Rikki Ducornet

This wonderfully strange and hormonal B-movie of a novel has the feel of an uncensored fairy-tale, and I mean that in the best possible way. It's pulsing with onanistic nuns and Satanic alchemists and hirsute dildo-salesmen; and yet the whole thing somehow also works as a dark metaphor for the experience of a girl on the cusp of adolescence, discovering, with the usual mixture of excitement and terror and awe, the mysteries of life, death, puberty, sexuality and religion. It reads something show more like an Angela Carter rewrite of Diderot's The Nun, and it should have been filmed by 80s-era Pedro Almodóvar.

The girl in question is Charlotte, whom we follow from birth to age 14 or so, sometime towards the end of the nineteenth-century in a rural hamlet in France's Loire Valley (at the time, the author was living in Le Puy-Notre-Dame). There is no great compelling story-arc: the action advances episodically through encounters of almost magisterial weirdness, in which wide-eyed naïf Charlotte grows up and tries to make sense of life as she is buffeted in turn by the various eccentric inhabitants of the village. The scenes and the characters are over-the-top, often ludicrous, but it's all very self-aware and witty, not to mention deliciously dark and extreme – it can be ridiculous but it's so much fun.

Ducornet's prose is a delight: lexically rich but also able to throw out passages of condensed wit – such as this thumbnail description of villagers during a flood:

In the villages of Louerre and Louresse, desperate families huddled together on rooftops and looked on helplessly as their livestock and an occasional arthritic ancestor drowned.

It takes both skill and humour to withhold the verb to the very end of the sentence there, and there are many similarly nimble phrases studded throughout the novel, going off like little depth-charges in your brain. Although you always feel that Ducornet's in control, it isn't what you'd call a restrained prose style: on the contrary, she's pretty much turned all the dials up to eleven throughout. Here's how we're introduced to Sister Malicia, the apotheosis of every nightmarish schoolteacher-nun that you've ever read about or encountered:

…a cadaverous creature as human as a broom handle, her arms knotted across her flat chest to protect the inverted nipples that dented the flesh like the cruel traces of tacks, her pale blue eyes lying loosely in their sockets like faded minerals in sagging boxes […she] carried her lovelessness with majesty.

Subtlety is clearly not the point here: Ducornet is having fun, fun, fun. Like an illustrated mediaeval manuscript, her narrative is booby-trapped with moments of unexpected obscenity or grotesquerie that jump at you out of nowhere.

Returning to his bed, the Devil's insinuations hot in his ears, he sinks his teeth into the palpitating sugar-plum of Dreamland, and straddling the corpulent finger of sleep, thrusting hard, fucks Time.

What's that all about? God knows, but there's a lot of sentences like that in here. I was grinning and scratching my head a lot – appreciatively. You have to admire the audacity of someone who can describe a nun's anus as her ‘rosy cyclopean nether eye’ – and how many other writers, searching for an adjective to describe the Virgin Mary's breasts, would plump for ‘quince-shaped’?! This is deft but this is also bonkers – a combination that I happen to love. Shall we have more quotes? Here's the village Exorcist contemplating his latest ritual:

But first the convent must be cleansed, the floors and walls washed with vinegar. He'll have to grease some snakes, salt the shit, tattoo a pregnant sow, fuck a three-horned cow, burn myrrh…

Although it sometimes seems like craziness for craziness's sake, you never stop feeling for poor Charlotte at the heart of the novel. The book is full of provocative symbolism and apparent magic – but like all proper fairy-tales, that's not what it's ultimately about. It's about learning to navigate the very real dangers and pleasures of reality. Behind the inventive and balls-deep insanity, in the end The Stain invites wiser, more grown-up readers to share one character's ‘intimate conviction that everything that is, is visible. That the universe is knowable, if only you dare look.’ show less

Ah! Another teetering indecision writ large. More than four and less than five* (because as a matter of taste, [b:Gazelle|379258|Gazelle|Rikki Ducornet|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320464330s/379258.jpg|1361250] is so lyrically beautiful that [b:Netsuke|9683311|Netsuke|Rikki Ducornet|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328752966s/9683311.jpg|14571287], for all its brilliance, its macabre sensitivity, its fever dream quality, it rattles rather than ravishes) and my longer review to follow.

