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Western
A pioneering French woman turns her eye toward the most classically male American genre.
192 pages, Paperback
First published October 13, 2009
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106 people want to read
About the author
Christine Montalbetti
39 books5 followersChristine Montalbetti was born in Le Havre in 1965 and lives in Paris. French literature lecturer at Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis, she is the author of several books (novels, stories, essays) and also writes for the theater, including The Jekyll Case , which was created in Amiens in spring 2009 and then resumed at the National Theatre de Chaillot, in a staging by Denis Podalydès. She has published Love Hotel (POL, 2013).
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 20, 2025
(3.5) This postmodern take on the Western genre almost led me to abandon it on several occasions. But Montalbetti's humor and playfulness kept snatching me back from the brink. I kept trying to read faster only to be lassoed back into line. The often infinitesimally-focused and heavily parenthetical method which Montalbetti employs demands a slow, close read--kind of like how a cowboy saunters down a dusty, deserted main street, eyes roving for signs of anything out of the ordinary. The skeletal plot—simple in its few salient points—is rather tangential to the reading enjoyment. That the Western genre is not often dwelt up on with such fastidious concentration nor treated with such a gently mocking tone is part of what makes Montalbetti's novel so endearing.
August 1, 2015
The plot of this novel - in as much as it might be said to have a plot - could be summarised in one short sentence. But I won't do that, not that I fear causing a so-called 'spoiler' because, frankly, there is nothing to spoil, but because I'm afraid that the scarcity of story, the paucity of plot and the non-existence of narrative might become a little too evident and cause you to decide against ever reading this wonderful book.
Curious Bystander: Where lie the wonders?
Me: The wonders lie in the endlessly inventive use of words which combine to form lovely arabesques of long, coiling sentences which blossom into paragraphs, then chapters and, eventually a whole book.
Curious Bystander: Would you say that in either form or content 'Western' reminds you of any other novel or novels you have read at any time in the past?
Me: I would indeed. Stylistically it bears a resemblance to the nouveau roman, but with a significant distinction which is that while 'Western' pays close attention to minute details of objects and discursive considerations of the incidental, it does so with a conversational attitude and a lovely, engaging wit.
Curious Bystander: How does this wit you speak of manifest itself?
Me: By becoming part of an anthropomorphic landscape in which spiders have reflective thoughts about the dangers inherent in passing near a man's boot or words live in anxious hope that someone will use them or droplets of water experience deep anguish when separated from their unified comrades. Then there's the cow who dreams of freedom...
Does any of that verbiage convince you that this novel is worth reading? All I can say by way of further encouragement is that it is one of the most entertaining novels, and one of the best translated (by Betsy Wing), that I've read in a long time.
Curious Bystander: Where lie the wonders?
Me: The wonders lie in the endlessly inventive use of words which combine to form lovely arabesques of long, coiling sentences which blossom into paragraphs, then chapters and, eventually a whole book.
Curious Bystander: Would you say that in either form or content 'Western' reminds you of any other novel or novels you have read at any time in the past?
Me: I would indeed. Stylistically it bears a resemblance to the nouveau roman, but with a significant distinction which is that while 'Western' pays close attention to minute details of objects and discursive considerations of the incidental, it does so with a conversational attitude and a lovely, engaging wit.
Curious Bystander: How does this wit you speak of manifest itself?
Me: By becoming part of an anthropomorphic landscape in which spiders have reflective thoughts about the dangers inherent in passing near a man's boot or words live in anxious hope that someone will use them or droplets of water experience deep anguish when separated from their unified comrades. Then there's the cow who dreams of freedom...
Does any of that verbiage convince you that this novel is worth reading? All I can say by way of further encouragement is that it is one of the most entertaining novels, and one of the best translated (by Betsy Wing), that I've read in a long time.
March 9, 2018
A Failed Attempt to Rethink the Western Genre as Postmodern
An extremely clever book, which is also well informed about contemporary experimental writing: but it is academic in the bad sense of that word, by which I don't mean filled with jargon or theory, but rather drained of real risk, engagement, and passion. The idea is to "deconstruct" the genre of the Western by describing many things other than the action. In chapter 1, the narrator seems to be distracted by ants crawling under the hero's boot. "Western" is a sort of anti-Elmore Leonard, or a mash-up of Leonard and Robbe-Grillet.
The lack of risk and passion appears in many forms, and in the end it erased my interest. Chapter 2 opens with what I take to be an echo of Robbe-Grillet's opening of "The Voyeur": a minute description of sunrise on a porch. But that echo made me wonder what Montalbetti was doing. Her description is less precise than Robbe-Grillet's, less of an interruption, less fanatically myopic, less of a radical gesture. So why do it?
