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03
"From the bus stop across the street, it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that picked her up every morning, that she was slightly retarded."
A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams―full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon , sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up―reveal an entire adolescence. And this fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person.
03 is a book about young love like none you have ever read. It marks the English-language debut of a unique French writer―one of the great stylists of his generation.
A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams―full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon , sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up―reveal an entire adolescence. And this fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person.
03 is a book about young love like none you have ever read. It marks the English-language debut of a unique French writer―one of the great stylists of his generation.
84 pages, Paperback
First published June 22, 2010
12 people are currently reading
322 people want to read
About the author
Jean-Christophe Valtat
10 books43 followersJEAN CHRISTOPHE VALTAT was born in 1968. Educated in the Ecole Normale Superieure and the Sorbonne, he lives in Montpellier where he teaches Comparative Literature. He has written a book of short stories, Album, and two novels, Exes, and 03 (published in English by FSG), as well as award-winning radio-plays and a movie "Augustine" (2003), which he also co-directed.
He is also the author -in English - of the "dream-punk" trilogy "The Mysteries of New Venice", including "Aurorarama" (2010), Luminous Chaos (2013), and Suspended Citadels (2016) http://johnblank9.wixsite.com/blankpa...
He is also the author -in English - of the "dream-punk" trilogy "The Mysteries of New Venice", including "Aurorarama" (2010), Luminous Chaos (2013), and Suspended Citadels (2016) http://johnblank9.wixsite.com/blankpa...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews
June 24, 2013
“He considered each and every second as if he'd never encountered one before, as if the time it kept was a permanent surprise.”
Recently found by the half dozen in a remainder bookshop I couldn't resist how hip it would look to be reading a tiny little French novel with such an interesting cover. The fact that the premise was pretty intriguing too helped to sway my purchasing decision.
03 is essentially an 84 page paragraph told in stream of consciousness style in flashback. Does that class it as experimental literature? It's not exactly mainstream anyway. An unnamed narrator looks back at a time when he was in love with the girl who waited at the opposite bus stop from him every morning and somehow meanders through a series of beautifully constructed sentences contemplating all of those subjects that worry the intellectual teenager - love, sex, loneliness, freedom, stupidity etc. - but told with the wiser mind of a much older man.
Really it deserves and requires being read in one session as when I was forced to stop my reading I lost the feel and flow of the piece, it shouldn't be hard people, give yourself an hour and enjoy being inside the mind of a French Holden Caulfield.
April 2, 2011
Vaguely reminiscent of a more subdued version of Holden Caulfield, stripped of his colloquialisms and self-contradictions, or that of Alexander Portnoy, minus his off-the-charts libido and self-stimulation aided by a piece of liver, the nameless narrator of 03, French literary rock star Jean-Christophe Valtat’s novel of sorts, sketches a not dissimilar self-portrait of adolescent angst and sexual desire in a stunningly eloquent soliloquy that goes on for no less than eighty meaty, albeit generously spaced and wide-margined, pages. 03’s verbal soloist, channeling his younger self a la Scout Finch, culls his memories and thoughts about a time when, although world-weariness was already visible in the periphery of his troubles, all he seemed to care about was, naturally, a girl.
Set in “an eternal 1984,” the narrator’s story is framed and perpetually informed by his teenage fixation with a girl he sees every day on his way to high school. As might be expected, she’s no ordinary girl, and this key attribute of the object of his affection is made apparent right away in the novel’s opening sentence, whose last two words fall into place with an unexpected thud of unease and matter-of-factness: “From the bus stop across the street it was hard to tell but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that collected her every morning, that she was slightly retarded.” So begins his presumably complete and unabridged recollection of all things related, whether directly or tangentially, to this love unrequited. And if you’re going to dive into it, you best take a really deep breath, because that opening sentence is not only the first sentence of the novel but also the first sentence of one long paragraph that is the novel.
Deprived of paragraph breaks, 03 carries the stigma of experimental literature. Although it’s not nearly as long and audacious as Bohumil Hrabal’s one-sentence opus, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, 03 is unlikely to attract readers who are quick to stick disparaging labels, such as “gimmicky,” “artificial,” and even “postmodern,” on novels with elements that take risks and deviate from convention. Such readers will be more loath to give 03 a try once they learn that not only is it a novel without paragraph breaks to supplement some of its full stops, but it is also, more importantly, without a plot. But it’s not without substance.
