Vacated Landscape

by Jean Lahougue, K.E. Gormley (Translator)

An editor at a Parisian publishing house receives a manuscript by someone calling himself Desiderio—a manuscript that bears an eerie (though vague) resemblance to his own life and to a book he was planning to write on a Renaissance painter of the same name. He decides to use his vacation time to visit the place from which it was sent—the quaint, historical seaside town of V.—and believes he has identified the author/sender: one Jean Morelle, himself a tourist, who disappeared the very day the manuscript was mailed. The narrator decides to play amateur detective and track down Morelle, unaware that as he becomes more deeply enmeshed in the mystery, the streets of V. will bend around him like a Möbius strip to form a loop that seems to offer no escape.

A portrait of obsession, Vacated Landscape is both ingeniously fractal, with sentences that are tiny scale models of the larger narrative, and exuberantly byzantine, full of long parentheticals and odd circumlocutions that form a tantalizing labyrinth that sits somewhere between Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Kafka’s The Castle.

Genres: France, Fiction

199 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 1977

Reviews

[Jack Tripper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Your enjoyment of this novel may come down to what you think of the following sentence:

I remember there was no hint of a trap (a trap recognized as such: it went without saying that I was allowing myself to be captivated, with pleasure, by happy, sentimental memories) apart from a tiny, transparent cobweb within arm’s reach (and I was glad, because it was something the old woman had overlooked — the fault, at last, for which I’d probably been looking, unconsciously, ever since setting foot in the house — which made her incomprehensible, or arrestable, if you will), near enough that I could intervene at any moment to save, or not — it was up to me — the insect held in thrall by the little orb-weaver. (pp. 49-50).

If you can read that (pretty much randomly chosen) passage without suffering a brain aneurysm, then you might — or so I believe — enjoy this weird, Kafka-ish (I refuse to use the overused descriptor “Kafkaesque,” so this will — lacking a better word — have to do) mystery - first published in France in 1977 (but only just now released in English) - more than me.

The entire book is like this, barring the occasional dialogue, and there were times I’d start to settle into a groove, but often I’d have to sort of glance over sections just to get the general gist of what was happening. The one good thing I can say about the endless em dashes and parentheses is that they keep you on your toes. I never really got sleepy while reading (a problem I sometimes have), as maximum focus was required in order to decipher it all. My brain felt worn out at times, though. Every once in a while a novel comes along that makes me feel dumb as rocks, and this was certainly one of those.

The basic plot concerns an editor at a Parisian publishing house who one day receives a pseudonymous manuscript that’s uncomfortably close to what he himself had been planning to write, even though he never mentioned his ideas to anyone. So he travels to the city from which it was sent in order to track down the author and get to the bottom of this odd “hoax.” Easier said than done.

The overall vibe and disorienting atmosphere reminded me a little of the nouveaux romans of LaHougue’s fellow French author Robbe-Grillet (e.g. The Voyeur, Recollections of the Golden Triangle), as well as Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map and David Wheldon’s The Course of Instruction, in that they are all ostensibly mysteries that border on the surreal, where everyone appears dementia-ridden, either unable or unwilling to help in the labyrinthine investigation, frustrating both the protagonist and the reader. Only here, the frustration is compounded by the often impenetrable prose.

Still, I’m glad I read it, as it’s a unique experience to be sure. Confusing as hell and headache-inducing, maybe, but unique. And more than a bit mind-bending and tripped-out by the end.

[Bbrown · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first I did not know what to make of Jean Lahougue’s Vacated Landscape. Its narrator tells the story almost apologetically, with frequent tangents, as if he’s embarrassed about having gone through the “adventure” that the novel recounts. It was only about a third of the way into the book that I figured out—more accurately, I decided—that Vacated Landscape was not a surreal investigation of the mysterious figure Desiderio at all, but rather it’s a parody of such books.

Once I had that realization, the pieces of Vacated Landscape quickly fell into place. The narrator is not an amateur detective that you’re supposed to take seriously and follow on his adventure, he’s a clown doing narrative pratfalls for your amusement. How else are you to interpret his story of how he came to collect seashells, which he insists is important to the narrative but which actually isn’t important at all? “Yeah I used to litter my office with empty cigarette packages, then someone called me out on it and I was embarrassed, so now I keep seashells strewn all over my office instead.” That’s funny stuff! Just like when he gets tricked by a junk shop owner into massively overpay for a piece of smut, or when he asks his landlady if her dead son is really dead (he is). These are some solid comedic bits.

When looked at as a parody, the plot of Vacated Landscape snaps into focus as well. The narrative of a guy who, for no particular reason besides the fact that a fragment of a draft manuscript resonated with him, spends his holiday trying to track down an author that might not even exist, imagining himself as a character in an adventure novel (which, of course, he is) is a great way to poke fun at authors who write this type of post-modern quasi-mysteries unironically, everyone from Auster, to Bealu, to Modiano, and dozens more. Lahougue embellishes the narrative with other in-jokes about this subgenre, like the description of museum exhibits that is comically opaque, the narrator being a perv with his girlfriend, and the ending revealing the book to be one big cycle, with the narrator turning out to be the writer he was searching for all along (or is he?). In a serious book this would be an overused cop-out, but as part of a parody it highlights the laziness of such endings.

Is the Translator’s Afterword by K. E. Gormley in on the joke? It would explain lines like “Lahougue’s novel contains nothing that is not a motif,” but I don’t think so. Instead it takes the novel and its author seriously. Too seriously, in my opinion.

Look, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to say whether Vacated Landscape was an intentional parody or a failed attempt by Lahougue to write a real novel, even I would have to say that the latter is more likely. But, if I’d read the book that way, it would have been very boring and more than a little frustrating, putting it in solidly 2/5 territory. Because it’s more fun to laugh with someone than at someone, I choose to believe that Lahougue wrote Vacated Landscape as a comedic work pointing out the frequent absurdities of similar works. Even then, it’s not exactly a laugh-riot, but at least it’s saved from being boring. 3/5.

[Bob Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve never read anything quite like this, I found it impossible to put away. Both because of the unique writing and narrative style and because of the ever present mystique and unease.

The ending is just an absolute gourmet cherry on top! Loved this.

[Matthew Linton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vacated Landscape is a post-modern literary detective story written by the French novelist Jean Lahougue (trans. K.E. Gormley). Equal parts Georges Simenon, Edgar Allen Poe, and Umberto Eco, Vacated Landscape tells the story of an unnamed Parisian editor who receives a mysterious manuscript from an unknown author named Desiderio. This work intrigues the editor, since it is almost a perfect facsimile of a book on a painter he was planning to write, so he travels to the mysterious town of V. to track down Desiderio. There is something strange about V. and Desiderio (a nom de plume for another visitor named Morelle), which Vacated Landscape explores as the narrator struggles to solve the mystery and wrestles with his own sanity.

Vacated Landscape was a mixed bag for me. V. is a masterfully created setting and evokes the fogginess of an old black-and-white photograph or silent-era film. The mystery is also compelling and pays off in the end. The problem is that like an old black-and-white photograph, Vacated Landscape often feels vague and nonspecific; not in a mysterious way, but instead in a way that feels at times generic and other times confusing. Lahougue employs repetition to create a climate of mystery and uncertainty, but often just feels repetitious.

Not a perfect book, but one worth exploring if you like Eco, Poe, or Patrick Modiano. I was very impressed by the quality of the book however and will definitely be exploring more books in the @wakefieldpress catalog.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

The unnamed narrator of Vacated Landscapes is a work-at-home book editor for a Parisian publisher. He’s been plying his trade for a couple of decades, and personally knows or is familiar with many of the industry’s famous and minor writers. His apartment is filled with unpublished manuscripts, manuscripts with promise but which, in their various ways, fall short of what they could otherwise be. They are works in eternal limbo, works whose development has been arrested.

One day, the narrator receives in the mail a slim manuscript. It has a mysterious and faltering quality to it, its contents never explicated to the reader, and its author known to us at first by his pseudonym, Desiderio, with references to a Renaissance painter named of the same name. A postmark reveals where the manuscript was mailed from—a small town, revealed to us only as V., a place of minor historical interest to tourists and art historians. The narrator is intrigued enough by the manuscript and its pseudonymous author to set himself up as a sleuth to track down the writer, whom he believes is a man named Jean Morelle. Although the contents are revealed to us only in allusions sprinkled throughout the rest of the novel, we sense that the manuscript has to do with the narrator. The narrator soon discovers that Morelle left V.—assuming he actually had ever been there—the day he mailed the manuscript. Nonetheless, the narrator decides to stay in V. to reconstruct what he can about Morelle, despite the ambiguity of what the narrator allows to pass for evidence.

The novel has something of the Oulipian about it, a sense that the author, Jean Lahougue, is working within constraints unarticulated to the reader, which trigger, within the reader, a sense of an underlying current, a current felt but difficult to pinpoint. Elements of this putative thread include, of its characters, places, and objects, qualities of opposites and oppositions, doppelgangers, serenity and threat. The narrator withholds from us key information, as do the people he meets from the narrator. But for what purpose? To what ends? This is Patrick Modiano on steroids.

Evasion, correction, emendation, amendment: The story is told as the draft of a novel but one that has already been written, perhaps twice already, with the third—what we’re reading—in progress. That is, the narrative forms a Möbius strip. Its oppositions are merely the other side of what we will come to again but with a modified sense of what those modifications suggest about the story, about its characters. Repetition with variation, as Morton Feldman might say in a different context. The novel’s consistency, its coherence, is the strip the narrative is founded on that we walk along. K. E. Gormley, the novel’s translator, admirably captures and sustains the ambiguities of Lahougue’s prose, its ongoing erasures and retractions, rather than be topple or tripped up by them.

We are told in Gormley’s afterward that Lahougue admires Agatha Christie, who once famously got in trouble for writing a whodunnit in which the narrator himself is the culprit, all the while casting doubt on the novel’s other characters’ innocence. The protagonist of Vacated is somewhere between narrator and narrated about. Although Wakefield Press does not usually publish works by living authors, usually limiting itself to works by French, Belgian, and German authors from the 1880s to 1930s, Vacated Landscape is of a piece with the rest of Wakefield’s catalog—moody and eccentric, informed by a sui generis sensibility.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Shadi]

carefully constructed, non-orientable, and self-sustaining tale sprung from (personal?) obsession and compulsion

[hence · Rating 4 out of 5]

very obviously post modern french and i'm
here for it.... as tired as i am

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Manages to feel like a nouvelle roman, in the tradition of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and a more traditional mystery without really being either one.

[Ben Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible, incredible prose. One of my favorites I’ve ever read. Must read