Déconnection

by Claude Ollier

French

Genres: Literature, Historical Fiction, French Literature, 20th Century, France, Fiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Claude Ollier (born in Paris in 1922) is a French writer closely associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman literary movement. He was the first winner of the Prix Médicis which he received for his novel La Mise en scène.

Reviews

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/7116318...

At one point today, Christmas Day 2013, I thought perhaps I had had a stroke some time within the last week or two. I would be reading along another four or five pages of Claude Ollier's book here and there and not know what I read or why I even did it. The words were simply hollow for me and I was thinking that they shouldn't be. Nothing could dissuade me from my thinking the text a bore and inconsequential. There was nothing to engage me and still I felt maybe I had lost something of myself due to my new and potentially quite serious condition. But then I realized this could of course not be true because these same days I have been reading the humungous memoir of Elias Canetti and enjoying every word of it. He is such a good and interesting writer. And then there is Josef Winkler who is daily tearing me up with his Der Leibeigene and its awful contents regarding a life so foreign to me but so graphically real and disturbing it makes one cringe too much. My senses must still be intact, and I can still discern relevance, it seems, in a given text presented to me. So what is my problem with this master work?

I loved the feel of the book itself, its subject matter, the author's name, the cloth-covered boards, even the title which made it even harder for me to not like the text. I tried my best to like it, I did. But it was dead, the words, and perfectly good words at that but for some reason there wasn't a sentence that rang true and good for me. On page seventy-nine we are reading the words of the nameless writer in the first person:
Returned, stopping frequently, pushing my bicycle, dead tired, very gloomy. Haven't moved since.

It was as if he had a journal and was recording his daily activities so that one day in the future he might extend the shorthand into something palatable and interesting. For over eighty pages I attempted to find my way into the sentences of Claude Ollier and could not. And the blurbs on the dust jacket suggested I would and the critics claimed I had to. But success was not in the cards for me. Finally on page eighty-one I had to give in, give up, and move on. And the page before that was the straw that broke my back. And it wasn't anything I hadn't read before. Here we have in the third person words telling the story of Martin. The sentence was the same as all the others. The problem for me was in the telling. There was no showing, and that is the critical element I need that was missing. Oh writer, do not tell me about your problem but show it to me. And I will give an example of that page now and you can tell me why I am wrong. Better yet, please don't. It doesn't matter. I have no more time allotted or available for this project after my review.

Disconcerted, Martin walks the whole way, crosses the city for the first time on a weekday morning, goes along Lorenzkirche, Karolinenstrasse, is impressed while entering the immense building where uniformed orderlies, deciphering his paper, on each floor dictate to him the correct procedure.

So why even write this? Instead of showing me something, making me feel, we have empty adjectives such as immense and uniformed and also a stupid verb the likes of impressed. Honestly, there wasn't a page I liked or even a sentence that was memorable. And that is rare even in a shitty novel. And I know, I know, this one was supposed to be good. To me, it was if this novel was of an elitist quality and for a crowd I do not belong to. Something written in a way a common man such as myself could not possibly get or understand. Perhaps a book for the most attuned and smartest among us, though I have to doubt it. Seriously. I have the same problem reading poems written by William Butler Yeats. There are references in his poems that I just do not get and his work leaves me feeling flat. I never studied the classics. I do not know the secret code that might let me in. But, in stark contrast, a writer such as W.G. Sebald writes of places and historical occurrences I know nothing about either but I feel my way through and his words are interesting. His words also mean something to me. And by my lights that is good work, that is art, high art, important art, and full, sound, and relevant to my day. Sebald refuses to waste my time. He makes me pay a price for reading him. Ollier ultimately gives me nothing so he gets no praise from me. And in return a bit of indifference to the rest of his work, and little else to make me think or feel otherwise.

[Pierce Lockett · Rating 5 out of 5]

immensely scary and cruel little novel that’s all about dystopia, time, history, and fecklessness. ollier’s reliance on predicative sentences makes the read a bit tricky at times - verbs leap out with axes, connecting with one another in long, conjoined sentences - but sometimes they lose their mark. this is probably to do with the novel’s attempt to capture the oblique sense of being in the throws of historical terror, in a phase of anti-life, but lacking the narrative intelligence to utter this terror into a language appropriate for the task at hand. martin’s grueling walks to build death machines at the hands of the third reich and the unnamed narrator’s false quest to deliver a radio show no one will listen to are mechanical, subjectless responses to a kind of sublime annihilation - and what are we, in this age of disaster, if not these very subjects?

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found it hard to break the surface of this, which may well be more my fault than his.

[Ripleyland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. I would’ve loved this book if I read it four years ago.