Later in the book there are episodes of compulsively detailed, apparently irrelevant description that may remind English-language readers of Nicholson Baker or David Foster Wallace. But Montalbetti's asides are not as detailed, and they're botanically, neurobiologically, geologically, architecturally, and entomologically less precise. They are, in fact, full of signs that she hasn't mastered the technical disciplines she is playing at. So again, I wonder why: it is an intentionally less than exhaustive encyclopedism? A softer Oulipo? A less avant-garde nouveau roman? Why not write with microscopic precision and inexhaustible tolerance for irrelevance?
There are good passages in the book -- I especially enjoyed one that follows the labors of a single word in a man's mind as it tries to persuade its lazy companions to join into a sentence and actually be spoken into the world. I also liked the inevitable moment when Montalbetti inserts herself into the narrative -- that was well done precisely because it was inconclusive and purposeless. And I liked the conceit that we, the readers, are walking along with her, the narrator, as invisible companions to the cowboys. But that particular innovation is also affectless, safe, disengaged, academic. I wouldn't mind a studied absence of affect, but I felt Montalbetti simply lacks affect. For an uncontrolled, conceptual, experimental novel, this one is remarkably far from any real risk.
*
Some notes about the translation.
Once the book gets underway, the reader knows what to expect from the translator. But this is one of those books where tone, at the outset, is crucial, and there are some infelicities in the first two pages that upset my sense of what the narrator was doing. In paragraph 1, there's a comparison between the runners in a rocking chair and "some scarcely populated jaw." Surely that's the wrong word: it should be "sparsely." But if there is even a chance that the translator was trying to match an unusual word, she should have either signaled that or used the common word. This sort of thing matters in the beginning of a book because it signals whether or not an author is playing with language. Here it isn't clear.
The second paragraph has the first sign of the narrator's offhanded tone:
"Pushing down on the boot that rests on the horizontal rail built onto the front of the porch, well, it acts like a piston."
That "well" is our first indication that the author is going to adopt an informal tone, involving changes of mind and apparently impromptu digressions. But the "well" isn't quite ordinary North American usage. It reads slightly awkwardly. And did the original also sound ambiguously awkward? That isn't clear.
There are a half-dozen more of these imprecisely calibrated usages in the first two pages. For me, they established the uninvited guest of the slightly unreliable translator into the conversation of reading.
An extremely clever book, which is also well informed about contemporary experimental writing: but it is academic in the bad sense of that word, by which I don't mean filled with jargon or theory, but rather drained of real risk, engagement, and passion. The idea is to "deconstruct" the genre of the Western by describing many things other than the action. In chapter 1, the narrator seems to be distracted by ants crawling under the hero's boot. "Western" is a sort of anti-Elmore Leonard, or a mash-up of Leonard and Robbe-Grillet.
The lack of risk and passion appears in many forms, and in the end it erased my interest. Chapter 2 opens with what I take to be an echo of Robbe-Grillet's opening of "The Voyeur": a minute description of sunrise on a porch. But that echo made me wonder what Montalbetti was doing. Her description is less precise than Robbe-Grillet's, less of an interruption, less fanatically myopic, less of a radical gesture. So why do it?
Later in the book there are episodes of compulsively detailed, apparently irrelevant description that may remind English-language readers of Nicholson Baker or David Foster Wallace. But Montalbetti's asides are not as detailed, and they're botanically, neurobiologically, geologically, architecturally, and entomologically less precise. They are, in fact, full of signs that she hasn't mastered the technical disciplines she is playing at. So again, I wonder why: it is an intentionally less than exhaustive encyclopedism? A softer Oulipo? A less avant-garde nouveau roman? Why not write with microscopic precision and inexhaustible tolerance for irrelevance?
There are good passages in the book -- I especially enjoyed one that follows the labors of a single word in a man's mind as it tries to persuade its lazy companions to join into a sentence and actually be spoken into the world. I also liked the inevitable moment when Montalbetti inserts herself into the narrative -- that was well done precisely because it was inconclusive and purposeless. And I liked the conceit that we, the readers, are walking along with her, the narrator, as invisible companions to the cowboys. But that particular innovation is also affectless, safe, disengaged, academic. I wouldn't mind a studied absence of affect, but I felt Montalbetti simply lacks affect. For an uncontrolled, conceptual, experimental novel, this one is remarkably far from any real risk.
*
Some notes about the translation.
Once the book gets underway, the reader knows what to expect from the translator. But this is one of those books where tone, at the outset, is crucial, and there are some infelicities in the first two pages that upset my sense of what the narrator was doing. In paragraph 1, there's a comparison between the runners in a rocking chair and "some scarcely populated jaw." Surely that's the wrong word: it should be "sparsely." But if there is even a chance that the translator was trying to match an unusual word, she should have either signaled that or used the common word. This sort of thing matters in the beginning of a book because it signals whether or not an author is playing with language. Here it isn't clear.