03’s one long paragraph, ostensibly a postmodern, artificial gimmick, signifies the narrator’s teenage self’s profound feelings of desire towards the “slightly retarded” girl and displeasure about himself and others. He tells in one almost breathless go the non-story of how the girl inspired in him a passionate urge to form a deeply personal understanding of intelligence, childhood, time, and, yes, love. Not until he’s down to his last ten pages does he say outright what his purpose in brooding over her existence under the bus shelter opposite his is--“I wanted to turn this little retarded girl I adored [...] into an allegory [...] of my own handicaps and my friends’, or of early promise thrown to the black pigs of Time.”--but he hints at it a quarter of the way through--“For if this young retarded girl stood as a reflection of my own failure to fit in, when I gazed narcissistically into the slimming mirror of my own weakness, her image also kept this weakness, for once, safely from view.” This self-projection takes place as a result of his inability to approach her: from his initial and enduring incapacity to cross the asphalt road between them and perhaps hold her hand or at the very least flash her a smile up close, a disability, as it were, partly owing to the presence of her guarding mother, partly owing to his own imminent mode of transport, and mostly owing to he’s simply being a wimp ("[I]nstead of the complex chaos of action," he reasons, "I preferred the varied, more branching pathways of my dreams."), emerges a continuous stream of self-consciousness with a smattering of self-righteousness.
It’s a torrent littered with opinions, write-offs, and declarations, and bursting at the seams with digressive conjunctions, parenthetical expressions, concatenating clauses, and, most noticeably, vivid metaphors, many of which battle for supreme cleverness in their rich profusion if they’re not busy trying not to get mangled (“a defenseless virgin left alone on this ravaged earth,” “a dazzling laser beam of insight,” and “a failed party where the lights were being extinguished one by one though dawn was hours away” are but a small sample). Not all of these elements--accompanied still by numerous pop culture references, including a summary of Flowers for Algernon and an analysis of a Joy Division song--actually help the poor teenager get his points across, but together they make for a Proustian contemplation on love and disillusionment whose uninterrupted length is fortunately matched by its surprising depth.
Summed up briefly, 03 is the best single-paragraph book about the many things that make “retards of us all” and the few things that offer ways of escape that you’ll never read.
--
Originally posted on Fully Booked .Me: http://fb.me/SnPPVuha
Set in “an eternal 1984,” the narrator’s story is framed and perpetually informed by his teenage fixation with a girl he sees every day on his way to high school. As might be expected, she’s no ordinary girl, and this key attribute of the object of his affection is made apparent right away in the novel’s opening sentence, whose last two words fall into place with an unexpected thud of unease and matter-of-factness: “From the bus stop across the street it was hard to tell but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that collected her every morning, that she was slightly retarded.” So begins his presumably complete and unabridged recollection of all things related, whether directly or tangentially, to this love unrequited. And if you’re going to dive into it, you best take a really deep breath, because that opening sentence is not only the first sentence of the novel but also the first sentence of one long paragraph that is the novel.
Deprived of paragraph breaks, 03 carries the stigma of experimental literature. Although it’s not nearly as long and audacious as Bohumil Hrabal’s one-sentence opus, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, 03 is unlikely to attract readers who are quick to stick disparaging labels, such as “gimmicky,” “artificial,” and even “postmodern,” on novels with elements that take risks and deviate from convention. Such readers will be more loath to give 03 a try once they learn that not only is it a novel without paragraph breaks to supplement some of its full stops, but it is also, more importantly, without a plot. But it’s not without substance.
