European literary types will call this book a “novella,” and we will have more to say about these types shortly. Their typical attitudes, and the attitudes that inform this short novel, contrast in ways that are archetypal, and just possibly instructive.
Grognard is the first book by a young American writer, Patrick J.F. Quere — a name that indicates French antecedents. In an author’s note he writes that the book is “somewhat autobiographical,” and indeed the central character, Felix Moullec, has a French-speaking grandfather. But by the time you’ve finished reading the narrative you find yourself hoping most sincerely that only parts of it are true to the author’s actual experience.
One sunny morning in south Florida, Felix sets off with his father and his grandfather to sail down the coast. Their boat is called Grognard. It proves a reasonably happy occasion, with the three generations getting on amicably enough and chatting together, much of the time about the virtues or otherwise of Panama.
But the author states that he wrote the whole book “in an intense two-week spell of disgust and hate,” and so it isn’t surprising that this opening idyll changes into a series of near-nightmares, and then finally into some scenes of unambiguous horror. The father dies in a car crash, and the grandfather breathes his last in a home for the hopelessly old and incapacitated. As if this isn’t enough, the novel ends with a protracted flashback to Felix’s youth in which it’s revealed that he and a friend killed a hobo by hitting him over the head with a rock and throwing his body into the river, and later hired a prostitute and, after losing their virginities with her, stabbed her, cut her body in two, and threw the parts in black plastic bags into a nearby dumpster.
The book ends with Felix, back aboard the Grognard, adding the ashes of his father and grandfather to a glass of wine and water and, with Mozart’s Requiem for accompaniment, downing the concoction in a single gulp.
The book is vigorously written and has a certain brash, in-your-face quality. But it’s difficult for a European literary type like me to be less than disgusted with the whole procedure.
Firstly, the trajectory of the narrative is all too reminiscent of innumerable US horror movies. Things begin pleasantly, even as a kind of pastoral idyll, but you know perfectly well when you buy your tickets that the end will be grotesque, with body parts in the refrigerator and more, and with scenes that will be quite horrifying enough to justify you holding your girlfriend closer than she might have expected.
Now there’s plenty of horror in European literature — lopped-off hands in Shakespeare, severed heads in flower-pots in Keats, and much else. But we Europeans do tend to expect some moral justification for it all, in the same way that we traditionally expect literature, and the arts generally, to be, if not uplifting, then at least consoling, reassuring, or involving us in some vision of the world that will lift us out of our mundane everyday reality. Not so, we tend to think, with the Americans.
This may well be just envy, a sense of resentment at the US’ greater wealth, and anyway there is a large amount of wonderful American literature. Nevertheless, this seemingly gratuitous horror appears very American from the perspective of the other side of the Atlantic, and maybe from East Asia as well. And it’s very hard to see any overarching social or philosophical vision that serves to give any point to Quere’s gruesome story.
Take the example of the home for the old where Felix’s grandfather is incarcerated. The description of extreme old age here is reminiscent of the Strulbruggs in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. They can live indefinitely, but they can’t avoid growing ever older. Swift, however, is making a philosophical point. He was a Tory, and his opponents, the Whigs, were spawning novel ideas for the betterment of the human lot. Swift is saying that you might be able to improve some things, but there are certain dark features of human life that can never be altered. We age, we become ugly and feeble, and nothing politicians do is going to do anything about it. It’s part of the innate tragedy of the human condition.
But what purpose does Quere’s description of extreme old age serve? It’s hard to see one. As for his depiction of family happiness that degenerates into casual murder and brutal evisceration, what purpose does that have? The only likely one I can think of is that it offers a vision of US society as a whole as a kind of nightmare — placid on the surface, but savage, self-serving and without any genuine qualities, underneath.
Whether such a blanket moral condemnation lies behind Quere’s story is for the reader to decide. That his aim is to administer a gratuitous shock, plus fish for possible film rights, seems more likely to me. Extreme horror, after all, is easy to write, and is essentially a way of opting out of any real effort on the author’s part. It’s a kind of pornography — an easy way to get an assured reaction from the reader and earn a few quick bucks in the process. If this book is, by contrast, a species of social critique, then it feels rather extreme. The US, after all, is where perhaps much of the world, given the opportunity, would most like to live. If Quere really is being serious, then these immigrants will have a shock in store when they finally manage to arrive there.
Mongolian influencer Anudari Daarya looks effortlessly glamorous and carefree in her social media posts — but the classically trained pianist’s road to acceptance as a transgender artist has been anything but easy. She is one of a growing number of Mongolian LGBTQ youth challenging stereotypes and fighting for acceptance through media representation in the socially conservative country. LGBTQ Mongolians often hide their identities from their employers and colleagues for fear of discrimination, with a survey by the non-profit LGBT Centre Mongolia showing that only 20 percent of people felt comfortable coming out at work. Daarya, 25, said she has faced discrimination since she
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
More than 75 years after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Orwellian phrase “Big Brother is watching you” has become so familiar to most of the Taiwanese public that even those who haven’t read the novel recognize it. That phrase has now been given a new look by amateur translator Tsiu Ing-sing (周盈成), who recently completed the first full Taiwanese translation of George Orwell’s dystopian classic. Tsiu — who completed the nearly 160,000-word project in his spare time over four years — said his goal was to “prove it possible” that foreign literature could be rendered in Taiwanese. The translation is part of
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
RSS