halfflat reviewed Trois Pas Vers Le Sud by François-Michel DURAZZO
Getting Lost in the Funhouse of Free Will; Or, what if Gaddis Wrote “The Exterminating Angel”
5 stars
The truth of the matter is that the back cover tells you everything you need to know: a dizzying novel about doubles, fakes, life & death. Half crime novel, half espionage story, and half (in the imaginary plane perhaps) philosophical rumination, I'll be honest in saying there are still swathes of the story I don't fully understand. Perhaps a part of that is reading in French rather than English, but I do think that another part of it is Palol's deft capacity to slice away at plot until what's left is a kind of jewel, a refractive narrative that bends you as you pass through it. I have no idea whether all the information is truly there in this volume or whether reading other volumes of the Troiacord will "unlock" it for me, but I have to stress that I'm entirely satisfied in the muddle that it left me in. …
The truth of the matter is that the back cover tells you everything you need to know: a dizzying novel about doubles, fakes, life & death. Half crime novel, half espionage story, and half (in the imaginary plane perhaps) philosophical rumination, I'll be honest in saying there are still swathes of the story I don't fully understand. Perhaps a part of that is reading in French rather than English, but I do think that another part of it is Palol's deft capacity to slice away at plot until what's left is a kind of jewel, a refractive narrative that bends you as you pass through it. I have no idea whether all the information is truly there in this volume or whether reading other volumes of the Troiacord will "unlock" it for me, but I have to stress that I'm entirely satisfied in the muddle that it left me in.
My one issue, and this is a recurring element of Palol's work as I've been exposed to it, is that the women in his novels have a tendency, when they aren't unapproachably beautiful and mysterious, to pivot from what you could call "conceptual personae" to come-hither sexpots in a way that feels neither funny (though he's not above comic sex scene) nor really erotic. What's left is a sort of halfway place where it feels most like I can feel Palol looking over my shoulder, or perhaps I'm over his as he types, I'm not sure. The difficult thing is that desire and its orchestration, broken across categories (for capital, for artifacts, for knowledge and forgetfulness, for free will itself) is one of the themes being treated to permutations here. I can see an argument that the sex is one demonstration of game of multi-dimensional chess that Palol wants you to imagine is happening, one floor shaped by the architecture of desire, but this is all starting to sound suspiciously like homework. The reality is that I wish that I related more to the way the women act in this volume, rather than just seeing them reflected along a gem's flat walls. Perhaps that's also a case of reading in a second language getting in the way, maybe I'd have more fun with it if I didn't have to read lines twice, look up a word here and there.
As a final note, I'll say that critics have a tendency to stress Palol's training as an architect when they review his work, and even if it's a touch cliché, you can understand why they do so: the beauty here is rarely in single lines, and more in the broad sweep of a scene, the way you become the wind whistling through an edifice of enormous complexity. A refractive, architectural, sculptural novel.
In any event, I really enjoyed my time with Trois Pas Vers Le Sud. I'm greatly looking forward to getting lost in Autre Chose, and the rest of the volumes of El Trioacord in French.