03’s one long paragraph, ostensibly a postmodern, artificial gimmick, signifies the narrator’s teenage self’s profound feelings of desire towards the “slightly retarded” girl and displeasure about himself and others. He tells in one almost breathless go the non-story of how the girl inspired in him a passionate urge to form a deeply personal understanding of intelligence, childhood, time, and, yes, love. Not until he’s down to his last ten pages does he say outright what his purpose in brooding over her existence under the bus shelter opposite his is--“I wanted to turn this little retarded girl I adored [...] into an allegory [...] of my own handicaps and my friends’, or of early promise thrown to the black pigs of Time.”--but he hints at it a quarter of the way through--“For if this young retarded girl stood as a reflection of my own failure to fit in, when I gazed narcissistically into the slimming mirror of my own weakness, her image also kept this weakness, for once, safely from view.” This self-projection takes place as a result of his inability to approach her: from his initial and enduring incapacity to cross the asphalt road between them and perhaps hold her hand or at the very least flash her a smile up close, a disability, as it were, partly owing to the presence of her guarding mother, partly owing to his own imminent mode of transport, and mostly owing to he’s simply being a wimp ("[I]nstead of the complex chaos of action," he reasons, "I preferred the varied, more branching pathways of my dreams."), emerges a continuous stream of self-consciousness with a smattering of self-righteousness.
It’s a torrent littered with opinions, write-offs, and declarations, and bursting at the seams with digressive conjunctions, parenthetical expressions, concatenating clauses, and, most noticeably, vivid metaphors, many of which battle for supreme cleverness in their rich profusion if they’re not busy trying not to get mangled (“a defenseless virgin left alone on this ravaged earth,” “a dazzling laser beam of insight,” and “a failed party where the lights were being extinguished one by one though dawn was hours away” are but a small sample). Not all of these elements--accompanied still by numerous pop culture references, including a summary of Flowers for Algernon and an analysis of a Joy Division song--actually help the poor teenager get his points across, but together they make for a Proustian contemplation on love and disillusionment whose uninterrupted length is fortunately matched by its surprising depth.
Summed up briefly, 03 is the best single-paragraph book about the many things that make “retards of us all” and the few things that offer ways of escape that you’ll never read.
--
Originally posted on Fully Booked .Me: http://fb.me/SnPPVuha
July 14, 2011
This is an _unbelievably_ bad book. You know all the bad parts of Thomas Bernhard? Take away the cool parts. That's pretty much what this is. Just bad parts. I'm taken aback at how just ungood it is. Not even worth reading in the sense of seeing how bad it is. Just don't do it.
February 9, 2011
This dude can simply write. He strings together beautiful cumulative sentences into what is a novella-length paragraph. There's no action at all, as the entire book occurs with the narrator standing in one spot observing the object of his obsession who stands similarly across the street. So everything is internal, but Valtat's stream of consciousness is refined to the point that it always moves the reader forward, as opposed to the feeling I often get of wheel-spinning when traditional narrative forms are abandoned. Sometimes his figurative language seems to go too far, but that might be OK, since the whole book is based on language and thought instead of plot and action.
June 27, 2016
A short, unique monologue looking back on (and from) a moment where a smart adolescent boy is oddly infatuated with a retarded girl who waits for her school bus across the street from him. The infatuation is essentially a thought experiment, in some ways contemporarily Proustian. I found the idea better than the execution, but the experiment is appropriately short, and I found it a relief after barely taking a taste of a few conventional novels. A 3.5.
July 13, 2015
Disillusionment, self-actualization, pessimistic love for life & an unattainable object of desire as seen through the eyes (or voice) of a faceless, Holden-like teen. Youthful angst has always seemed poetic, but this one is more than that... it penetrates my soul.
May 13, 2022
I don't know where to begin. The style of this book was fun in that the prose was elegant (if contrived at times, which is to be expected when a French literary studies academic writes fiction) and I don't have an issue with the long stream-of-consciousness narrative, but I found this book unbearable.
First, I would like to have a word with the translator for finding it suitable to translate "débile" as "r*tarded" and put the aforementioned R-slur, which is like the N-word to people with disabilities, in the book alongside other problematic terms for intellectual disabilities such as "stupid" in excess of ten times over 84 pages. Good lord. There are other ways to translate the idea that don't make disabled readers feel like multiple hate crimes are being committed against them when they're just trying to read a novella. Farrar, Straus and Giroux - get your sh*t together.
