The Impersonal Adventure by Marcel BéaluMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
First off, a huge thank you to Goodreads friend Nancy Oakes for gifting me a copy of the book. It was an incredibly kind gesture. Please go take a look at her blog, Reading Avidly!
Wakefield Press continues to do the (insert your favorite deity here)'s work, especially with their sub-series "The School of the Strange," a series of possibly forgotten novellas and collections by some of the 20th-Century's most under-rated and lesser known European writers in translation. Through the books I've read in this series (Malpertuis, Waystations of the Deep Night, and now this) and several other gems from other publishers, I've developed a strong taste for continental European works in translation. I suppose having spent half my childhood in Europe has something to do with it, but I've become enamored of finding and exploring these works. Since my German and Latin are sub-par, and since there are so many languages I don't have time to learn, I really appreciate what Wakefield (and others) has done here. They've presented an excellent primer for works of "The Weird".
Marcel Beaulu's The Impersonal Adventure continues this trend. The title, as one might guess, is tongue-in-cheek, with several meanings, at least a couple of them laced with irony. The situations that the main character, Fidibus, finds himself in speak to the crumbling of individualism, the loss of "me" in what I will call crowded situations. Simultaneously, Fidibus discovers that his singular importance has been hidden even from himself by the overwhelming tyranny of the majority in which he finds himself. And what if the majority imposing such tyrrany is altogether mad? What if it is so mad that you are unsure of your own sanity? And when one comes to their senses, what happens when the fact that everything making sense doesn't make sense anymore? There's a powerful sense of surreality throughout, which the appended analysis of the novella interprets in Freudian terms (while disavowing a proprietary interpretation - it is pointed out that this is only one way in which the text may be interpreted and acknowledges that this is probably the wrong way to approach the book anyway). Even this last essay at the end of the book adds a further element of ambiguity.
What is not ambiguous about the work is the sheer atmosphere presented here. In my notes, I characterized it as Alfred Hitchcock meets David Lynch, and as I continued reading the book, this feeling never diminished. I felt as if I was immersed in a world created by these two, but in an admittedly anachronistic sense. If you're a fan of Vertigo and Twin Peaks, for example, I think you'll like this book!
This novel becomes more and more claustrophobic, in a social sense, as it goes along. Questions of personal identity vis-à-vis other's expectations and the expectations of society at large are at the forefront. In sum, this might be the greatest gaslighting story ever told, but its surreal tone and bizarre conclusion make it much more than that.
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