StemCell Therapy

Photo: Supplied

Fiction Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria Brian Castro Giramondo, $26.95

Throughout a distinguished career that began in 1983 with Birds of Passage, Brian Castro has consistently played intricate games with language and with literary and cultural allusions. This playfulness often extends to echoes of the lives and works of writers as diverse as Kafka (notably in After China) and, in Drift, the little-known English experimental novelist B. S. Johnson, who died in 1973.

Many diverse elements enter into the fabric of Castro's always intriguing though sometimes opaque works. Looking back over his career, it seems that finding the appropriate form for his often unusual preoccupations hasn't always been successful. There often seems to be a conflict between the demands of narrative and what really engages Castro's intellect and imagination.

His latest work has, I think, found a solution to that conundrum. Described as "a novel in 34 cantos", Blindness and Rage recounts the adventures, mostly in Paris, of the Adelaide-based writer-cum-town-planner Lucien Gracq. Cast mostly in a kind of free verse made up of lines of different lengths with the frequent use of rhymes, half-rhymes, internal rhymes and alliteration this form gives Castro greater scope for doing what he seems to like doing best, and is often very good at doing.

Blindness and Rage hops from arcane topic to arcane topic, from Adelaide to Paris to China and Hong Kong with a disarming nonchalance unconstrained by the need to tell a coherent tale. Not all of it is completely comprehensible, at least on a first (or second) reading, but most of it is lively, striking and even exhilarating.

The narrative, such as it is, is straightforward enough. Gracq has been diagnosed with a terminal liver condition. He decides to spend his last days numbering 53 he'd been assured, he insists several times in Paris.

He moves into a small flat near the Jardin des Plantes, and comes into contact with a shadowy group of savants, Le club des fugitifs, which offers writers who are about to die the chance to ascribe their last work to another person. Gracq is accepted into the club, intending to bestow on it his epic poem based on cultural and anthropological theories of play. He also has a brief flirtation with Catherine Bourgeois, a concert pianist, whose flat is on the same landing as his.

Castro constructs a bewildering array of allusions, quotations, literary jokes and puns around this narrative kernel. They are far too many to detail in a short review. Here are a few. At one stage Gracq considers travelling to Amsterdam to enlist the services of "the infamous Dr Nietzsche" and his euthanasia-computer. There are references to Pushkin and Kafka again, to modern French writers such as Georges Bataille and to the 18th-century pornographer Restif de la Bretonne, de Sade's antagonist. One could go on and on.

The topography of Paris also provides important elements to this "phantasmagoria", none more so than the area around the Jardin des Plantes. Gracq rents a flat at 11 Rue Linne. As it turns out the "Fugitives" hold their raucous meetings next door at No.13. The man who acts as Gracq's sponsor is called Georges Crepe their first meeting took place in a creperie near the place where 16 Carmelite nuns were guillotined in 1794.

Such random bits and pieces come together, as often with Castro, in the literary figure standing behind Gracq's adventures. Georges Perec (his surname an anagram, of course, of Crepe) spent the last years of his life at 13 Rue Linne. He was a member of OuLiPo, an eccentric group of writers, almost all of whom flit across the pages of Blindness and Rage.

Finally, Gracq was told he had 53 days left to live when he moved to Paris, and Perec's last, unfinished, work was a novel entitled 53 Days, conceived during the 53 days he spent in Australia a few months before his death. Fifty-three was also the number of days Stendhal supposed to have needed to write The Charterhouse of Parma, a factoid that might have inspired both Castro and Perec.

After all this, read Blindness and Rage and prepare to be enthralled and sometimes exasperated.

See the article here:
Blindness and rage review: Brian Castro plays his customary literary ... - The Sydney Morning Herald

This entry was posted on June 2, 2017 at 4:45 am and is filed under Blindness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |