Hallucinating Foucault

Patricia Duncker

Duncker's first novel gives us the story of the narrator, who remains anonymous throughout, a graduate student doing a dissertation on Paul Michel, a novelist who wrote flawless, detached prose, but lived a life of extremity. Michael stopped writing, and disappeared, in 1984. Nine years later, the graduate student, embroiled in an exceptionally odd relationship with another graduate student doing a dissertation on Schiller, heads to France to find out what really happened to Paul Michel, and whether he's still alive.

The book's main flaw is its first section, before the narrator heads off to France, which is pedestrian. There's a great deal of setup, much of which seems quite extraneous. Once our narrator gets to Paris, however, things start moving along considerably. Which is rather odd, considering much of the second part of the story is simply the narrator reading letters.

Odd, but symptomatic of the book as a whole; it's almost as if Duncker wanted to get any real action, any motion, out of the way before she really dove into the meat of her subject, much of which is discourse on the nature of literature, love, obsession, the relationship between the reader and the writer, and ultimately what one has to do for one's life to be productive (whatever the rest of the world thinks of it). There are long stretches where one forgets one is reading a novel; this could well be social/literary theory (and were more social/literary theorists to write in such a readable manner, they'd sell more books). There is a moment towards the very end where the reader is jerked back into the function of reader, where the novelness of the novel takes over again, and that jerking is a wonderfully calculated move; it adds a great deal of surprise to an already-surprising revelation at book's end.

This was quite a well-done little book, and I'll definitely be reading the fiction she's published since this came out.