Third Book of Roubaud's Great Chronicle

Over at The Complete Review, Michael Orthofer has favorably reviewed "Mathematics," the third installment of Jacques Roubaud's great chronicle that began with "The Great Fire of London" and continued with "The Loop." To his credit, Orthofer is astute enough to recognize the book as something other than a novel. He writes that "Mathematics" is "presented decidedly (or at least parenthetically, in the US edition) as: 'a novel', yet the first-person narrative is clearly autobiographical: it seems very much like a memoir of Roubaud's time at university, and then his military service. While creatively presented, there is little that is obviously fictional about it." In other words, it is a chronicle. Odd how many reviewers continue to do without a term (or without coining an alternative) which they so obviously need, choosing each time to describe the genre instead, usually at some length.

'Decidedly Not a Novel,' Writes Warren Motte

At World Literature Today, Warren Motte reviews Emmanuel Carrère's chronicle "Limonov" and accidentally offers up another usable definition of what a chronicle is: "decidedly not a novel (though it makes many gestures in the direction of the novel.)"

Motte's review is lukewarm, which may have something to with the fact that "Limonov" is indeed not a novel. He laments: "The fact that ["Limonov"] should win the Renaudot testifies to how embattled the very idea of the novel is on the contemporary cultural horizon, where in recent years that form has been influenced in key ways by genres once imagined to be quite distinct from it: biography, autobiography, testimony, travel writing, historiography, journalism, and so forth."

Actually, all those genres that Motte mentions, when married to novelistic strategies, tend to yield chronicles. The chronicle genre is undoubtedly on the rise, but this rise is taking place incognito, under the smuggling mantle of the novel, confusing (and often dismaying) reviewers and critics.

Motte is yet another critic sorely in need of discovering the term "chronicle" and of labeling a work as such when he finds it to be such, no matter what the publishers claim.

Jacques Roubaud's Masterpiece of Literary Nonfiction

Among the great chronicles that, for English-speaking readers, have been mislabeled as novels is Jacques Roubaud's "The Great Fire of London." Although he is an Oulipian, Rouabaud is a great admirer of the conventional, middle-brow novel, particularly in its British incarnations, so he almost certainly is under no illusion that his great avant-garde work fits into the genre. It is indeed a chronicle, but one of the most complex and artful ever composed - and one of the least-recognized masterpieces of modern literature. For many years only the first volume was available in English, but a couple of years ago Dalkey Archive brought out another, "The Loop," and will soon release a third, "Mathematics:"

Pascal Quignard's Roving Genre Taunts a Reviewer

The concept of nonfiction literature has become so alien in the English-speaking world that it is always amusing to watch a critic tussling with an example of it, as happens in Three Percent's favorable review of Pascal Quignard's "Les Ombres Errants," now available in translation as "The Roving Shadows."

The reviewer, hilariously, spends much of his piece simply trying, and failing, to classify the work, getting into it with the very first sentence: "Les Ombres Errantes won the Prix Goncourt—possibly the most prestigious award a French literary work can receive—despite the fact that it is not a novel.[Bold emphasis ours.]" Really, despite the fact that it is not a novel? Scandalous!

Then, in the second paragraph, comes this gem: "Indeed, it is difficult to say which genre of writing it actually fits. On the one hand the book contains many examples of sensuous description and personal memoir—you know, the type of thing one expects to find in a literary work." And by "literary work" the reviewer obviously means fiction. It is highly irregular, in the reviewer's view, that one should encounter such writing in a work of nonfiction.

And the reviewer goes on, confessing perplexity: "The uniqueness of this work’s style presents a problem to the reader and the critic. Against which body of works should one judge The Roving Shadows, then, literature or critical theory?"

Not that the reviewer is seriously interested in judging it against any body of work (though it does sound impressive that he should wish to.) And in the end he resolves his literature-or-critical theory classification quandary with this hilarious compromise: "the work is best classified as a distillation of critical theory into literary form."

So, has the reviewer decided that the book is, after all, literature despite not being a novel? Not so fast. "For this reason," he writes, "it is an important work, an interesting work, and a landmark in French literary/philosophical thought."

Ernaux: It's Not Fiction

In France, Annie Ernaux's collected works have been published under the title "Writing Life." Ernaux, best known among English-speakers for her book "A Simple Passion," is one of the very best chroniclers out there, taking for her sole subject a sort of unembarrassed anthropology of the self. She has often pointed out that what she writes should not be misconstrued as any sort of fiction or even storytelling. To do so is to deny the novelty and rigor of her art, the way in which, in her short books, she deploys a lean but ingenious structure and style to make simple recountings of personal facts and observations sing. Yet publishers and reviewers on this side of the pond,incapable as they are of accepting the fact that fact can be artful, or lacking a labeled category into which to slot such work, insist on classifying her book as novels or novellas. (Even the usually more enlightened but fiction-loving M.A. Orthofer over at The Complete Review does so.)

Emmanuel Carrère's Chronicle Takes All

The chronicle is not only very much alive and well and living in France, its is beating all comers. Limonov, Emmanuel Carrère's chronicle which had already won the Renaudot prize, has proven the form's potential by beating even prize-winning novels to the Prix des prix littéraires -- the prize awarded to the best of the year's award-winning literary works.

Carrère Chronicle Wins Prize

The aforementioned Emmanuel Carrère has won the sales-boosting Renaudot prize with his latest chonicle, which is about the Russian activist Limonov.

See What Happens When You Don't Call It a Chronicle

What happens is an absurdity like this, from World Literature Today: "An Iraqi in Paris is Samuel Shimon's debut novel, detailing the author's real-world journey from his home in Iraq to Paris, France"...

HOW CAN IT BE A NOVEL IF IT IS THE AUTHOR'S REAL-WORLD JOURNEY?

Emmanuel Carrère Explains What a Chronicle Is

At Three Percent's Read This Next, I found Emmanuel Carrère, previously mentioned in this blog, explaining what a chronicle is — except that, lacking the term, he calls it a non-fiction novel, a la Truman Capote:
I write what Truman Capote called “non-fiction novels” and often, as you say, deeply personal non-fiction novels, which means I use all the tools and the tricks of fiction-writing, but on documentary material. I have nothing ideological against fiction, I enjoy reading fiction and maybe I shall write it again in the future, but right now, I feel at home in this real, a huge and partly unexplored continent of literature.

Misadventures in the Chronicle Form

Kudos to another French writer, Emmanuel Carrère, for trying his hand at the modern chronicle -- especially given that, judging by his early work, he is a natural novelist. Unfortunately, his last two attempts at the chronicle -- "My Life as a Russian Novel," and, more recently, "Lives Other Than my Own" -- make you wish he had stuck to novels. He is one of those writers who do best to keep their silly egos concealed behind fictional characters.