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mhanlon's review
4.0
Look, I'm biased. I think Michael Joyce is an amazing stylist, one of the most beautifully elegiac writers working today -- his hyperfictions, Going the Distance, The War Outside of Ireland, Disappearance, Twentieth Century Man, these books perform this amazing literary boxing act: the emotional punch of nearly every passage, the urgency you feel while reading his stuff can discombobulate you, throw you off balance, but the prose hugs you in tight, making it difficult to break away.
I leapt at this one because of Joyce's technical abilities, despite not being a Foucault expert (fan? I knew of more of Foucault in terms of the pendulum that old Umberto wrote about, the same Umberto who once joked that Michael was "the real Joyce") and being a bit wary of epistolatory novels.
I think I would have enjoyed it even more, had I been a Foucault scholar or more au fait with French and/or Swedish. The letters, some sent, some unsent, are written in an English mixed with a hybrid of Swedish and French, and the overall effect, early on, was to make me feel very dumb (which I'm not disputing is the case... it was just highlighted in this case). When Gabrielle comes onto the scene, with her Brazilian exoticism in an already exotic (albeit cold) locale for Foucault, the narrative picks up. She's kind the center around which Foucault will (or will not) hold as he begins to spiral, in his letters, into or around madness. I really enjoyed her appearances, as Foucault does, and as time has past since I read the book -- I really spent a long time on this review, waiting to digest many of the impressions I'd had, and as I have I've grown to appreciate it more and more -- I appreciate the more subtle aspects to the way Joyce has constructed this book when I may have been less inclined towards the more meta (almost to the point of an obsession) moments in the letters.
There's an interview with the author at http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/04102015/complicated-geometry-michael-joyce-and-foucault that goes into the reasoning behind why the book was written the way it was and some extra background material on Foucault's life that wiggles its way into some of the letters.
Of Michael Joyce's works, this may be one of the more dense, more difficult, for me, anyway, but when the narrative shifts at the very end, like Foucault's fateful motorcar, I realized I'd been immersed inside the mind of the fictional philosopher and was just as haunted as he was.
I leapt at this one because of Joyce's technical abilities, despite not being a Foucault expert (fan? I knew of more of Foucault in terms of the pendulum that old Umberto wrote about, the same Umberto who once joked that Michael was "the real Joyce") and being a bit wary of epistolatory novels.
I think I would have enjoyed it even more, had I been a Foucault scholar or more au fait with French and/or Swedish. The letters, some sent, some unsent, are written in an English mixed with a hybrid of Swedish and French, and the overall effect, early on, was to make me feel very dumb (which I'm not disputing is the case... it was just highlighted in this case). When Gabrielle comes onto the scene, with her Brazilian exoticism in an already exotic (albeit cold) locale for Foucault, the narrative picks up. She's kind the center around which Foucault will (or will not) hold as he begins to spiral, in his letters, into or around madness. I really enjoyed her appearances, as Foucault does, and as time has past since I read the book -- I really spent a long time on this review, waiting to digest many of the impressions I'd had, and as I have I've grown to appreciate it more and more -- I appreciate the more subtle aspects to the way Joyce has constructed this book when I may have been less inclined towards the more meta (almost to the point of an obsession) moments in the letters.
There's an interview with the author at http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/04102015/complicated-geometry-michael-joyce-and-foucault that goes into the reasoning behind why the book was written the way it was and some extra background material on Foucault's life that wiggles its way into some of the letters.
Of Michael Joyce's works, this may be one of the more dense, more difficult, for me, anyway, but when the narrative shifts at the very end, like Foucault's fateful motorcar, I realized I'd been immersed inside the mind of the fictional philosopher and was just as haunted as he was.
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