Christine Montalbetti’s books are innovative, compelling, and slyly enticing constructions that provide some of the finest readerly experiences that French fiction currently has to offer. They put on stage a wide variety of characters, situations, and events, yet each book testifies in similar ways to a profound reflection on narrative art, and each pays close attention to the critical dimension of contemporary writing. That this should be the case is logical enough, once one realizes that Montalbetti leads a double life. On the one hand, she is beginning to make her mark as one of the most intriguing young novelists in France; on the other hand, she is a professor of literature at the University of Paris, and the author of a number of important critical and theoretical works that have confirmed her as a scholar of narrative. Insofar as her fiction is concerned, its most salient trait is undoubtedly the manner in which it takes the reader into account. These are generous texts wherein the author invites her reader to inhabit textual space, and to participate in a meditation focusing both upon the book of the future and the future of the book. For my own part, I am persuaded that it is precisely in such texts that the contemporary French novel realizes its potential and seeks to renew itself. From their very first sentences, Montalbetti’s books call upon their readers relentlessly, inveigling us, flattering us, cajoling us, attempting to persuade us that we have a role to play in the process of storytelling. , for instance, begins thus:

Call him anything you want, this thirty-year-old in the checkered shirt who rocks back and forth under the roof of this porch in what can only be called a makeshift apparatus, haphazardly, with nothing like the harmonious movements of an actual rocking-chair—the slow movement of its curves in an ergonomic unity conducive to day-dreaming—making do, under the circumstances, with this senescent chair, even being a little too hard on it, a chair covered in nicks and smudges telling of past carelessness (see that chipping, those splotches, the gashes on its rungs, the scars in its back), a rustic model;(notice how thick the rungs are, the clumsy spindles fanning out), pushing it just a little bit too far, having wedged its back legs into a crack in the floor, while its front legs, like the lone two fangs, if you will, in some scarcely populated jaw, bite erratically at the ground, as though that jaw were snapping shut.

An imperative in the first-person plural is one of the most characteristic signatures in Montalbetti’s writing. It suggests a complicity between narrator and reader that she wagers upon throughout her work, proposing a narrative contract steeped in complaisance, one which guarantees that, whatever else may come to pass, author and reader are—and shall remain—allied. Yet that very complaisance serves a variety of purposes other than that of merely putting the reader at ease, I think; and it sets the stage for a series of canny maneuvers that Montalbetti practices elsewhere.

The key technique that she practices is that of “intrusive” narration, and it colors each of her novels and short stories. Narrative voice in her writing is utterly irrepressible; her narrators are unrepentant causeurs who condition our reception of the text in crucial ways. Yet to be fair, as intrusive as they may be, they constantly invite the reader to engage in dialogue with them, as if both narrator and reader were present in the story, and in position to shape it productively. Montalbetti uses a variety of effects intended to engage us, and some are less subtle than others. Flattery, for instance: she often positions her reader as the one individual who is capable of appreciating the kind of storytelling she is putting forward. In one of her short stories, she remarks, “you are the one person who may imagine flawlessly the particular trouble that the unlucky hero of this story experiences.” Another translation of this passage, this time cast in barefaced blarney, suggests itself: You are a smart and resourceful reader, indeed an ideal one; I have foreseen your readerly responses and have predicated my own narrative strategy upon them; I shall tell you everything you wish to know in this, my story.

Another technique, one closely akin to flattery, is cajolery. Montalbetti resorts to that tactic when she feels that the reader’s attention might be flagging, or when she senses that the reader might be unwilling to make the kind of interpretive leap that a particular narrative situation demands. In the middle of an especially garrulous passage describing a sunrise in Western, Montalbetti enjoins her reader, “come on, there you go, easy now, easy . . . I want you even more passive, more trusting, that’s good . . . you’re floating, you paddle around, come on, let yourself go, reading can be wonderfully regressive . . .” She strokes her reader here as one might stroke a golden retriever, fondly and benevolently. It is quite a different figure, then, from the one she habitually appeals to, a reader distinguished by intellectual acuity, by resourcefulness, and by active interpretive participation. Yet the manner in which she attributes shifting characteristics to her reader is very much a part of the game she plays in her discursive strategy, and its ludic quality is meant to be savored.

