Compact

by Maurice Roche, Mark Polizzotti (Translator, introduction)

Maurice Roche has been called “the most interesting novelist in France” (TriQuarterly), and Compact “one of the classics of our modernity” (Le Figaro). Certainly, Compact is one of the most compellingly original works of fiction of the postwar period. Composed―as if a musical score―of six intertwining narratives (each distinguished by its own voice, tense, and typeface), Compact has lost none of its remarkable freshness or groundbreaking innovation since its first appearance in 1966. But along with its striking originality, Compact is also a work rich in offbeat humor and great humanity. Compact is the story of a blind man living in a city of his own imagining. Confined to his deathbed, he engages in mental walks through the world’s capitals. These sightless excursions explode in a plethora of musical arrangements, sexual encounters, and mysterious funeral rites. Meanwhile, a Japanese collector and his transvestite assistant watch over the blind man in exchange―upon the latter’s death―for his magnificent tattooed skin. As a further ordeal, the protagonist finds himself prey to the whims of a sadistic French girl in the next apartment. A novelistic tour de force, Compact fully bears out La Tribune de Geneve‘s judgment of Maurice Roche’s work as “the most important literary upheaval to hit France in the last decade.”

Genres: Fiction, France, Novels, French Literature

154 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 5 out of 5]

You shall be made sleepless even as you are left sightless. While you're penetrating the darkness, you'll penetrate into the night, getting in deeper and deeper, your already failing memory growing proportionally weaker as -- at the end of a long lethargy -- you become conscious of your condition. (How will you tell day from night?)

Insane and Incredible. A bed-bound dying blind man regresses through memory and personal geography and vestigial sex drive, tormented by the doctor who sustains him -- at the price of his skin and tattoos upon death -- haunted recollection of a face without a name, and the ambiguous advances of the girl in the next appartment. Rendered with extreme kinetic elegance via breathlessly fractured six-voice stream-of-consciousness and jarring, ever-surprising typographic effects. All of which adds to, rather than distracts from, the story (ie. Not gimmicks!). And bleak as its circumstances may be -- pain and mortality are central here -- it's also absurd and funny in that emergent Joycean way: lost in swirl of words, you are suddenly aware that what you are reading has actually become hilarious without your being immediately aware.

It's also worth noting that this manages that excellent post-modern trick of being simultaneously overwhelmingly smart and surprisingly engaging, full of weird lurid detail. Maybe the most experimental novel I've ever encountered, but utterly successful even so. Even if any reading of it may only be an invitation to much more unpacking and re-reading.

Anyone know if any other Roche novels ever made it into English?

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew nothing about the French, "New Novel," or Nouveau Roman. movement of the 1950's. After a brief search on the web this is my simplified version and I look to be corrected by those more in the know.

A group of writers in France having been influenced by Kafka, Beckett, among others became dissatisfied with the novel being corralled into the chronology of time rendered plots, characters, metaphorical stylizations, and florid flowing descriptions lent by poetic prose. Alain Robbe-Grillet appears to have been their leader. Their point being-and here I hate them for it, hate myself for having to agree- thriving off of literary layers of metaphoric meaning, marveling at the growth and change of characters who lift off the page, thrilled by the aesthetics of the sounds of words-that this old way of writing does not reflect the chaos, complexity, and discontinuity of actual life. The traditional novel form is one symptom of humanities need to make connections, sense, reason, where none exists. This is a collective defense for psychological equilibrium and a structural form of political ingenuity to feed into and contain the masses.

What the New Novel movement suggested which served as a precursor to post modernism(I hope I am not overstepping myself here), was by writing where plot and character served the realities of complexity versus the other way around. This could be attained by not having a narrative move forward only but not have a narrative at all. The novel on the page would be the multiplicity of a moment through the shifts in time we all travel in our minds, differing points of view, seeing things as they are-objects-versus expanding upon them. This sounds to me like Realism but it is, I think, Realism expanded to include far greater realities of present day life. I unfortunately cannot argue. Why, if serious about the function of art, write about the comings and goings of life that is not actually life but an adjusted form that has minimized it? Yes, within this rectangular area we refer to as life we can get good at its maneuvers but that is all that it is.

Maurice Roche was an early Nouveau Roman author. Reading the first few pages I had no idea what was going on. So, I read further and had less. I knew there was an old man in a bed blind. It was an apartment not his? He suffered a stroke and could not leave the bed. His memory is fading. The writing is in first person and we are allowed into an intelligent, imaginative, sensitive, humorous, racous, mind. Sounds like a fair setup for an interesting story with the prerequisite number of dots to connect to shim ourselves up for the encounters within that rectangular space. However, the form is abandoned before mentioned. There are six different point of views with their own fonts, voices and agendas rapidly switching necessitating a bottle of Dramamine to be situated within each hand's reach. Time also shifts within its electric currents moon beamed like billiard balls in full tilt. Memories are flashing their eccentric representations too quickly to be fully explored. This poor old man is left with imaginative explorations into different parts of the city of his own making. However, since he cannot see and is bed-bound he is left with internalized words not the things, the objects, the subjects, themselves, his fading memories cleaving to their distortions. He does this with admirable agility despite the growing hollowness.

