{"id":4812,"date":"2010-09-15T13:09:16","date_gmt":"2010-09-15T17:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=4812"},"modified":"2010-10-27T13:30:44","modified_gmt":"2010-10-27T17:30:44","slug":"a-week-in-culture-nelly-kaprielian-critic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/15\/a-week-in-culture-nelly-kaprielian-critic\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in Culture: Nelly Kaprielian, Critic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

DAY ONE<\/h3>\n

10:00 A.M.<\/strong> How can you tell when a novel is great? When, even on a second reading, you keep discovering new things, you keep being amazed, impressed, amused, when the text keeps making you think about the world and your own life. That’s how it is with Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, La Carte et le Territoire<\/a><\/em>. I just finished rereading it this morning in preparation for my interview with him tonight. The book comes out September 8 and already\u2014ever since August 20\u2014the press has been full of raves. <\/p>\n

Every Houellebecq novel is an event. The only real phenomenon in French letters, and the only French author known abroad, Houellebecq has certainly paid a price: to be idolized like a rock star, yes, but also hated, scorned, dragged through the mud by his idolators. Since The Elementary Particles<\/a> <\/em>came out in 1998, Les Inrockuptibles<\/a><\/em> has stood by Houellebecq, defending him against the unfounded attacks that greeted one of his best books, The Possibility of an Island<\/a><\/em>, in 2005. Out of loyalty, Houellebecq has granted us the first in-depth interview about the book, and the only long interview in a serious weekly. Needless to say, such loyalty is rare in the literary world. Ironically, thanks to the new book, Houellebecq finds himself lionized yet again by the press. Whenever a book of his appears, the media\u2019s reaction tells you as much about them as about the book itself.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>11:00 A.M.<\/strong> It hasn\u2019t got any sex in it, no swingers\u2019 clubs, no Thai whores. The novel, which is less angry and less polemical than his previous work, will be read on its own terms, simply as a great book: a total novel, a metaphysical labyrinth of dizzying complexity, a vision of the world that we once knew and have lost to globalization. No, it isn\u2019t exactly funny. And yet Houellebecq manages to combine his despair with an irony that draws you helplessly in. It strikes me that this is why I do my job\u2014why all critics do\u2014for the intense feeling, for the adrenaline rush, of discovering a work of genius. If it wasn\u2019t eleven in the morning, I\u2019d pour myself a shot of vodka.<\/p>\n

12:00 P.M.<\/strong>. At the office, in Bastille. I have other people\u2019s reviews to edit, headlines to write (trying to be witty, to think up puns \u2026 a nightmare), etc. But first I can\u2019t resist going straight to the editor of the TV section and begging him\u2014on bended knees, with clasped and trembling hands\u2014to let me borrow season three of Mad Men<\/em>. That\u2019s one advantage of working for a culture journal. You can get all 13 episodes at once, and watch five in one night. Ecstasy.<\/p>\n

5:40 P.M.<\/strong>
\nHouellebecq\u2019s novel features a misanthropic alcoholic named Michel Houellebecq, who says at one point: \u201cYou know, it\u2019s the journalists who\u2019ve given me the reputation of a drunk: what\u2019s odd is that none of them ever realized that, if I drink a lot in their presence, it\u2019s only so I can stand them.\u201d<\/p>\n

I pick up a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.<\/p>\n

\"\"6:07 P.M.<\/strong>
\nHouellebecq is \u2026 Houellebecquian. The Ritz? The Meurice? The Plaza? No. While in Paris he stays at a completely crummy chain hotel\u2014in the 13th Arrondissement, no less, the same neighborhood where his main character, the artist Jed Martin, lives. The room is depressing enough to make you want to jump out the window. Pajamas balled up on the unmade bed, electric toothbrush recharging on the table. The usual slow delivery, the usual long silence before every sentence, the usual cigarette in the corner of his mouth. And yet he has changed: he\u2019s thinner, his face is more deeply lined, his eyes seem washed out, he seems exhausted. It worries me. \u201cThank you for the champagne, but I already picked up a bottle. We\u2019ll drink them both.\u201d And so we do.<\/p>\n

10:30 P.M.<\/strong>
\nMichel orders a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape at the Moroccan restaurant where he has taken me to dinner.<\/p>\n

11:35 P.M.<\/strong>
\nHe has fallen fast asleep on the table. What to do? The kind waitress hails a taxi, I shake Michel by the shoulders to wake him up, help him to his feet and put him in the car. \u201cWhere are we?\u201d he asks, still half asleep. In the taxi he finally recognizes the 13th Arrondissement and seems reassured. I tell him that the most worrying thing, for me, is that I seem able to hold my liquor better than \u2026 Michel Houellebecq himself. \u201cYes, but you have practice, what with all those literary cocktail parties they make you attend.\u201d All is well: he has got back his sense of humor.<\/p>\n

11:55 P.M.<\/strong> In front of his hotel we smoke a few more cigarettes while the taxi waits to take me home. \u201cAlcohol, you know, is a thing of my youth. I don\u2019t drink the way I used to. I\u2019m old now, and I don\u2019t think I have much longer to go. La Carte et le Territoire<\/em> may be my last book \u2026 \u201c Touching, moving, sincere, brilliant, funny, utterly down-to-earth \u2026 An interview with Michel Houellebecq is not like an interview with anybody else. No doubt about it, I love the guy. <\/p>\n

DAY TWO<\/h3>\n

\"\"9:30 A.M.<\/strong> Not even a hangover! I call my head editor, who is dying to know how things went with Michel H. He\u2019s thrilled when I told him the whole story: \u201cWrite all of that in your article, starting in the taxi on the way there.\u201d He’s right, naturally, only I hate articles that start with some cut-rate gonzo clich\u00e9 about being in the taxi before an interview. Above all, I hate the kind of journalism that reduces a great writer to his biography for the sake of a profile. I recently read an article in a British paper about Bret Easton Ellis\u2019s new book<\/a>\u2014and all it talked about was his bad relationship with his father. (While we\u2019re at it, what about his dog?)<\/p>\n

