Running Away

A three part review of Toussaint's 'Marie' novels, excluding the first one, 'Making Love,' which is out of print and would have cost me over eighty dollars second hand--here's hoping the current copyright owners will let Dalkey bring it out and keep it in print.

Running Away was a very pleasant surprise; a bit like a Javier Marias novel with most of the thinking taken out. It's all spectacular scenes in wonderfully interesting writing, and ever so slightly silly--the narrator is always out of his depth, and there's nothing he can do about that fact. The book is also perfectly structured; if nothing else, Toussaint's work here will do prospective writers as much or more good than a semester at an MFA. My only complaint--and this will show more echo through the other volumes--is that when Marie is present, the book becomes less interesting. It's hard to avoid in this one: we start with a near-love scene on a train, move onto the best chase scene I've ever read, and then... well, then Marie is just kind of there, being supposedly irresistable, but actually falling prey to the all-too-common 'Anna Karenina' syndrome, in which the supporting female character is far more interesting and alluring than the 'sexy,' 'mysterious' lead.

The Truth About Marie has scenes as wonderful as RA's, but with the special bonus of actually including Marie and making her ever-so-slightly interesting, provided you can nget interested in a woman who is really sad because her horse has died. I'm sure it's very sad when your horse dies; but really, if you own a horse, and hang out with people who own racehorses, my sympathy levels start pretty low. But the Marias comparison holds here, too: great, silly, but affecting and funny and spectacular scenes, but done much more efficiently (for better and worse).

Naked was, after all that, a bit of a let-down. There are no wonderful scenes here, really; the opening gambits are far too silly and, unfortunately, actually feature Marie, who is... just not interesting. Anna Karenina rules this book, and without the spectacle or intelligence of the second and third books in the series, I can't help thinking that Toussaint just wanted to wrap it up and move on. Alternatively, he wanted to write something beautiful and romantic, but there's more love and tension in any given page of RA's train romance than in this entire book. show less

Sierra Nevada Celebration was greeted in an informal homecoming party last night. This morning, my reality appeared bound in gauze. The Premier League apppeared removed and neutered: did MUFC really lose at Norwich?

This altered condition is likely ideal to appreciate the mastery displayed in J-P Toussaint's novel. Running Away a prose poem for displacement. It is a lyric for jetlag in the tumultuous world of Shanghai and Beijing. It the crust of not bathing or truly sleeping for days and spanning half the globe. Pained and uncertain, Running Away is beautiful.

Another interesting one from Toussaint, but I was a little thrown by the odd dynamic this time around. Ennui and indecisiveness plague the lead, as always, but they're undermined a little as forces since events conspire to force him into action regardless. A Toussaint thriller? Not his best, but worth a look.

I think this is one of those tedious psychological novels that Borges was warning about. Well, let's count some commas.

Eyes closed and standing still, I was listening to Marie's voice coming from thousands of kilometers away, her voice which I could hear despite the countless lands that separated us, despite the steppes and immeasurable other plains, despite the expanse of the night and its gradation of colors spread across the surface of the earth, despite the mauve light of a Siberian dusk and the first orange streaks left by a sun setting on the cities of Eastern Europe, I was listening to Marie speaking faintly in the early evening sunlight of Paris, her frail voice reaching me, sounding more or less the same as ever, in the late

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night of the train, literally transporting me, as thoughts, dreams, and books can do, when, releasing the mind from the body, the body remains still and the mind travels, swelling and expanding, while gradually, behind our closed eyes, images are born, and other memories, feelings, and states of being surge into view, pains and buried emotions are reawakened, as well as fears and joys and a multitude of sensations - of coldness, of heat, of being loved, of confusion - while blood pounds in our temples, our heartbeats accelerate, and we feel ourselves shaken, as if a fissure had cracked the sea of tears frozen in each of us.

Right, I count 28 commas in that sentence. I wonder if it's the most in a sentence of this book, or not.

This is what I was thinking as I finished the book. Not exactly gripping, then. show less

A beautiful little book. Love his writing.

La prose parfaite de Jean-Philippe Toussaint entraine ses lecteurs sur les routes du monde, lui faisant découvrir les recoins oubliés d'une langue magnifique et les contours incertains des relations qu'entretiennent entre eux les humains... "Fuir" est un thriller inachevé, une course poursuite exotique interrompue par un évènement triste et banal, une histoire qui se déguste comme une glace italienne qui fond au soleil: un peu trop vite mais sans regrets pour les gouttes perdues sur les pavés...