{"id":6221,"date":"2014-06-19T19:57:50","date_gmt":"2014-06-19T23:57:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=6221"},"modified":"2014-06-19T19:57:50","modified_gmt":"2014-06-19T23:57:50","slug":"villa-bunker-by-sbastien-brebeltranslated-by-andrew-wilsondalkey-archive-press-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/villa-bunker-by-sbastien-brebeltranslated-by-andrew-wilsondalkey-archive-press-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Villa Bunker by S\u00e9bastien BrebelTranslated by Andrew WilsonDalkey Archive Press, 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

Villa Bunker<\/em>, a novella made of 133 numbered sections (ranging in length from a sentence to several pages each) is weird and interesting and pretty great to have read right after Martha Ronk’s Transfer of Qualities<\/em>—I felt there were moments when these two books complemented one another interestingly. Ronk’s book was concerned, in large part, with objects, with how we arrange them, with how they affect us. Brebel’s book features a narrator whose parents have just moved into a vast isolated villa. They think they’ll make it into their dream home, but that doesn’t seem to happen. The narrator’s mother writes him letter after unhinged letter: is the villa making his parents crazy? Or is the disordered space of the villa a result of his parents’ disordered minds? At one point the narrator’s mother thinks that her husband’s “exhaustion was being transmitted to the furniture, which was slumped in the dark recesses of the room” (59). <\/p>\n

“Perched on a cliff above the sea, looming and hostile, secretly opposed to anyone staying is what she’d written about the villa”: this is how the book opens, attributing energy and will to the villa (1). The villa is isolated; the villa has bars on the first floor windows to keep intruders out, but it feels like they’re also there to keep people in. (The narrator is writing (or failing to write) his dissertation on Foucault, the “philosopher of prisons, hospitals, and barracks,” which feels significant. (81)) The villa has a locked and windowless master bedroom, and a vast ballroom in which the narrator’s parents initially decide to camp out, just while they make their plans to renovate the rest of the place, but the narrator’s mother worries they’ll be there forever: she feels “hemmed in on all sides, surrounded by the multitude of objects summing up their life together” (20). The narrator’s mother is oppressed by the old clothes and furniture that previous inhabitants have left in the villa, too: “She would see a man’s jacket on a chair, and this abandoned article of clothing would haunt her thoughts, this individual thing among so many others would dispossess her of herself; the old jacket would come to life in the silence of a bedroom (someone had left it there), and all around the chair things would stir, one by one, things roused from their sleep, awakened by her mere presence, she’d thought, and now these things wanted her to notice and recognize them” (35). <\/p>\n

The villa is a bewildering space: “It was as though the villa were growing, expanding gradually, constantly. The rooms were multiplying, forming something like a long snakelike dwelling space, whose coils extended over several floors” (41). The narrator’s parents try to master it: his father obsessively photographs it; his mother obsessively writes about it, and also tries an experiment in indoor gardening, which she soon abandons after the plants begin to feel like an “invasion” whose “fragrance was delivering a coded message, the toxicity of which was growing by the day, or perhaps hour” (65). And then there’s the strange child the narrator’s mother finds, or thinks she finds, or maybe it’s her husband, or maybe she’s imagined it, or maybe all of this is a product of the narrator’s imagination—he keeps mentioning what his mother wrote in her letters, but he also says he’s been tossing them in the wastebasket unread. The sense of what’s “real” in this book shifts like the villa, like the narrative, and it makes for a compelling read. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Villa Bunker, a novella made of 133 numbered sections (ranging in length from a sentence to several pages each) is weird and interesting and pretty great to have read right after Martha Ronk’s Transfer of Qualities—I felt there were moments when these two books complemented one another interestingly. Ronk’s book was concerned, in large part, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}