10:30 A.M.<\/strong> Starting to write my article about another great book: Summertime<\/em>, by J. M. Coetzee. A fictional autobiography told by five narrators (mostly women) who mattered in Coetzee\u2019s life (he is dead when the book begins). To hear the women tell it, he\u2019s cold, shy, repressed, a bad lover, and they didn\u2019t fall in love with him. He\u2019s ridiculous and pathetic. Coetzee dwells on the distance between life and literature, the difference between the writer as his readers imagine him and as he, disappointingly, is. I have interviewed billions of writers. I\u2019ve dated some. And of course Coetzee\u2019s point amuses me deeply. He\u2019s so right!<\/p>\n

\"\"12:00 P.M.<\/strong> There is a funny similarity between Coetzee\u2019s and Houellebecq\u2019s books. Each writes about himself, presenting himself as pathetic\u2014and, sooner or later, as dead. Each kills himself through fiction. Houellebecq describes himself as lonely, depressed, dirty, drunk all the time, eating junk food, spending his days watching cartoons on TV. Yesterday he was telling me that he took an intense masochistic pleasure in writing about himself that way. Also, he has turned up as a character in other people\u2019s novels, and he likes showing all of these writers who used him that they could have done a better job. Indeed! <\/p>\n

In his own way, Coetzee is making it impossible to write a biography after his death. No one, in speaking of those two, can do worse than they have done. Each novel is a sort of master class.<\/p>\n

2:30 P.M.<\/strong> At the office. Not much going on, to tell the truth. Can\u2019t wait to go home and watch Mad Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

7:30 P.M.<\/strong> Oh, no ! I forgot I have a dinner party to go to. So much for Mad Men<\/em>. Fortunately, \u00c9lodie, who works for a publishing house, lives just up the street. There are two other book critics there. Each manages the culture or book section of a weekly magazine. Each of us has brought someone from outside the business, so we do our best not to talk about literature. But it\u2019s like asking junkies not to talk about drugs. After lots of champagne (in France, a good book critic is a critic who drinks, I wouldn\u2019t trust a sober one\u2026), we crack. \u201cWhat did you think of X?\u201d \u201cDid you read Y?\u201d blah blah blah. I pity our friends, who seem to be standing on the sidelines of a game whose rules nobody\u2019s bothered to explain. <\/p>\n

3:20 A.M.<\/strong> I notice my watch on the floor\u2014what is my watch doing on the floor? I never, ever lose that watch. Or almost never. Pick it up and realize it\u2019s after three. Standing up to leave, I also realize we\u2019re all drunk.<\/p>\n

DAY THREE<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>9:00 A.M.<\/strong> Hungover. And wouldn’t you know it, this morning I have to go on national TV (and not just national: France 24 is broadcast in other countries too) to talk about that typically French phenomenon known as the “rentr\u00e9e litt\u00e9raire.” Every year, at the end of August, French publishers bring out about 700 books, all at once, hoping for a shot at one of the literary prizes that get awarded in October and November\u2014most famously (and always most controversially) the Prix Goncourt.<\/p>\n

10:45 A.M.<\/strong> I begged the makeup woman to camouflage my Elephant Man eyes, whatever it took. Now I have the eyes of an Elephant Man who tried really hard to look pretty.<\/p>\n

11:00 A.M.<\/strong> Why are the offices of a TV station always spacious, neat, futuristic, beautiful–when the offices of a print journal are always a pigsty? The program starts. The interviewer asks the ritual question, the same one they asked last year and will ask again a year from now: “Seven hundred books\u2014isn’t that too many?” <\/p>\n

It’s funny, in June or July, while I’m trying to select the best novels for our special rentr\u00e9e issue, I hate that figure, 700. I spend every night all summer reading while normal people are out on some caf\u00e9 terrace having fun. But by late August, when it’s all over, and when they ask me the question, I always answer, “Would you prefer to live in a country that published only three books a year?” <\/p>\n

Choice is freedom. And if some of the books don’t get read, too bad. A good book will always find readers.<\/p>\n

11:30 A.M.<\/strong> The preordained question about the new Michel Houllebecq: “Everyone says it’s a masterpiece. True or false?” No question about it, he’s the star of the rentr\u00e9e. <\/p>\n

Forgive me. How can I help writing about him every day?<\/p>\n

1:00 P.M.<\/strong> Back to work. Meetings, tension, soul-searching. All par for the course, since the magazine is being completely redesigned and relaunched on September 15. I’m happy because we managed to keep our book section long, with real reviews and not just advertorial capsules. Nowadays you can’t take a thing like that for granted.<\/p>\n

\"\"8:30 P.M.<\/strong> Mad Men<\/em> and herbal tea. Everyone has a theory about Mad Men<\/em>. Mine is that our era has reduced women to two choices about their bodies\u2014puritanical guilt (the burka, the chador, anorexia) and pornography (fake boobs, fake blonds, muscles, tramp stamps, etc.)\u2014and we’re nostalgic for a time when a woman could dare to have a woman’s body, when a woman could be comfortable with her sensuality, her breasts, her dress size, her legs. The dresses on Mad Men<\/em> show everything, even as they hide everything, and that’s what makes them so provocative in 2010. <\/p>\n

Today Christina Hendricks’s breasts are a thousand times more subversive than any tatooed lower back.<\/p>\n

Check back tomorrow for the second installment of Kaprielian’s culture diary. Nelly Kaprielian is a critic and editor in Paris, France.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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