Belgian literature at its best

http://www.book-blog.com/2008/09/tous... ( )

This is an amusing novella about a man on a sabbatical in Berlin, hoping to work on his "monograph" about Titan, who gives up watching television. The book demonstrates the pervasiveness of television in society. A wry glimpse into an everyday, mundane, and delightfully humorous life, which is unrecognized by the narrator. Delightful if a bit frothy. ( )

Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Television is about as mesmerizing as a book about nothing can be. Mesmerizing yet a little numbing, like a television, set to a constant low hum. There were several times that I wanted to abandon the book, thinking "Alright, I get it!", but I kept being drawn back to it the way the flickering images on a TV in a bar or restaurant can draw my attention even when I know I can't hear the audio.
Television is not so much about television as it is about the narrator and his ability to put off writing. Throughout the course of the book, all he manages to write is two words. Yet, the narrator claims he is working: if he is swimming, dining, walking and thinking about his book, or preparing to think about his book, he is 'working'. The narrator describes how he postpones any actual writing in a series of humorous events over the course of a summer. Each of these scenarios -- a chance encounter with his benefactor in the park, dinner with a colleague, watering his neighbor's plants, floating casually in the pool -- is, like the book as a whole, without much of a plot. Yet, the recounting of his day-to-day activities creates an effect on the reader similar to one a rabid channel-surfer in control of the remote would have on another viewer: the blurring of story lines, different faces and times, scattered observations in one continuous loop. Sitcom, melodrama, documentary, arts: on TV it all blurs, and little of it is memorable. Like the banality of television programming, it the mundane that occupies the narrator's life. And he is okay with that.

Read my complete review here: http://camreading.blogspot.com/2006/0... ( )