As she deploys the array of effects designed to grab and retain our attention, Montalbetti occasionally puts that very process on display, and asks us, with transparent sincerity, to consider it, as she does on one occasion in : “But what wouldn’t I do to retain your attention?” What indeed? For her solicitation of the reader seems to acknowledge no boundaries, and the pact that she attempts to seal with us includes a clear hospitality clause, “because you’re my guest, after all.” Yet it nonetheless becomes clear—and indeed Montalbetti takes pains that it should—that such effects are surface phenomena intended to function on a first level (just as polite conversation renders a more purposeful dialogue possible), and that both writer and reader, working within the complicity that those effects help to establish, recognize them as such. As complaisant as they may appear, then, they are nonetheless intended to reinforce the notion of narrative authority; and each of those techniques is calculated to make us imagine that we are hearing the author’s voice in each instance where that interpretation is even barely possible—and to make us feel, too, that that voice is addressing us directly and without mediation.

Books in English Translation by Christine Montalbetti:

, translated by Jane Kuntz ()

, translated by Jane Kuntz ()

, translated by Betsy Wing ()

, translated by Betsy Wing ()

Montalbetti takes her time in her books, and she calls insistently upon her reader to follow her through the dilatory meanders of fiction. These are “loiterly” texts (to borrow a term coined by Ross Chambers), which put forward the notion that we are fundamentally loiterly by nature, and that we take pleasure in digression. However else stories may come to be, they are certainly not made in an instant, Montalbetti argues, and they should not be told in an instant, either. In their final form, they bear the traces, more or less legible depending upon the case, of a lengthy imaginative process. That process is a wandering one, Montalbetti argues, rather than a strictly ortho-linear one. Stories are governed by teleological principles, certainly, but they proceed toward their goal in a crablike fashion, going this way, then that way, then this way again. In short, they take their time—and so should we.

Montalbetti’s fiction posits plot only to shy away from it, deferring plot while constantly whetting our appetite for it, playing on our desire to know what “happens.” In so doing, she practices a dexterous sleight of hand, playing a textual shell game, keeping us guessing about where narrative truth lies. Each of her digressions tells a story, one that may be related to the principal story at hand only by the most tenuous of links. They are anecdotal and offhanded, chatty, and apparently spontaneous on the surface; yet a closer reading confirms that they are also deeply calculated. Just in that light, then, Montalbetti’s digressions may be seen as fictions within a fiction; and as such they perform an intriguing critique upon fiction itself, destabilizing conventional narrative norms and enabling other, less conventional dynamics to come into play. The skepticism that they display with regard to tradition may prompt us to think about process issues in the text at hand, and to appreciate the manner in which those process issues adumbrate new narrative prospects. In short, Montalbetti uses digression strategically, as a critical tool, in fictions that adopt an overtly critical stance, casting a speculative gaze on their own conditions of possibility.

Montalbetti encourages her reader to consider the notion that the interest of fiction may not be principally invested in plot, but rather in elements of narrative that we usually view as being peripheral to plot. She launches one of her short stories, for example, in the following manner: “I don’t know about you, but for my part, when I look at a painting, it’s often not the main subject that I focus upon; rather, it’s the little scenes in the background, those secondary subjects, limned quickly by the brush, and positioned vulnerably apart from the central figure.” She is clearly attempting thereby to shape our reading of the text to follow, exhorting us to make the broad leap of faith that it demands—that is, to entertain the possibility that more interest may be found in the margins of things than in what we have always thought of as their vital center.

The idea of discursive freedom is pivotal here, I think. It is a principle that Montalbetti claims for herself, but it is also one that she extends to us, as if fiction were, more than anything else, an unfettered conversation between author and reader. The kind of conversation that Montalbetti puts on offer in her books is a suavely playful one; moreover, it is one that does not hesitate to call the boundaries that we normally erect between fictional worlds and real worlds severely into question. From time to time, she postulates wormholes connecting those worlds, inviting us to follow her through them, imagining for instance situations where a character speaks directly to the reader, or consulting us about which way best to tell her tale, or indeed positioning us as characters in a fiction that she has constructed. We implicate ourselves deeply in the stories we tell and the ones that we read, Montalbetti argues, and sometimes we may lose ourselves therein. “You too, to a certain degree, inhabit a parallel world,” she says, making a crucial move in the game she plays with us, suggesting that different worlds do in fact collide, causing temporary havoc and opening troubling, aporetic vistas perhaps, but also—and more importantly—enabling us to see things anew.

