A nighttime view of New Venice, 1908:
They were now entering the centre of the city, an off-white grid of frozen canals and deserted avenues, lined with impressive Neoclassical and Art Nouveau buildings. In the twilight, their incongruous stuccoed, statue-haunted silhouettes, rising darker against the darkening horizon, gave the eerie impression that they had been cast down from the sky like palaces from another planet. You could not, by any stretch of the mind, imagine an architecture less adapted to its surroundings. (59)
And behind those impressive façades, tensions are growing. The city, founded by men with Utopian dreams, is now being governed increasingly strictly by the Council of Seven; a police force called the Gentlemen of the Night is exerting more control over the citizens; the surrounding Inuit are, more and more, being ghettoized and marginalized; someone’s just written a call to revolution that has the Council worried; and there’s a mysterious black airship that’s been hovering like a cloud that just won’t leave. It’s polar winter, and the New Venetians do lots of drugs to deal with the darkness and the boredom; the Gentlemen of the Night are cracking down on clubs where drug use happens, though, and there’s even a rumor that the Council wants to set itself up as something of a drug syndicate. Meanwhile, in mid-February, a sanitation crew happens upon something strange: a glassed-in sled with no driver, pulled by a team of dogs: upon further inspection, there turns out to be a dead woman inside the sled.
Aurorarama is the story of all of the above and then some. It’s told in chapters that alternate between the stories of two men: Brentford Orsini, a government worker who, we learn early, is the author of that revolutionary pamphlet, and his friend Gabriel d’Alliers, a professor who’s really more of a dandy and flâneur. There’s lots of wordplay (much of the story is about “poletics”) and lots and lots of allusion: Valtat, clearly, has done his research. Brentford’s pamphlet includes language from the 1649 tract by the Diggers, and I kept having to go look up various real-life polar explorers and anarchists, plus bits of Norse and Inuit and Irish mythology. The Doukhobors make an appearance, as do bits of Spenser and Shakespeare and Bataille. But the book isn’t all philosophy: there’s plot and excitement too: Gabriel has more run-ins with the Gentlemen of the Night than he’d like; Brentford receives a weird dream-message from a dead woman telling him to go to the North Pole and decides he should go for it; a stage-magician turns out to have more secrets up his sleeve than anyone guessed; the lines between reality and dream and hallucination are often blurred.
This book is, according to the flap copy, the first in a series; it’s also Valtat’s first book written in English (his first language is French). Though the prose sometimes struck me as clunky (though partly this may have been because the dialogue was meant to be closer to speech from 1908 than to speech from 2011), it had its moments of loveliness, too: I liked the playfulness and the puns and the descriptions of the Arctic landscape and the occasional lyricism: at one point Valtat writes about “the pensive loneliness of all things snowed upon,” which is such an excellent phrase. (174) And though I wished there had been some better proofreading (I saw several “than”/”that” mess-ups and one “not”/”now” error), I still enjoyed the book and will probably read future installments: I’m hoping Valtat will write a prequel that will give some of the back-story that’s only hinted at in this book. I forget where I first heard about Aurorarama, though it might have been over on Nonsuch Book (here and here), but wherever I heard about it, it’s been a good companion for this way-too-hot weekend, where I didn’t much want to do anything other than sleep and read in the comfort of the one room of our apartment that has air-conditioning.
Leave a Reply