Jean Lahougue

[giantsilkmoth]

Jean Lahougue's Vacated Landscape is an awesome little novella. It's one of them metaphysical detective stories a certain vein of French nouveau roman guys love and one of the better ones I've read. The thing that I really like about it so far is that it's about reading and stories in a really strikingly complex way. There are a lot of these kinds of books about stories, going back to Beckett's Molloy (which I'm shocked the afterword doesn't mention as an influence, there's even a Detective Morand here to echo Beckett's Detective Moran). Vacated Landscape, though, the protagonist is an editor, not a writer, and that's important. The book feels less concerned with what it means to tell a story, to engage with fiction, to realize that there's never answers, and more interested in how we arrange a vast influx of information into a narrative for ourselves. The book is absolutely bursting with metaphors for itself and for narrative in a way that, as the afterword points out, is kind of fractal. The sentences are long and winding and filled with hemming and hawing. Everywhere the narrator goes, he is forced to think about how much of a narrative he should follow, how you're supposed to proceed step by step, etc etc. He visits a museum of utopias where it feels as if each category of utopia is a model of a kind of novel, but then he meets a woman and his embarrassing desire for her feels like it is presenting a contradictory model of narrative. After all, it's not that there's no narrative, it's that there's ten million billion of them and it's your job to figure out what you're supposed to do with that. It's all about desire, movement, and loops, you see.