Suffice show more to say (au ce moment) that it is shocking, but not in the closet-prude-turned-avid-voyeur way...shocking in its execution, its exploration, its ethereal decadence and its twisted rendering and its unavoidable fascination - a train wreck in motion approaching its inexorable conclusion...

******

I recommend this book as other than the first foray into Ducornet because this is a writer who commenced powerful (and powerfully) and has developed and extended her range in such a way that to ingest of her, like partaking of finely aged and accented wine without having learned to appreciate the gradations of structure, vintage, palate, and bouquet and pronounce it thus the equivalent of mass-produced and vat-manufactured fermented fruit less than fit to be included in the concoction of the blushful Hippocrene, sans the experience of her transition from gifted raw to genius sophistication risks lacking the necessary apperception and raffinesse to discern the nuances of the story as it unfolds.

Which it does, on a number of levels. The voices of the protagonists are discrete, differentiated and sustained for the length of the novel, irrespective of whether Ducornet employs the first-person point-of-view (which she does, to astounding effect and lending an immediacy all the more acute and penetrating, in present tense) or omniscient narrator, and despite a spare, stark, prose, brutal in its impact, which is not her hallmark style, but which suits the character of her lead protagonist and creates the sense of impending, unavoidable doom that propels the story to its final annihilation. There is no redemption, no reassembling, no means to thwart or defeat the outcome of succumbing to compulsion.

This ability that Ducornet exhibits to craft her prose according to the atmosphere required of that which she wishes to explore, that to which she wishes to direct our attention and force our appraisal (of ourselves and the situation) is reflected in both the title of the work and the netsuke comprising part of the protagonist's collection of art pieces in which he professes so little aesthetic interest, and which inform his personality, his perspective and raison d'etre - the objectification and compartmentalisation of each aspect of his life as a means to deal with his Existenzkrise. That his wife is Japanese is not because she embodies a fascination with the culture but because she is emblematic of its elegance and ethereality, the purity of its precision, its lack of ambiguity, exemplified in the netsuke, miniature sculptures used as toggles to secure small containers to the obi of kimono and kosode, and traditionally worn to adorn men.

The imagery created by the prose demands the reader's willing collusion; but expect scenes to remain long after closing the book. Not because of graphic description of action, but because of graphic allusion. That is a degree of skill that few modern writers evince, let alone master. And it is perfectly suited to the material Ducornet treats here. Avoid reading this book if you expect a pop-corn style reality-docu-drama of a taboo subject - you'll be disappointed. But if you would allow yourself the vicarious experience of a relentless, sensuous, descent into hell, reading this book will bring its own provocative reward.

*On reflection, five stars. show less

The Plotinus is the first of Coffee House Press's NVLA series, which consists of novellas that "challenge and broaden the outer edges of storytelling." I knew, going in, that I would probably be very confused reading this, and I was right! I didn't even enjoy it for the first half, and I even considered DNF'ing it, but then somehow I got the hang of it—the story or the writing style or both—and the whole thing became so profound.

Content warnings:
- homophobia
- (what I guess could be read show more as, but I don't honestly think is) bestiality

Representation:
- I think this is inspired by Egypt?

On the surface, the book is about a young man who's arrested for going outside with his "knobby stick" by a robot called the plotinus and thrown into a cell where, as he awaits death, he tells his story in code by knocking on the air vent. As he grows more gaunt and malnourished, he discovers true beauty and almost religious-like ecstasy in the sight of the hornets who build a nest in the upper corner of his cell.

The story seems to take place in the far future, when robots have successfully staged their uprising over humanity and the less wealthy humans that haven't colonized Mars are either trapped in their houses or left to die in prisons. But things are left very open, very vague and I think personal interpretations go a long way.

By the end, I already found this to be very moving and deep. It's kind of the prime example of "show, don't tell." But then I realized that the title never tripped my note app's spellcheck, which got me curious. I searched "plotinus" and went down an enormous rabbit hole upon learning that there was a lot more to this story than I first thought. It stands on its own (and I was going to rate it five stars as it was!), but the additional background knowledge took everything to a completely new level.

