’s the story of Avignon, a walled city seen from outside and in, Avignon as object, as something to be explored, but also Avignon as a place to be skirted around, passed through, a place connecting points south to points north. Early on, we learn that our protagonist, over a period of eight years starting when he was eighteen, traveled to/around/through Avignon—a city over 500 miles from his hometown, Brussels—about twenty times. He stops there en route to Greece; he takes a solitary week-long hiking trip in the surrounding countryside; he spends five weeks, one summer, in a village where he knows no one; he lives, for a time, in that village, away from his family. The Author’s Note, at the end of the book, talks about the idea of a book “in which the characters would be objects: a whole town just the same as the most trifling urban object,” and, indeed, the people in the book are always at a distance, from us and from the narrator: he fantasizes about girls/women, has a lover from his hometown, marries her—but we learn next to nothing about these people. Instead, we learn about what Rilke said about Avignon, what John Evelyn said about it; we learn about the Avignon Papacy. There are many lists: the names of the gates of the town, the names of bridges (Pont Saint-Bénezet, Pont-du-Gard, Pont Saint-Pierre) the names of hotels, the names of streets (Boulevard de l’Oulle, Boulevard Saint-Dominique, Boulevard d’Estienne d’Orves), the names of the books in the protagonist’s library that talk about the city.
There’s a mix, too, of the concrete and the philosophical: the idea of the “circuitous, interminable approach” (13), the idea that “approaching may be our most profound vocation” (15), ideas about memory and its unreliability, about reality and what it consists of. There is precision and vagueness: the memory, say, of a teenage family trip through France and Spain, drinking rosé, watching dad act tipsy, trying to strike up a friendship with a bellboy, the atmosphere of all the different towns, like “Lloret with at most three hotels, including one—theirs—where the roof leaked; where in the mornings before ten o’clock you saw no one under the palms on the promenade except children with their black-and-white uniformed nannies; where in the tent close to the high-tide mark deadly serious children of ten congregated to dance” (8). And then trips back and forth between Avignon and Brussels where our protagonist doesn’t remember the details, so instead of hearing about the trip we hear about logistics: the times of the buses, the towns where the trains stopped, the times of the trains.
The book at one point says that the protagonist’s memories and travels—and the telling thereof—are just “a collection of tangents and intersections” (58); elsewhere, earlier, the project of the book is described like this:
Though actually, the main thing is to get him to accept that his experience of Avignon as an essentially arbitrary town (which could thus be replaced either by Prague, a town he’s never set foot in, or indeed by his hometown) and perhaps even as an arbitrary object (just not so central an object, so exclusively personal, that any statement about it would become problematic)—however fragmentary and unsystematic this experience, however inadequate for a historian, a geographer, an economist, a sociologist, an archaeologist, a compiler of travel guides, or even a tourist—precisely because of its randomness, its physical, synthetic innocence, offers the chance of an exploration, of course lacking the thoroughness of a scientific research project, but being therefore a report that would have room for everything that scientists must neglect for the sake of objectivity: an ordinary human statement that might satisfy in us precisely what all scientific literature fails to satisfy. (4-5)
For me, the book works best as an “ordinary human statement” when it tries (and I think, manages) to capture the fullness of life in a city or even just a village, when there are multi-page lists, for example, about the townspeople in the village where the narrator stays, like this (though this is only the start of it): “Madame Escoffier’s aloofly smiling sister and her short, thin, pale husband, a retired engineer—one could never tell whether or when he was smiling; the landlord of the bar-tabac, a former truck-driver with the sinister face of a boxer; his dark-eyed, gray-haired wife, hailing from the biggest farm in the area, the very picture of solid, sensible, passionate womanhood; the gruff, paunchy, maire who always spent the whole day playing cards in the bar-tabac opposite his house;” (45-46).
Leave a Reply