In such a manner, Christine Montalbetti seeks to remind us that narrative may be a construction, but that it is nonetheless part of our world, whether it be a case of the stories she chooses to tell, or that of the stories we habitually tell to ourselves. We inhabit those constructions happily, sadly, blithely, earnestly, in work, in play, turn and turn about—in fact, just as we inhabit our more obviously material edifices. If we have no quarrel with the idea that the world is played out in fiction, why should we balk at the notion that fiction may be played out in the world? In such a light, the future of fiction will inevitably be decided both in fiction and in the world, in a debate that shuttles purposefully back and forth between illusion and reality, causing the boundaries between those sites to seem increasingly dubious. For the most urgent message of Christine Montalbetti’s writing contends that fiction, just like the world of phenomena, is staggeringly unconfined.

Warren Motte is College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado and a Chevalier in the Order of Academic Palms. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. His recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990Ěý(2003),Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (2008), and Mirror Gazing (2014).

Gérard Gavarry’s Hoppla! 1 2 3, a book I actually have read, has similar qualities. The title comes from the Bertolt Brecht line, “And as the first head rolls I’ll say: hoppla!” These morbid connotations, coupled with the three numbers, present a taste of what is to come. The basic story is that a youth from the housing projects of a Parisian suburb rapes and kills his mother’s boss, the manager of a supermarket. The novel aspect of the book is that the story is told three different times in three sections of eleven chapters each.

At first this may sound like a more drawn out and more blood-thirsty version of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. The back of the book certainly backs this up as it describes how each section is “in a different tone or mode and with different sets of images and vocabularies—borrowed from tropical botany, the shipping industry, and ancient Greece.” But this is actually misleading. The whole book sticks fairly close to the same style throughout, and each retelling is more a chance to flesh out the basic plot than to cast it in an entirely new light.

To be sure, there are slight variations in each third of the novel: the first has occasional mentions of palm trees and coconuts; the second starts with a scene of two truckers on their way to the supermarket; and the third has certain qualities of solemnity and grandiosity reminiscent of the ancient world. But the most intriguing difference comes in the slang of Ti-Jus, the violent youth, and his friends. Anyone with an eye on France in the past few years knows that the suburbs around Paris are a place of constant tension as the young (infamously dubbed la racaille, or scum, by Sarkozy) start riots or have angry confrontations with the police. Gavarry captures the element of otherness that separates this generation from older ones by honing in on language. When Ti-Jus and his gang are on a train, they use words like Nucifera, spadices, coir, and drupe:

Because they use words like these—much more than because they’re brawny, restless, and voluble—the four adolescents in the Paris-Corbeil look like alien creatures: as foreign as winged angels, as subtropical sprites, or as young and dangerous pagan gods whose slightest prank would surely have unleashed a catastrophe upon mere mortals . . . But deprived as they are of the crutch of language, reduced to apprehending nothing but physical signals and assigning them meaning based solely on intuition, the passengers of the Paris-Corbeil have been demoted to an animal state, excluded from Homo loquens.

In the second section the slang changes to lining the windlass, stowing, and slackening the hawser while in the third we get Furreez, Pholus, and kyroballs! These words are nothing from my limited knowledge of slang in English or French, so a more fitting comparison for Hoppla! 1 2 3 than Exercises in Style seems to be A Clockwork Orange, another novel featuring four unruly youth and their own made up language.

But the key difference is that A Clockwork Orange is narrated wholly by someone already initiated into the patois such that we as readers eventually pick up on his manner of speaking and are able to follow along and empathize with Alex. Yet here the slang appears so infrequently that we are never allowed into the world of Ti-Jus, and thus never get to know him. In fact the characterization of everyone in the book is so spare that we can’t ever feel any attachment to them. This begs the question, who is the subject of the book?