The six different varying threads, flashings of memories and their fragments, imaginative wanderings, desires, the multi references to music and its theory-which I missed out on due to my ignorance in this area-we live and experience the trembled explosion of complexity occurring to us-him-moment to moment. This is what this book is and once I began seeing it through the New Novel's ideas and aspirations it became a thrilling ride.

Its one drawback for me was the use of what seemed to be slapstick humor. It's certainly possible this was included or added to contrast the old man's existence with the ridiculous absurdities of that rectangular area with its conflicted tangled desires and illusions. I don't think it was necessary if this is why it slipped within these pages. The frantic flow-though written in anything but a frantic unseemly style- has so successfully pointed this out through the old man's experience I think it would have been better served by the absence of overt comparison to a rectangular existence. This writing is about form and through form the reader is put through, rather than told about or explained, the experience the writer is communicating. Humor was aberrant here and diminished the already greatly achieved effects. Otherwise this easily would have been a 5 star jaunt rather than the 4.5/5

Readers didn't and maybe don't want to read this book not only because it is a difficult read-in great part there is no action, suspense- but due to its revelation which shakes up all previous set constellations. It is easy to see why this book became buried and how much we owe the dedicated people of the BURIED BOOK CLUB for unburying it and making it available to us.

This was for me the type of book I have found myself primarily drawn to and often recommended. I am a fan of having my little world shaken through the experience of of a book's style and form. Compact has provoked me into inquiring but what else if not a text reflecting the experience of the life I am living? More thinking led to my love of aesthetics written from or about any period of time, and how others in the past expressed their perceptions of life. My reading will remain varied but leaning towards this New Novel form (though Compact was written in 1966) and its eventual Post Modern Descendants. It is fun to see as a historical document where it came from, what it disrupted, led to, but it is a powerfully powerfully written work with its own set of aesthetics and I highly recommend it.

4.5/5

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

[Black Glove · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Novel Novelette
At first glance confusing, the text of Compact consists of seven different typefaces (originally seven different colours).
I read one typeface at a time, and this is the best way. Doing so makes the jumbled narrative come alive.
Story-wise it's about a blind man on his deathbed: his memories, hallucinations, his passions, hassles, his otherness, his vanishing . . .
The textural shenanigans invite many readings. Definitely a novel work to analyse and decipher.
Concise, dark, typographically quirky with restraint and purpose.
All in all an engrossing imbroglio > alt-perfect oddity.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly one of the best novels I’ve read at this level of experimentation. Translate CodeX!

[Sofia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What ticked me off reading Roche's Compact, though I liked it, was that the stuff I was writing when I was 15-18 was incontestably better, doing a similar thing, but going far, far beyond anything that any of the writers of the nouveau roman movement had even dreamed was possible. I had something great going, and fuckers stole my fire. I wish I'd read Compact earlier, that I'd had the chance to speak to people who'd read it and loved it, but, seriously, most inventive writer in French my fucking arse."

[Ripleyland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt that 5 stars was deserved from how cool this book was to read. I gotta be honest I really dunno what happened in it, even after two reads, but the presentation ruled.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are some truly odd reviews here, which is fitting for such a unique book. I'll leave potential adjectives at "unique" since fetishizing the obscurity or strangeness of this novel distracts from how entertaining and readable it is. This is a novel first and not a Concrete novel, not a Oulipean novel, not an "experimental" or gimmick novel, or Choose Your Own Adventure.

Very sorry to see this book is hard to find, or else so expensive. If you came into my house and tried to steal this book, I would leap up when I heard my door's lock kicked in and wood against metal and foot, and attack back. If you tried to stab me with a knife I would grab books from my shelf to block you, to catch the stab, or parry you. If you stabbed again I would choose another book, and then with each plunge I would pull another, and then this, that one, let's say I would go through a lot of books I own to defend myself, defend this book, before I would allow any harm to come to this book. I would even take a cut before I relinquished this rare-ish book from the safety of my home. I've given up relationships with close relatives, ended friendships and dismissed lovers, wives, even banished my own children for offenses against "Compact". I am happy to say my sins on behalf of this great book and its author are all reactive. I've never met someone in private, in a confined space, and thrown this book before them, commanding, "Read it!" and watched their face for the hour or two that it takes for them to finish it. I am not a taxi or Uber driver, who only took the job in the hopes that I can encounter someone who has read "Compact" in order to discuss it, or that I might get a long ride whose passenger I can throw my passenger copy of "Compact" in the backseat and say "Check this out." I've never bought up all the used expensive copies of "Compact" out there with my thousands and distributed them among strangers on the subway, secreting them in unsuspecting purses and even pockets of strangers I suspect might be receptive to its brilliance.

Have you read "Compact" yet? If so, let me know what you think in the comments!