Rabelais's Doughnuts

by Pierre Senges, Jacob Siefring (Translator)

Rabelais's Doughnuts is an original collection of the short writings of Pierre Senges. It brings together seven monologues, essays, fictions, and glosses which have not appeared together before.

“Suite"
“Last Judgment (detail)”
“A Slightly Vain Exercise in Style"
“On the Electrophorus and the Tohu-Bohu"
“Measure of All Things"
“Many Ways to Stuff a Watermelon"
“The Counterfeiter"


Topics Daniele da Volterra and the Sistine Chapel; the correspondence of Pierre Aretino, addressed to the artist Michelangelo; the affordances of different media for writing/reading through the ages; the relative merits of manifestos versus those of six-hundred-page novels; various writers’ libraries, real, apocryphal, and fictional; an entry in Kleist’s Abendblatter; and slightly vain exercises in style.

Genres: France

124 pages, Paperback

Published February 22, 2022

About the author

Pierre Senges (born 1968, Romans-sur-Isère) is a French writer. His work includes fifteen books, often collaborations with illustrators, and over twenty-five plays for radio.
His books are sometimes noted for having a baroque style. They frequently combine erudition and invention Fragments of Lichtenberg or play with the relation between the true and untrue Veuves au maquillage and La réfutation majeure.
Senges' radio plays (fictions radiophoniques) have been produced by France Culture and France Inter. His many prizes include the Prix Wepler, the Prix SACD Nouveau Talent Radio in 2007, the Grand prix de la fiction radiophonique de la SGDL in 2008, the Prix du deuxième roman, the Prix Rhône-Alpes, and the Prix meilleure page 111.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sunday is a time for homily, for a gloss however glib or lazy. This collection of essays meets that metric and beams perhaps. There is certain aura to these pieces as the author himself notes the inherent vanity in the exercise of style. There’s a piece on libraries where the author is a singer and a six hundred page novel a monster (Senges’s Ahab?) There are other pieces on technology and discovery regarding literary transmission. The final piece on the author as counterfeiter is one for the ages. Most satisfying is the authors and works cited: all Jon’s favorites (Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia (Urn Burial), and A Letter to a Friend Fernando Pessoa Jorge Luis Borges) . There are displays of art criticism, an alignment with Calasso if you will.

Senges succeeds. There’s your headline. Now run out and read this.

[Chris Via]

Talking about Fragments of Lichtenberg , Falstaff: Apotheosis , Studies of Silhouettes , and Rabelais's Doughnuts in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaNrC...

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

A selection of Pierre Senges' idiosyncratic musings—half a dozen plus one. As ever, his just off the edge of nonfiction satire led me to look up more than a few historical and literary personas to fully appreciate his wanderings, but that is, in my mind a bonus, not a fault. I especially enjoyed the two pieces that involve Michelangelo's Last Judgement, his ramble through libraries, imagined an real, and his sad counterfeiter's soliloquy.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/05/31/se...

[Nakedfartbarfer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, brilliant translation of an exuberantly playful French writer. Senges is unceasingly intertextual in a way that (possibly with a quick Wiki) will reward the reader with more than just the esteem of a name-drop. These essays are essentially literary and historical pastiche (read: jaunty fan-fiction). An example of the idiosyncratic liveliness of the author is one of the more straightforward passages where Pietro Aretino, an Italian writer and contemporary of Michelangelo, at the end of a letter in which he offers Michelangelo a lot of advice on how to paint The Last Judgment, appends a confession of his sins as a way to signify his familiarity with damnation and thereby his authority on the subject of how to paint the final judgment by Christ:

I am Pierre Aretino. I've committed misdemeanors, I've been a shameful specialist, I've crossed myself with my left hand...I preferred pizza to the consecrated host, I deceived papists in order to please novices, I sought the face of Lucrezia Buti in the face of St. Marguerite, I composed drinking songs to the tune of Ave Maria, I refused to hear vespers, I sullied my chin, I took my navel for an enigma--and with my nose in a flower, I held my breath and renounced God.

[Sarah Stephan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really fun, witty collection of essays!

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last story in this collection, "The Counterfeiter," is excellently composed: an ominous tone is set (think Robert Louis Stevenson or Poe)—that of the damned—embedding a monologue / apology for fraudulence.

Although I’ve enjoyed other of Senges’s books, this one I can’t get into, apart from the last story, despite what Senges clearly owes to Borges, Calvino, Aira and other writers who find the fantastic in the quotidian. The other pieces in this collection feel too heavy, lacking the light touch of Senges’s influences, the arched eyebrow of irony in response to the absurdities plainly set before us, which "The Counterfeiter" does so well.

Or perhaps, more likely, the problem is with my own assumption that a writer influenced by Borges et al. will necessarily reproduce their tones and conclusions. Not this time!