The second paragraph has the first sign of the narrator's offhanded tone:
"Pushing down on the boot that rests on the horizontal rail built onto the front of the porch, well, it acts like a piston."
That "well" is our first indication that the author is going to adopt an informal tone, involving changes of mind and apparently impromptu digressions. But the "well" isn't quite ordinary North American usage. It reads slightly awkwardly. And did the original also sound ambiguously awkward? That isn't clear.
There are a half-dozen more of these imprecisely calibrated usages in the first two pages. For me, they established the uninvited guest of the slightly unreliable translator into the conversation of reading.
December 14, 2009
Christine Montalbetti is the best shot in town. She'll slay you in the street at high noon. So if tender, easily digestible reads are your favorite, best clear on out the back. Jane Austen or Suzie Ormond, Western ain’t. However, if what gets your blood going is a hard gallop across open space with terrain so changeable you could get thrown if you don’t pay strict attention, well, then Western is your mount.
The author of Western is French, a literary critic and theorist, and teaches French literature at the University of Paris. Western was—you’ll need a slug of rotgut whiskey to get this down—written in French. (The translation, by Betsy Wing, corrals the novel superbly in English.) Western is, therefore, nothing like an oater scribed by Louis L'Amour. Well, maybe not nothing.
There are genre tropes in Western. For example: a big sky, horses, tumbleweed, a ranch, a street brawl, and a town, called postmodernly enough, Transition City. Imagine these tropes filtered through phenomenology, Roland Barthes, Proust, Laurence Sterne, Jacques Tati, Lucille Ball, and god knows who or what else. The result is that Montalbetti uses and abuses all these tropes pretty much as she does with one cowboy, name of Dirk, who is so laconic it takes him three pages to say nothing. This expansiveness means Western upends what is a terse action genre and becomes hilariously, verbosely literate while making profound observations and asides. Western, therefore, has huge fun decimating its genre, honouring it, while being amazingly intellectually satisfying and wise.
The novel also takes a postmodern tact in narrative voice. It employs a first person narrator, a “writer” who speaks directly to “you”, as though we, the reader, were walking beside her as she creates the action and characters. At times, she fades off into a third person omniscient, only to pop up again as "I" just when you’ve forgotten there was a first-person narrator.
Many sentences in Western roll, twist, divagate, navigate, hesitate, stumble, detour, and come back on themselves for a page and more. Thank goodness, though some readers may be tempted to throw the book at the wall. Go ahead. You’ll be picking it up in a minute eager to see if the narrative will eventually exit that anthropomorphic ant world you’ve suddenly been dragged into with its hexapod characters’ imaginings—though just a sentence ago another cowboy was rocking on the porch waiting for sunrise. Hexapod characters’ imaginings? Yup.
Summing up this book is like trying to sum up life. Instead of trying, here’s an excerpt to give you some idea of the action-adventure you’re in for in Western. Slow down. Savour.
This tiny, defiant memory, which distinguishes itself so clearly from the heap of fragile, scarcely sustained subjects briefly popping up in our man’s mind only to disintegrate immediately (those particular subjects would be just as hard for me to catch, in order to show you, as chasing butterflies with a net held out in front of me—picture it—while tripping over lumps of earth pushed up by moles; likely to lose my Lepidoptera if I start paying attention to the ground I’m walking over, but unable to catch anything as I’m falling all over the place), this thought, more vigorous than the others, no longer forming a single long wave along with them, driving its roller onto the beach, this thought, a sturdy residue rather than foam, though still, well, how shall I put it…
Me, I put it like this: tour de force.
Review by Neil Flowers
The author of Western is French, a literary critic and theorist, and teaches French literature at the University of Paris. Western was—you’ll need a slug of rotgut whiskey to get this down—written in French. (The translation, by Betsy Wing, corrals the novel superbly in English.) Western is, therefore, nothing like an oater scribed by Louis L'Amour. Well, maybe not nothing.
There are genre tropes in Western. For example: a big sky, horses, tumbleweed, a ranch, a street brawl, and a town, called postmodernly enough, Transition City. Imagine these tropes filtered through phenomenology, Roland Barthes, Proust, Laurence Sterne, Jacques Tati, Lucille Ball, and god knows who or what else. The result is that Montalbetti uses and abuses all these tropes pretty much as she does with one cowboy, name of Dirk, who is so laconic it takes him three pages to say nothing. This expansiveness means Western upends what is a terse action genre and becomes hilariously, verbosely literate while making profound observations and asides. Western, therefore, has huge fun decimating its genre, honouring it, while being amazingly intellectually satisfying and wise.
The novel also takes a postmodern tact in narrative voice. It employs a first person narrator, a “writer” who speaks directly to “you”, as though we, the reader, were walking beside her as she creates the action and characters. At times, she fades off into a third person omniscient, only to pop up again as "I" just when you’ve forgotten there was a first-person narrator.
