Voice Over

They have known each other for a long time. She has never quite been able to recall the moment when they met, the place, the precise day, whether she shook his hand or they kissed on the cheek. Nor has she ever thought to ask him. She does have a first memory, though. As she was was climbing into her coat in the narrow hallway of an unkempt apartment, she had caught his look of distress. The woman he had flirted with all evening was refusing to leave with him. He was trying to persuade her with an insistent barrage of words, which fell to pieces in the face of the majestic creature. She thought the idea of being suddenly deprived of the object of his affections must have been more than he could bear just then. And seeing him this way, in love, had moved her. She had slipped between the two of them and said, I'm off. But he had not replied.

I have quoted the opening passage of Voice Over by Céline Curiol in its entirety to give you a sense of its style. At first I was immersed in the narrative, admiring her approach, but I soon became lost and never found my way in the text, to where it was going. The style is at first novel but it quickly becomes off-putting. The anonymous narrator -a disembodied voice who announces trains at the Gare du Nord- remains faceless and nameless and I never had a sense of who she was. The "he" from the opening paragraph, the man she loves, also remains nameless and I was often confused about who I was reading about, especially as the time narrative moves backwards and forwards, like a train making stops at certain stations along the way. The style is never-changing and the continual stream-of-consciousness throughout the text, with no chapter breaks or even dialogue, made it inaccessible to me. The style though is definitely a talking point.

As mentioned yesterday, this was a book group choice and it certainly generated discussion. For the most part though it was to voice our own incomprehension and wonder at what Curiol was attempting to achieve, at which we drew no definitive conclusions. We deviated into a rich and informative discussion on accomplished, unique, and, at times, alienating narratives (think Coetzee, Self, Amis), which greatly interested and intrigued me. I am attracted to books that play with the boundaries of narrative and I do enjoy feeling confused by an author's intent on occasion but I don't think I was in the right head space for Voice Over. For a start, my head has hurt since last Thursday and prose that I really had to work at made it worse. I thought that a book at just over 200 pages would be a breeze to read in a couple of days but it wasn't; I struggled with its density. I was left with no insight into the narrator -the stream of consciousness doesn't actually allow you into her mind or a sense of who she is- or the authorial message, if there was one; I even questioned whether all of the strange events in the novel existed or were imagined in her head. I found this book a very difficult one to read and I don't think it was limitations of translation in any way but a style that simply didn't suit my reading needs. With a fuzzy head and post-Persephone week exhaustion, followed by immersion into Catching Fire, I have fallen into a bit of a book slump, that isn't helped by a time-sensitive to-be-read pile (Bookers mainly).

I was left feeling underwhelmed and confused by Voice Over but it generated a good discussion. All in all it is a curious book but makes an interesting choice for a book group. Some of us disliked it and others enjoyed its originality but we all agreed that it is bizarre.

Polly of Novel Insights has also posted her thoughts and I enjoy that we took different things away from it and both provide different views of the same picture. I forgot to mention the Esther Greenwood (from The Bell Jar) comparisons to the narrator, which were wonderfully coincidental. eta: Simon has also posted his views from Tel Aviv!