Rather what, for the answer is language, and not that of Ti-Jus, but rather that of Gavarry. The reason I am so resistant to the description on the back of the book is that yes, the slang vocabulary changes from time to time, but it is overshadowed by the third person narrator, who keeps the same voice throughout. Luckily this voice is highly unique, but not without its problems, as the following passage demonstrates:

In the comfort of their passenger compartments, however, people were furious. The radio confirmed it—“You’re furious out there on the southbound!” In the Opel, in particular, Madame Fenerolo, in a fit of rage, went so far as to hit the off button on her car radio . . . and this made all the difference.

Switching off a car radio was a harmless gesture. A show of temper in such circumstances was perfectly understandable. Thus, the THIS in this made all the difference pertains not to the gesture itself, nor even to the acerbic abruptness of its execution, but to the fact that the manager had so fully and unreservedly embodied the meanness and viciousness of her gesture. The act itself has been brief. It lasted only as long as a click or a clack—“You’re furious out there on the click . . .” Nonetheless, just as when hatred or deceit have appeared, even once, on the most beloved of faces, and that same face then becomes forever hostile and deceptive in our eyes, convincing us that it had always been thus, the THIS which the manager’s act had manifested defined in advance the actions, positions, and words to follow, and indeed her entire person, and by retroactively modifying the images that she had previously generated at the SUMABA, THIS devalued those marvels into vulgar fantasies—not without their own attractions, certainly, but not even remotely loveable. Henceforward, both inside and outside the Opel, the climate degenerated—with each passing moment, the silence grew more oppressive, and then, all of a sudden, hail . . . THIS was in the air, epidemic, and THIS threatened to contaminate all persons and all matter, to infest every land, to gangrene burns and deepen wounds until all human bodies were stricken with its inhumanity. Wherever one went, whatever one did, soon dreaming would amount to nothing. However long and high the battlement, no matter how defrosted the surrounding woodland, our lookouts would be reduced to futile expectation, to pointless searching. Such that no mirage, no view anywhere in ĂŽle-de-France could console those watchers, our dreamers, nor could reason still have a hope of checking the ruthless momentum of the avenging hordes.

Near the end, Gavarry attaches an almost absurd level of bombastic and cataclysmic consequences to the smallest of gestures, yet he appears to do so completely without irony or humor. It is a style of writing that used sparingly could be highly effective, but when spread out over 160 pages becomes tedious. Gavarry has numerous passages about space and dimension, gesture and body. It is this that reminds me most of (how I imagine that book) by Paul Virilio, and the work of French post-modernists in general. From the most commonplace occurrences they are able to draw great significance that often seems to be baseless. Fiction should show how transcendent daily life can be, but if every second of it were like Hoppla! 1 2 3, I think the sheer awesomeness would drive me mad. An opera is good for four hours, but would become exhausting if it were any longer. That is why with much of this book, I felt like I only had a superficial understanding of what was going on due to the richness and complexity of the writing, yet I have no desire to ever read it again.

As frequently occurs, a few days ago I was browsing through a bookstore when something caught my eye. The book was Negative Horizon by Paul Virilio, which “sets out [his] theory of dromoscopy: a means of apprehending speed and its pivotal—and potentially destructive—role in contemporary global society.” Chapter titles include “The Aesthetics of Disappearance,” “The Metapsychosis of the Passenger,” and “From the Site of the Election to the Site of the Ejection.” I did not purchase the book (the one time I’ve read anything Continuum published it took me over an hour to get through the first ten pages, though kudos to them for putting out a translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz), but something about it struck me as simultaneously so French and so absurdly pretentious that Paul Virilio has stayed with me.

Gérard Gavarry’s Hoppla! 1 2 3, a book I actually have read, has similar qualities. The title comes from the Bertolt Brecht line, “And as the first head rolls I’ll say: hoppla!” These morbid connotations, coupled with the three numbers, present a taste of what is to come. The basic story is that a youth from the housing projects of a Parisian suburb rapes and kills his mother’s boss, the manager of a supermarket. The novel aspect of the book is that the story is told three different times in three sections of eleven chapters each.