Many sentences in Western roll, twist, divagate, navigate, hesitate, stumble, detour, and come back on themselves for a page and more. Thank goodness, though some readers may be tempted to throw the book at the wall. Go ahead. You’ll be picking it up in a minute eager to see if the narrative will eventually exit that anthropomorphic ant world you’ve suddenly been dragged into with its hexapod characters’ imaginings—though just a sentence ago another cowboy was rocking on the porch waiting for sunrise. Hexapod characters’ imaginings? Yup.
Summing up this book is like trying to sum up life. Instead of trying, here’s an excerpt to give you some idea of the action-adventure you’re in for in Western. Slow down. Savour.
This tiny, defiant memory, which distinguishes itself so clearly from the heap of fragile, scarcely sustained subjects briefly popping up in our man’s mind only to disintegrate immediately (those particular subjects would be just as hard for me to catch, in order to show you, as chasing butterflies with a net held out in front of me—picture it—while tripping over lumps of earth pushed up by moles; likely to lose my Lepidoptera if I start paying attention to the ground I’m walking over, but unable to catch anything as I’m falling all over the place), this thought, more vigorous than the others, no longer forming a single long wave along with them, driving its roller onto the beach, this thought, a sturdy residue rather than foam, though still, well, how shall I put it…
Me, I put it like this: tour de force.
Review by Neil Flowers
tasted
January 1, 2024Betsy Wing’s translation is truly fantastic. She deftly handles all the elements of this difficult literary work. Wow!
This experimental work uses long, labyrinthine sentences to get into the details of thoughts and actions that few would call “action” or even, to be honest, “thoughts.” How much can you undermine a reader’s expectations, even short of satirizing the Western (which this work does not really do), of which little is preserved here? The answer is, A great deal, at least in Montalbetti’s hands. But, at least for me, only so much. I would give the first half of the novel five stars for the brilliance of the writing/translation, the author's sense of humor, and the gutziness of the author’s mission (and lack thereof). But a little after this, in the chapter called “Siesta,” I did indeed have trouble keeping not my eyes, but my mind open, which does, effectively, amount to the same thing). I am happy to have read what I read, and I would like to read more of Montalbetti (but is my French up to reading her in the original?).
This experimental work uses long, labyrinthine sentences to get into the details of thoughts and actions that few would call “action” or even, to be honest, “thoughts.” How much can you undermine a reader’s expectations, even short of satirizing the Western (which this work does not really do), of which little is preserved here? The answer is, A great deal, at least in Montalbetti’s hands. But, at least for me, only so much. I would give the first half of the novel five stars for the brilliance of the writing/translation, the author's sense of humor, and the gutziness of the author’s mission (and lack thereof). But a little after this, in the chapter called “Siesta,” I did indeed have trouble keeping not my eyes, but my mind open, which does, effectively, amount to the same thing). I am happy to have read what I read, and I would like to read more of Montalbetti (but is my French up to reading her in the original?).
March 23, 2017
Why do I not remember reading this book???
Read
December 17, 2012There are loads of great ideas that make up this novel by Montalbetti. It subverts the genre of the western by delaying the action (and screwing about with the motivation), and interacting directly with the reader and inviting the reader to interact directly with the book (take this painting, put it on your wall, it will look good), and giving space for all things, animate or inanimate, even a band of traveling hexapods.
It's just not a good read. Like performance art, Western is a good idea that frankly doesn't pan out--good ideas don't necessarily make for a fulfilling read. What further drags this novel down is that it isn't doing anything new or shocking. This came out in 2005 in France and meta narratives and subversion of genre had been done to death ages before (Paul Auster's New York Trilogy comes to mind), the agency given to the other presences is largely illusory and despite claiming on the back to subvert the typical portrayals of women in westerns, it only manages to enforce it.
This is a book that is worth reading with a group so that you may discuss it briefly, but is largely dismissible. It isn't first, it isn't daring and it isn't particularly striking--but worst of all it isn't enjoyable.
It's just not a good read. Like performance art, Western is a good idea that frankly doesn't pan out--good ideas don't necessarily make for a fulfilling read. What further drags this novel down is that it isn't doing anything new or shocking. This came out in 2005 in France and meta narratives and subversion of genre had been done to death ages before (Paul Auster's New York Trilogy comes to mind), the agency given to the other presences is largely illusory and despite claiming on the back to subvert the typical portrayals of women in westerns, it only manages to enforce it.
This is a book that is worth reading with a group so that you may discuss it briefly, but is largely dismissible. It isn't first, it isn't daring and it isn't particularly striking--but worst of all it isn't enjoyable.
Want to read
November 4, 2010Liked her short story in Best European Fiction 2010
April 20, 2012
I really wanted to like this
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews