First a good news, at least for me: I was finally able to order 'Mapping the Territory' (see previous post) at Amazon. And I could have ordered all the other books from Alyson, for that matter. Without shipping or handling fees. Thank you Amazon! It all was an unpleasant error. A glitch.
Robert Pinget is one of the greatest French writers of the second half of the twentieth century, although he had been somewhat ignored, not only lately. Born in Geneva in 1919, he died in Tour in 1997. He was best known as a member of the Nouveau Roman, a group he did no feel very comfortable with. His obituary (Robert Pinget, 78, a Master Of the Nouveau Roman, Dies), published in The New York Times in 1997, provides a good summary of his life and art. In 2004 the literary review Europe published an issue mostly dedicated to Robert Pinget. I discovered it in my library while selecting books to give away during my last stay in Paris. In a short contribution (Souvenirs de Robert Pinget) Claude Simon writes:
J'éprouvais pour lui non seulement une réelle admiration (je tiens Quelqu'un pour un chef-d'œuvre) mais encore une sympathie particulière du fait qu'il était Genevois d'origine et ma famille paternelle de ce Jura tout proche où j'ai passé mes vacances d'enfant: je retrouvais donc dans ses livres un 'climat' (gens, parler, nature) qui m'est particulièrement cher, et même des situations (comme celle du petit garçon qui se perd dans la forêt en cherchant des framboises) dont l'ensemble constitue en moi tout un monde." Then he adds: "Nos rapports presque impossibles ont-ils été de ma faute, de la sienne (ou du fait de son homosexualité)?
Even The New York Times was more circumspect (but, yes, it was in another century): "After living for some years in Paris, Mr. Pinget, who never married, opted for the isolation of a cottage near Tours in the Touraine region."
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Instead on working on the sequel to Pilcrow Adam Mars-Jones continues to write for the TLS. He recently (January 8th issue) produced a rather negative review of the play Rope (Patrick Hamilton, 1929) currently shown at Almeida Theatre in London. Rope is based on the infamous real-life crime of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb which is the subject of a thick volume published by Simon Baatz in 2008, For the Thrill of It - Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago. The play was the basis of Hitchcock's movie The Rope, "that perverse reworking of stagecraft into self-absorbed cinematic virtuosity," writes Mars-Jones, after having suggested: "The obvious way to remake the play for a modern audience would be to build this up as a gay relationship, following Tom Kalin in his film 'Swoon' (1992), based on the same crime; to say in effect, 'yes we're monsters, but you wouldn't let us be anything else, and we've come to enjoy it'."
2010.02.07