"Plotinus" was actually a Greek philosopher from Roman Egypt (204-270 CE) who is thought of today as the founder of Neoplatonism, philosophy very influential during late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. His three fundamental principles include the One, the Intellect, and the Soul.

The One is a supreme, transcendent one, "prior to all existents," and Plotinus identifies this One with the principal of "Beauty" (Beauty being the narrator's lover in the novella as well as something associated with the hornet he's fascinated by). Plotinus also compares the One to light and the sun, and compares the Soul to the moon, whose light is merely a reflection of the sun. I wish I still had the book from the library, so that I could read it again paying much closer attention to the way the narrator remarks on the sunlight and moonlight that seeps into his cell from his one window. I think so many elements of this tiny novella could produce a number of essays of equal or longer pages (like Eros and sensuality/sexuality). This author is so intelligent, it boggles my mind!

But I'm not done, because the rabbit hole I went down that night was very, very deep.

Plotinus also wrote about true human happiness, which is beyond anything physical: "the human who has achieved happiness will not be bothered by sickness, discomfort, etc., as his focus is on the greatest things." He describes this as "henosis", unity with the One, and a state of tabula rasa. Looking back at the novella, this is very similar to what the narrator feels at the very ending when he looks upon the hornets.

This isn't a very long read (honestly, reading about the historical Plotinus will take longer), but the experience is incredibly meaningful. There's so many layers and ways to enjoy this story, I have no idea how Rikki Ducornet was able to craft this. I have to read what else she's written! show less

A Goodreads friend highly recommended Rikki Ducornet’s novel, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition. Having never previously read Ducornet’s works, I find that she writes very luscious, provocative prose, which seems especially fitting as the subtitle of the book is A Novel of the Marquis de Sade. Partly, it’s a historical fiction novel based around a fan-maker (of scandalous fans, writings, friendships, & liasions) being tried during the Reign of Terror while also weaving a tale of an earlier show more reign of terror, that of Bishop Landa’s Inquisition & autos-da-fé of Mayans in the 1500s. Ducornet excels with her alternating transcripts of the court proceedings, personal letters, and various documents used to tell the overlapping stories. Her skillful hand exposes the irony, hypocrisy, and zealotry that drive humans to various extremes – acts from destroying different cultures, destroying individuals, destroying minds – whether done by groups or people on the outside or whether the decay begins from within. It takes an adroit author to create simultaneous plotlines that cover different time periods, while entwining the similar threads of the undoing of both men & civilizations. We certainly repeat the past, don’t we?

{Note: Some spoilers ahead…}

I especially liked Ducornet’s parallels between Bishop Landa’s destruction of Mayan books/knowledge & the Reign of Terror’s destruction of materials deemed inappropriate. Censorship & fanaticism are timeless topics & this book gave a somewhat lesser-known historical look at topics that still haunt us today. (Looking up Bishop Landa, I found irony in the fact that while he destroyed so much knowledge, he also was one of the most knowledgeable about Mayan learning & his notes & information are still being used today to help decipher the Mayan language.) These are not the only parallels that shine through the text; the topics may be rooted in the past yet are so relevant to each other as well as to today.

On a small side note, I enjoyed the fan-maker descriptions because fans had prominence in a different book (The Stockholm Octavo) I read earlier this year. And, the Marquis also figured in another historical fiction I read set during the French Revolution, Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution. Certainly, the Marquis de Sade is a notorious figure, but after reading so much about the Reign of Terror, I imagine it must have been an incredible feat for anyone to stay sane during those times, especially if imprisoned for years, some of the time within seeing/hearing distance of the guillotine during its daily use surrounded by baying crowds.

{End of spoilers.}

Historical fiction that’s both exquisite & sharp, while pointing out issues that plague society today, especially if you’re concerned with freedom of speech/expression & censorship – what more can you ask for in a novel? The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition provides some savory fodder for discussions & pondering -- & perhaps the dream of learning & growing from our past. Highly recommended. 4.5 stars.

"What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading." – Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition show less