At first this may sound like a more drawn out and more blood-thirsty version of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. The back of the book certainly backs this up as it describes how each section is “in a different tone or mode and with different sets of images and vocabularies—borrowed from tropical botany, the shipping industry, and ancient Greece.” But this is actually misleading. The whole book sticks fairly close to the same style throughout, and each retelling is more a chance to flesh out the basic plot than to cast it in an entirely new light.

Click here for the full review.

Most of the 43 chapters include a thorough recounting of the interior of Rolin’s current lodging. He takes the reader on a remarkably unusual tour of rather ordinary hotel rooms around the world, describing mundane details of accommodations ranging from a Double Tree in Tallahassee, Florida to a Novotel in Cotonou, West Africa. He approximates the dimensions of each room and describes furniture, lighting fixtures, fabric patterns and wallpaper motifs. Recounting shapes of pillows (like “gigantic ravioli”) and wall colors (“denture pink” or “oxblood red”), he continues his seemingly absurd yet captivating narrative right down to the exact positioning and design of the luggage rack.

Although the repetition may tempt readers to skim some details, each of Rolin’s settings is curious enough to hold interest. And his creative use of mirrors and windows proves particularly revealing, providing insight about the state of his own character and offering up views of landscapes that lie beyond the tiresome litany of measurements and upholstery patterns. He often segues from reciting banal room details to carrying on with his latest scheme-in-progress, as in Lausanne, where he describes the phone in Room 1212 at the Hotel d’Angleterre, as it “happens to be ringing to let me know that my clients are waiting for me in the lobby.”

So just what exactly is this international man of mystery up to? Brawls, murder, sex, street riots, ransoms, smuggled caviar and the “explosive-fake-nougat trade” all play a role. There are embassy meetings, secret missions, ridiculous shenanigans and, to be fair, noble efforts like “preserving world peace (temporarily).” Rolin wheels and deals with frequency among a worldwide network of cohorts and exotic women. And, of course, one woman and one hotel room stand apart from the rest. Rolin cannot describe (and remembers very little) about Room 211 at the Hotel Crystal in Nancy, France— except for a box of macaroons—possibly a present from his one true love, Mélanie Melbourne?

This is only one of many unanswered questions. We learn at the outset of the novel that Rolin is actually missing. His stories, discovered in a briefcase that turns up in Paris, made their way into the hands of an “editor” who has pieced together Rolin’s peculiar travel journal. Notes about his hotel rooms and ensuing misadventures are scribbled on travel ephemera of every kind — hotel stationary, transit maps, airline menus, an assortment of postcards, pages torn from literary works and from a Lonely Planet guidebook (with a long footnote hypothesizing why this might be.)

We also learn that Georges Perec has inspired Rolin. While describing Room 102 of Augerge Saint-Pierre in Mont-Saint Michel, Rolin sits (in a bamboo chair) and says he will not leave until he finishes reading a book by Perec:

“So, it is my intention to write the book that Perec refers to in Species of Spaces: ‘…to make an inventory, as exhaustive and as accurate as possible, of “All the Places Where I Have Slept.”’ Yet, as far as I know, Perec never finished the work as planned. So, I’m going to do it for him: not out of arrogance, but rather out of a kind of respect bordering (perhaps) on devotion. When it comes to the authors I love, I can’t bear the idea that they left a project incomplete.”

Yet that is exactly what Rolin does in Hotel Crystal. His experimental fiction is engaging and humorous, but too fragmented and unresolved to be fulfilling. Flipping back and forth between chapters, I found myself trying to piece together his puzzling movements, wanting to plot his multi-continent hotel jaunts on a map, and surprisingly, wishing I could participate in his international escapades. I imagined Rolin’s book as an adult version of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series—complete with fantasies, bad guys, rooms of mirrors and games of chance—in which I could play a part, and see at least one story through to the end.

Rolin’s assemblage of far-flung travel tales is imaginative and refreshing in its approach, but I remain unsatisfied. And throughout the book, he dares to tease about additional tales he has to share! “But that’s another story.” Somehow enticing in its lack of resolution, Hotel Crystal is, however, a book I will read again, foolishly (perhaps) still hoping to solve something in the end.

By Olivier Rolin
Translated by Jane Kuntz
Dalkey Archive Press
190 pgs, $12.95