{"id":938,"date":"2018-05-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-05T20:03:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=938"},"modified":"2025-01-02T09:19:28","modified_gmt":"2025-01-01T20:19:28","slug":"vernon-subutex-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2018\/05\/19\/vernon-subutex-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Vernon Subutex I"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Virginie Desperantes, translated by Frank Wynne<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Quercus\/Maclehose Press<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, May 19th 2018<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Virginie Despentes has a reputation for politically and socially confrontational work such as the pornographic and violent Baise moi<\/em> and Apocalypse Baby<\/em>, and the first instalment of the Vernon Subutex <\/em>trilogy \u2013 a profanity-filled novel whose character\u2019s obsession with sex, drugs and nostalgia for their punk-rock youth evoke The Young Ones in middle-age minus the comedy \u2013 is no exception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The titular Vernon Subutex (a name I repeatedly misread as Subtext) is a former record store-owner who has spent the last few years selling his possessions on E-Bay, watching on-line porn and relying on a wealthy friend, pop-star Alexandre Bleach, to pay his rent when finances get tight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel opens just after Alex \u2018accidentally\u2019 overdoses and the story, such as it is, follows Vernon\u2019s slow descent to the Parisian streets pursued by people who want to get their hands the only items of any value he still owns; three videos that Alex recorded just before his death. But his main purpose is to introduce the reader to the people that cross his path, a litany of angry, ugly stereotypes that run the spectrum of social, political and sexual identity: from a wife-beating Marxist revolutionary-in-waiting to a hedonistic futures trader sickened by the cultural habits of the poor to a Neo-Nazi champion of the common (French)man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Despentes has been criticised for allowing her characters to express extremely misogynistic and racist views, it is na\u00efve to believe that such beliefs do not persist in society, and she generally leaves them to condemn themselves by their words and actions. Furthermore, it is fascinating to see the connections between them slowly coalesce as the novel progresses and is a credit to hers skill as a writer that it is compulsively readable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My main problem was not what was in<\/em> the story but what is not<\/em>. Despite being described as \u201cA mind-blowing portrait of contemporary French society\u201d, Subutex could just as easily be down and out in London or New York as in Paris. This may be a deliberate choice by Despentes to universalise her social critique, but given the novel ends with Subutex experiencing a moment of epiphany in which his identity expands to encompass the entirety of Paris, I think this is unlikely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alternatively, it may reflect translator Frank Wynne\u2019s decision to adopt an Anglophonic rather than a Francophonic linguistic tone (for example by converting an idiomatic French phrase into an equivalent English one). It remains an area of active debate whether it is the translator\u2019s job to conform to the letter or the spirit of the original but my feeling is that, as Ros Schwartz puts it, \u201cA good translation doesn\u2019t colonise the work but preserves the joys and beauties of its \u201cotherness\u201d without resorting to weird foreignisation\u201d, and this is precisely what I found lacking in Vernon Subutex<\/em>. Although this is a matter of opinion, I can\u2019t help feeling something may have been lost in translation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was also irritated by the multiple typographical errors, which I would not have expected in a book nominated for a major international award. That said, I look forward to the English versions of the remaining parts of the trilogy and it will be interesting to see what the Man Booker judges make of this challenging novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.odt.co.nz\/entertainment\/books\/spinning-out-streets-paris<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne
\n
\nOtago Daily Times review May 19th 2018<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[278,370,18,282],"class_list":["post-938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-278","tag-fiction","tag-odt","tag-virginie-despentes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=938"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1869,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions\/1869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}