Second, and most troubling, is that even the most tactful, sensitive translator in the world can't do much to make a book like this readable. There are other gems besides the R-slur in here to describe intellectually disabled people: the little girl that he keeps thinking about is described as "useless," on p. 38, followed two pages later by "idiot" to describe another disabled person, then two pages later "dim" to describe yet another person, to whose perseverative behaviors the author has the chutzpah to refer as "an allegory," as though people with autism (like me - hi!) are objects to be contemplated rather than people. I found the conceit of meditating on "intelligence" and "feeblemindedness/stupidity/r*tardation" a grotesque premise for a narrative. "Flowers for Algernon" has been written already, in the NINETEEN-FIFTIES, and with considerably more sensitivity around the topic, at that.
Third, the complete tactlessness with which the author describes people with disabilities makes the writing fail to convey that the narrator is musing back on his younger, more callow self and his process of maturation at several points. It became difficult to distinguish Young Narrator from Adult Narrator, even though that is apparently the point of the book, by virtue of the fact that they said the same nauseating garbage about people with disabilities for pages on end. These are the kind of thoughts that children who don't understand the world very well have about disability and intelligence until they become better educated and more mature. If the idea is that the narrator has gained insight into the world since his adolescence, then this book missed the mark by several miles.
The reflections of the narrator somehow manage to fetishize a girl with an intellectual disability (ew), marvel and gawk at the intellectual disabilities of several young men as though they were a spectacle to be "understood" rather than a disadvantage, and get very, very creepy in the smug satisfaction of being "smart" in a world where some people are - ahem - "dumb." It's like reading a narrative of a privileged, self-obsessed white kid thinking, wow, isn't it amazing that I get to be white in a world where people are (insert racialized slur here)? Wouldn't it be interesting if I had sex with one of them? I wonder if they have feelings and desires like me? Etc. Quite literally, this novella made me cringe over and over again. I could barely finish it.
What we have here is a nauseating set of privileged musings about how it's hard to be young (duh) and smart (spare me) wrapped in the pretentious garb of an experimental coming-of-age novel written in an inordinately grating voice. I do not understand why anyone on Goodreads sees fit to compare this to Proust, unless they are completely unaware of any other French authors who wrote autofiction about coming of age from the perspective of a Grown-Up Actual Writer. Ugggghhh. Speaking as a French lit professor here - this is more equal to the cringe factor of Marguerite Duras or Camille Laurens' autofiction. Talented with words? Yes. Capable of telling a story that doesn't make you despise the narrator and how much they clearly esteem themselves and hold others in disdain? Absolutely not. Please keep names like Marcel Proust (and Annie Ernaux) out of your mouth when you talk about this book.
I am actually too embarrassed to sell this to the used bookstore in my town because I do not want someone else to find it and be forced to read the R-slur used this many times in print so casually. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I read it all the way through when there are many better books that I haven't finished. There are very few books that I don't think improve the world, or that actually make it a worse place to live, but this is one of them. If anyone in the American publishing world happens upon this rant of mine, I would advise them to get cracking on publishing translations of other French experimental fiction that undoes destructive stereotypes and promotes enlightened perspectives on differences between people, like the novels written by Gauz (published by Le Nouvel Attila). The United States does not need to import the screeds of White Men Whining and wondering if disabled chicks ever get laid. There are reasons that I found this book at the Dollar Tree.
First, I would like to have a word with the translator for finding it suitable to translate "débile" as "r*tarded" and put the aforementioned R-slur, which is like the N-word to people with disabilities, in the book alongside other problematic terms for intellectual disabilities such as "stupid" in excess of ten times over 84 pages. Good lord. There are other ways to translate the idea that don't make disabled readers feel like multiple hate crimes are being committed against them when they're just trying to read a novella. Farrar, Straus and Giroux - get your sh*t together.
Second, and most troubling, is that even the most tactful, sensitive translator in the world can't do much to make a book like this readable. There are other gems besides the R-slur in here to describe intellectually disabled people: the little girl that he keeps thinking about is described as "useless," on p. 38, followed two pages later by "idiot" to describe another disabled person, then two pages later "dim" to describe yet another person, to whose perseverative behaviors the author has the chutzpah to refer as "an allegory," as though people with autism (like me - hi!) are objects to be contemplated rather than people. I found the conceit of meditating on "intelligence" and "feeblemindedness/stupidity/r*tardation" a grotesque premise for a narrative. "Flowers for Algernon" has been written already, in the NINETEEN-FIFTIES, and with considerably more sensitivity around the topic, at that.
Third, the complete tactlessness with which the author describes people with disabilities makes the writing fail to convey that the narrator is musing back on his younger, more callow self and his process of maturation at several points. It became difficult to distinguish Young Narrator from Adult Narrator, even though that is apparently the point of the book, by virtue of the fact that they said the same nauseating garbage about people with disabilities for pages on end. These are the kind of thoughts that children who don't understand the world very well have about disability and intelligence until they become better educated and more mature. If the idea is that the narrator has gained insight into the world since his adolescence, then this book missed the mark by several miles.
The reflections of the narrator somehow manage to fetishize a girl with an intellectual disability (ew), marvel and gawk at the intellectual disabilities of several young men as though they were a spectacle to be "understood" rather than a disadvantage, and get very, very creepy in the smug satisfaction of being "smart" in a world where some people are - ahem - "dumb." It's like reading a narrative of a privileged, self-obsessed white kid thinking, wow, isn't it amazing that I get to be white in a world where people are (insert racialized slur here)? Wouldn't it be interesting if I had sex with one of them? I wonder if they have feelings and desires like me? Etc. Quite literally, this novella made me cringe over and over again. I could barely finish it.
What we have here is a nauseating set of privileged musings about how it's hard to be young (duh) and smart (spare me) wrapped in the pretentious garb of an experimental coming-of-age novel written in an inordinately grating voice. I do not understand why anyone on Goodreads sees fit to compare this to Proust, unless they are completely unaware of any other French authors who wrote autofiction about coming of age from the perspective of a Grown-Up Actual Writer. Ugggghhh. Speaking as a French lit professor here - this is more equal to the cringe factor of Marguerite Duras or Camille Laurens' autofiction. Talented with words? Yes. Capable of telling a story that doesn't make you despise the narrator and how much they clearly esteem themselves and hold others in disdain? Absolutely not. Please keep names like Marcel Proust (and Annie Ernaux) out of your mouth when you talk about this book.
I am actually too embarrassed to sell this to the used bookstore in my town because I do not want someone else to find it and be forced to read the R-slur used this many times in print so casually. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I read it all the way through when there are many better books that I haven't finished. There are very few books that I don't think improve the world, or that actually make it a worse place to live, but this is one of them. If anyone in the American publishing world happens upon this rant of mine, I would advise them to get cracking on publishing translations of other French experimental fiction that undoes destructive stereotypes and promotes enlightened perspectives on differences between people, like the novels written by Gauz (published by Le Nouvel Attila). The United States does not need to import the screeds of White Men Whining and wondering if disabled chicks ever get laid. There are reasons that I found this book at the Dollar Tree.
September 27, 2013
I read Valtat's 'Aurorarama' and didn't really like it. But when I came across this, I was curious, especially because this was written in French, then translated, and 'Aurorarama' was written in English. I did think that the language in this came across as smoother, and with more clarity, but the styles are so very different that it's hard to compare.
It's peculiar that this was published as a stand-alone 'novel.' It comes across as a seemingly autobiographical essay.
A socially awkward teen develops a platonic crush-from-afar (or at least, from across the street) on a retarded girl that he sees every morning while waiting for the schoolbus. This setup is used as a jumping-off point to talk about the nuances of being an 'outsider,' and the parallells of being 'above' the norm and 'below' the norm... at least, that's how I saw it, as that's something I actually thought about quite a lot in high school, myself...
Interesting, but very, very short, and doesn't really explore its themes in too much depth.
It's peculiar that this was published as a stand-alone 'novel.' It comes across as a seemingly autobiographical essay.
A socially awkward teen develops a platonic crush-from-afar (or at least, from across the street) on a retarded girl that he sees every morning while waiting for the schoolbus. This setup is used as a jumping-off point to talk about the nuances of being an 'outsider,' and the parallells of being 'above' the norm and 'below' the norm... at least, that's how I saw it, as that's something I actually thought about quite a lot in high school, myself...
Interesting, but very, very short, and doesn't really explore its themes in too much depth.
