ASEROË

Published in 1992 in French, this is the first of celebrated author Dominique’s works to be translated into English. Though billed as a novel, it resists all expectations of what a novel should do in terms of narrative cohesion, plot development, or character dynamics. Instead, the author renders his narrator François’ sensory perceptions and their attendant philosophic connotations with a precisely articulated language that calls to mind other continental authors, like Maurice Blanchot or Antoine Volodine, and their attempts to merge the theoretical realm of ideas with the poetic language of the lived life. Separated into 12 sections, the book begins with an homage to its namesake, a type of stinkhorn fungus with “an odor so unbearable and so persistent that even the most distracted passerby cannot fail to notice it.” Upon this unlikely subject, François attempts an esoteric experiment aimed at studying the “power of attraction” an object may have over the language used to describe it. As any amateur mycologist will know, the common names of mushrooms take full advantage of the organisms’ “fundamental character,” which, François remarks, “insidiously invite[s] organic, libidinous metaphorization” of every extreme. Indeed, the narrator’s delight in the rills of language that compose the lists of mushroom names and the funk of their description makes for enthusiastically engaged reading. Each of the remaining 11 sections is a separate, only loosely connected exploration of the inevitable failure of language as a tool of communication. The reader travels through scenes of Rimbaud’s death and meets an “idiot girl” in a cafe, among other vignettes. Though each section contains an element of the startling vulnerability François displays as he falls victim to the stinkhorn’s lingual mutability, there is an unhappy tendency for the narrator to facilitate his philosophical swoons through other characters’ objectification. This is most apparent in the case of the intellectually disabled girl in the cafe but is also evident in the repeated use of the trope of a sexually available female character who appears solely in order to expedite a revelation on the part of the narrator. The use of a character as a prop to exemplify a philosophical condition is, of course, an ancient one, and no one expects these characters to be fleshed out beyond this role in a philosophical screed. In a book that claims to be novel first, though, one cannot summon characters into being only to so casually dismiss them, particularly when these characters are so uniformly of a type—vulnerable, strange, and female.

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