October 11, 2010
Any book tagged as "experimental" runs the risk, fairly or not, of limiting its intended readership. Valtat's 03--at under 100 pages, as much a sketch as a fully formed portrait--is one of those books, combining elements of the French nouveau roman and an aimless, philosophically inquisitive "story" that calls to mind the plotting of a Seinfeld episode more than that of a Dickens serial. A powerful, quirky study of adolescence, even if some scenes misfire when they slip into melodrama and "half-baked philosophizing and glib aphorism" (Boston Globe), 03 nonetheless showcases Valtat as a risk taker and a lyricist, a trait no doubt even more evident in the original French. Valtat's recent Aurorama, a Steampunk novel set in the Arctic, has been well reviewed. This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
July 7, 2018
Thrilled by the conceit, but left cold by the content. Firstly, the narrator is writing this as a writer in retrospect. So, not all of this transpired in those three seconds in real life. Of course, how could they? His young self's thoughts are really the bitter musings of a man looking for nostalgia in remembrance yet forgetting the meaning of the word.
The musings themselves are pretty standard for a teen: school sucks, adults suck, being a kid sucks. Being a kid is to be oppressed no less. That the mentally challenged girl is both an image of what once was and what could never be is summed up in the novel's beautiful last pages. Getting there though, I feel like I've read this sort of diatribe before. I mean, these guys are from England and who gives a shit.
The musings themselves are pretty standard for a teen: school sucks, adults suck, being a kid sucks. Being a kid is to be oppressed no less. That the mentally challenged girl is both an image of what once was and what could never be is summed up in the novel's beautiful last pages. Getting there though, I feel like I've read this sort of diatribe before. I mean, these guys are from England and who gives a shit.
June 14, 2012
There really isn't much of a "story" here, which should be apparent by the synopsis for the book. It's not like we're tricked as to what this is about. Sure, there are elements of story, but it really does revolve around the racing thoughts of our narrator--which are more than enough for the length.
Truly, there are some gorgeous passages and ideas and summations of what it means to grow up. And Valtat ensures that the book only goes for just so long. Had it been much longer, the momentum would've been killed, losing what goodness this book has to offer.
If you just love the sounds of words and don't mind more of a philosophical rant than a story, this is a perfect little read.
Truly, there are some gorgeous passages and ideas and summations of what it means to grow up. And Valtat ensures that the book only goes for just so long. Had it been much longer, the momentum would've been killed, losing what goodness this book has to offer.
If you just love the sounds of words and don't mind more of a philosophical rant than a story, this is a perfect little read.
August 29, 2010
A bright teenager muses on difference, intelligence, talent, ambition, sexual drive, need, desire, the qualities the bind us to each other, the forces of social hypocrises--and seems to come to a tentative acceptance of himself, gaining an ability to love what he's lost, what he'll never become, and what he never was.
February 16, 2010
Especially for fans of Donald Antrim. I want all of my friends to read this, actually.
September 6, 2010
Awesome.
Want to read
September 21, 2010wow, I feel like this guy is going to be my new favorite author. If, you know, I actually read any of his books.
December 12, 2010
Like Proust condensed, this is new writing as close to perfection as I've read this year.
October 27, 2024
Having read this book sporadically over a couple of months, I have come to the conclusion that I should have read it in one session. That said, I'm unlikely to do so as I struggled so much to find enough empathy for the narrator or to engage with his adolescent-boy musings. Valtat has his narrator explore his longings in a self-obsessed diatribe full of similes and metaphors appropriate to an intelligent and alienated teenage boy, but we're never allowed out of his head, no voice is given to the "slightly retarded" girl who is the object his desire precisely because she has no agency, at no moment does Valtat let us see a knowing aside or external observation that might let us in on the joke. If this is Valtat's 'English-language debut' (so says the back cover, although this was translated from the French), the use of English here is somewhat tone-deaf, and though you might say that is the point, it was certainly not endearing.
October 24, 2021
Lolita-In-Microcosm For Disillusioned Teenagers
I will always enjoy anything Valtat chooses to share with the world. This short story spoke to me in a different way than New Venice; reminiscent of The Killer of Love, as well as Leon The Professional, I am likely missing 90% of the subtlety and subtext, but it was a welcome diversion and gave me pause to reflect on my own experiences as a former "gifted" youth.
I will always enjoy anything Valtat chooses to share with the world. This short story spoke to me in a different way than New Venice; reminiscent of The Killer of Love, as well as Leon The Professional, I am likely missing 90% of the subtlety and subtext, but it was a welcome diversion and gave me pause to reflect on my own experiences as a former "gifted" youth.
July 26, 2020
While the writing itself was at times poetic and the premise was insightful, the stream of consciousness style of writing lost me throughout the book. The plot was a bit lost or non-existent which made it difficult to follow along despite quite a few brief insights that made me stop to think more deeply.
July 10, 2019
Too long with no breaks. Dull and drull Teenage boy and his hormones getting the best of him. Teen angst. He hates school hates his parents and he needs to quit pining after an innocent .
December 17, 2023
GET A JOB
STAY AWAY FROM HER
STAY AWAY FROM HER
July 7, 2025
More stream of consciousness than anything else....
October 22, 2010
This book is one long (84 pp.) paragraph as the narrator recalls the time when, waiting for his bus to high school, he noticed a younger girl across the street waiting for a bus to take her in the other direction. When he realized that she was at least a little retarded, his imagination ignited and he tried to imagine what it would be like to be her, and called it being in love. Much of it rings terribly true: don't most teenagers consider their home town Nowheresville? He questioned the received wisdom of adults with an acuity that seems unlikely for a teenager, but thought-provoking: "... the idea that spontaneous feelings were better than others ... struck me as open to debate...Where were these so-called natural emotions and why were they worth more than the others?"
He is not likeable but I was on his side.
It would be best to read this in one sitting; the lack of paragraphs keeps you reading and doesn't give you a place to stop. I started it on the train and finished it in my hotel room, so didn't have the best experience; evenso it was exhilerating to keep reading as long as possible.
He is not likeable but I was on his side.
It would be best to read this in one sitting; the lack of paragraphs keeps you reading and doesn't give you a place to stop. I started it on the train and finished it in my hotel room, so didn't have the best experience; evenso it was exhilerating to keep reading as long as possible.
January 15, 2011
A moment of admiration turns into the layered musings of the sociological, philosophical, romantic and self examining variety. Musings which are remarkably insightful considering they're coming from a 12th grader — the most self-aware, prodigious near-adult I've come across in my readings (certainly not in my personal encounters). Can't quite determine whether this is the narrator looking back or caught in the moment (a la Nicholson Baker's narrator in the decidedly more quotidian The Mezzanine). Which, admittedly, irks me some.
The prose shifts effortlessly from the dense explanatory style of the philosophers to pure poetry ("...animals devouring each other in a blue fizz of flies"). No matter how measured his wonderment, the inquisitive bursts in this 80+ page, one-paragraph soliloquy often reach heartbreaking heights. Lots of underlines in this one.
Still, placed on my imaginary scale, the balance tipped in favor of the thought-provoking read more than an enjoyable, dreamy one.
The prose shifts effortlessly from the dense explanatory style of the philosophers to pure poetry ("...animals devouring each other in a blue fizz of flies"). No matter how measured his wonderment, the inquisitive bursts in this 80+ page, one-paragraph soliloquy often reach heartbreaking heights. Lots of underlines in this one.
Still, placed on my imaginary scale, the balance tipped in favor of the thought-provoking read more than an enjoyable, dreamy one.
November 28, 2011
We read 03 in our book group recently. It’s only 84 Pages long, so you wouldn’t expect it to be such a slow read. But it’s also written in only one paragraph, which makes putting it down and picking it up again difficult—how can you tell where you were. And it’s written in one slow stream-of-consciousness soporific voice. Some of us finished it.
A young man stands at a bus-stop looking at a girl who he thinks he might fall in love with. She’s handicapped. He has no qualms looking down on her, even as he imagines he’s looking up. Too smart for his years, like many other French protagonists, lonely, just beginning to grow up… the narrator fits many stereotypes and hardly seems to change, though at some point he switches from child to adult remembering—read carefully or you’ll miss it.
03 certainly evokes the loneliness of youth, but perhaps doesn’t age well, or perhaps I’m just not the intended audience.
Disclosure: We’re wondering in our book group if short books always take longer to read than long ones.
A young man stands at a bus-stop looking at a girl who he thinks he might fall in love with. She’s handicapped. He has no qualms looking down on her, even as he imagines he’s looking up. Too smart for his years, like many other French protagonists, lonely, just beginning to grow up… the narrator fits many stereotypes and hardly seems to change, though at some point he switches from child to adult remembering—read carefully or you’ll miss it.
03 certainly evokes the loneliness of youth, but perhaps doesn’t age well, or perhaps I’m just not the intended audience.
Disclosure: We’re wondering in our book group if short books always take longer to read than long ones.
December 3, 2012
I'd give this book a 3.5 for sure. Three stars for simply the way Valtat can write a sentence. If you're in the mood for a 90 page paragraph with sentences similar to Proust and instead of Proust and his madeline you want something more alternative, say, a retarded girl, to send the character off into minute speculations about life, love, intelligence and childhood then this is your book. Enjoy it. I went into it thinking it would be a quick, easy read, one that perhaps I could coerce some of my more alternative freshman to read, but I was wrong. It took time. I had to read the sentences over and over and if I got lost because my son was telling me about Venom or I needed a sip of coffee, I'd have to go back again. I will definitely read this again someday, perhaps during a warm summer day at a park, alone...then I'll give it four stars.
October 18, 2010
I’m not sure what to say about this book. It’s very short for a book, but the entire book is just one long paragraph. It’s about a teenage boy who has a crush on a retarded girl. The book is the boy’s musings on his love. It’s a collection of his reflections on different subjects while he’s standing at the bus stop and watches the girl. Proust’s name has been mentioned when reviewing this book. You wish – or maybe you don’t – Proust was this terse.
There was a time in my past when I would have been very, very impressed with this book. But now I find it more difficult to swallow pretentious philosophizing shoved down my throat in the name of experimental literary fiction. Not to put down the book. The writing is really beautiful, and some of the observations are quite insightful.
There was a time in my past when I would have been very, very impressed with this book. But now I find it more difficult to swallow pretentious philosophizing shoved down my throat in the name of experimental literary fiction. Not to put down the book. The writing is really beautiful, and some of the observations are quite insightful.
March 9, 2014
At 80 pages a concise and brilliantly imagined journey into the mind of a disaffected adolescent whose object of affection is a fourteen-year-old disabled girl that he sees everyday at the bus stop while waiting to go to school. That makes it sound like a novel with a plot. It's not. It's more like a meditation in the style of Thomas Bernhard: nothing happens, topics rise and fall on the gentle sea of Valtat's prose, and ideas and feelings flow with the special liquid despair and fury of the adolescent.
The interpretation of Joy Division's heart-wrenching song The Eternal is breathtaking, better that anything that I've ever read under the name of "rock criticism".
It's a book that I've gone back to often, maybe also because it's so brief, so devastating, so funny.
The interpretation of Joy Division's heart-wrenching song The Eternal is breathtaking, better that anything that I've ever read under the name of "rock criticism".
It's a book that I've gone back to often, maybe also because it's so brief, so devastating, so funny.
August 23, 2016
Valtat's slim little book is interesting and a bit dizzying. There's a Lolita vibe to it and a pretty unabashed expression of male longing heightened not only by his object's inability to speak (she's across the street) but her disability, whatever it is. So the female is voiceless and utterly defenceless, and the male voice appropriates literally everything. He's a teen too (there are some references but he could be older) and the effect on me was ooky and a little astonished at how tone-deaf the writer is to questions of having women and the disabled own their own voices. The writing is a brilliant and tone deaf tour de force of the male gaze and self-absorption, perhaps rightly so in a teen but still not my thing.
July 6, 2017
On its cover this book is credited as "a novel" though it is a novella, at least in terms of length-- a breezy, 85 small-sized and wide-margined pages; and if it were any longer, Valtat's stream of consciousness flow and refusal to separate the text into more than one long paragraph would tire or agitate the reader, who should unquestionably plan (barring some domestic catastrophe) to finish in one sitting, as there are short stories that are more lengthy, and because Valtat's translated prose about a twelfth grader's silent love for a "slightly retarded" girl seen at the bus stop one morning is moving and worthy of its uncommon form.
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