John J. Gaynard's Blog

Nobody I Know Makes Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' Look Like a Comic Book

Buy from Amazon.comHerebelow is the first review of Nobody I Know that was contributed to Amazon.com.

"When I first began reading 'Nobody I Know', I could not help but think of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' by Ken Kesey. Kesey's book about the state of psychiatric facilities and treatment in the early '60s became a major motion picture; the book was, and is still on lists of all time great books. There is still plenty of social commentary generated by readings of the text.

As I got further into 'Nobody I Know' I began to think that Gaynard made Kesey's book look like a comic book. Kesey was an orderly in a psychiatric facility before or while writing the book, so maybe he was just not exposed to the true treatment of the patients. Perhaps as an orderly, he primarily saw the interactions of the patients with the nursing staff (Nurse Ratched) and less so with the medical staff. Nevertheless, it is a classic for broaching the subject of the treatment of mental illness, but Gaynard deftly takes this to the next level.

In 'Nobody I Know' the interaction is focused on the psychiatrist O'Neill and one particular patient whose identity is not clear - he is referred to as Patient XYJ in O'Neill's publications, but there there is also lots of discussion between the two as to whether XYJ is the Christian or Moslem Jesus. O'Neill, for his part, keeps reverting back to his time with the CIA and his current agenda of exploiting XYJ for his personal and professional gain - the volumes of papers he has written about the case.

The book explores the relationship between O'Neill and XYJ and in particular, XYJ's identity - is he the Christian or Moslem Jesus, or Patsy Burke (who makes an appearance) or just XYJ? XYJ has an estate of some value that is managed by a daughter, for he does seem to have some skill as a sculptor which he also shows in the "Black House" (psych facility) by making 'paper pisse' artifacts by urinating on O'Neill's papers. All very extreme, and again, I think that Gaynard has skillfully pushed the boundary of the discussion of the treatment of the mentally ill way past what Kesey did in the early '60s.

There is an appropriate climax in 'Nobody I Know' of a confrontation between XYJ, other patients (the HRU) and O'Neill. The story plays out in the church on the Black House facility as you would expect, but you will have to read the book to see how it ends. Suffice it to say that Gaynard makes a clear statement about how the mentally ill are viewed, treated and are used, by society and the government.

Kesey's book was lauded for exposing the treatment of the mentally ill in the '60s. Gaynard takes this to a whole new level by exploring the depths of one particular doctor-patient relationship. You must read the book - and stay with it through the tough parts - to get to the ending where Gaynard makes an important statement about government treatment of the mentally ill. I hope this book receives the wide visibility it deserves."

An important social commentary that outdoes "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" - a review of 'Nobody I Know'

Buy from Amazon.comHere is the first review of Nobody I Know on Amazon.com. It was posted a few hours ago.

"When I first began reading 'Nobody I Know', I could not help but think of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' by Ken Kesey. Kesey's book about the state of psychiatric facilities and treatment in the early '60s became a major motion picture; the book was, and is still on lists of all time great books. There is still plenty of social commentary generated by readings of the text.

As I got further into 'Nobody I Know' I began to think that Gaynard made Kesey's book look like a comic book. Kesey was an orderly in a psychiatric facility before or while writing the book, so maybe he was just not exposed to the true treatment of the patients. Perhaps as an orderly, he primarily saw the interactions of the patients with the nursing staff (Nurse Ratched) and less so with the medical staff. Nevertheless, it is a classic for broaching the subject of the treatment of mental illness, but Gaynard deftly takes this to the next level.

In 'Nobody I Know' the interaction is focused on the psychiatrist O'Neill and one particular patient whose identity is not clear - he is referred to as Patient XYJ in O'Neill's publications, but there there is also lots of discussion between the two as to whether XYJ is the Christian or Moslem Jesus. O'Neill, for his part, keeps reverting back to his time with the CIA and his current agenda of exploiting XYJ for his personal and professional gain - the volumes of papers he has written about the case.

The book explores the relationship between O'Neill and XYJ and in particular, XYJ's identity - is he the Christian or Moslem Jesus, or Patsy Burke (who makes an appearance) or just XYJ? XYJ has an estate of some value that is managed by a daughter, for he does seem to have some skill as a sculptor which he also shows in the "Black House" (psych facility) by making 'paper pisse' artifacts by urinating on O'Neill's papers. All very extreme, and again, I think that Gaynard has skillfully pushed the boundary of the discussion of the treatment of the mentally ill way past what Kesey did in the early '60s.

There is an appropriate climax in 'Nobody I Know' of a confrontation between XYJ, other patients (the HRU) and O'Neill. The story plays out in the church on the Black House facility as you would expect, but you will have to read the book to see how it ends. Suffice it to say that Gaynard makes a clear statement about how the mentally ill are viewed, treated and are used, by society and the government.

Kesey's book was lauded for exposing the treatment of the mentally ill in the '60s. Gaynard takes this to a whole new level by exploring the depths of one particular doctor-patient relationship. You must read the book - and stay with it through the tough parts - to get to the ending where Gaynard makes an important statement about government treatment of the mentally ill. I hope this book receives the wide visibility it deserves."

A psychological thriller that leans heavily on Christian theology, religion, & contemporary political events to fashion a disturbing account of terrorism in today's society. The Clarion Review of Nobody I Know:

Nobody I KnowThe Foreword Clarion Review of Nobody I Know has just arrived. I'm sincerely grateful to the reviewer, Jeremiah Rood, who has done a good job of understanding what I designed right from the outset to be a book that gives no quarter to religious fanaticism, while giving a clear theological underpinning, however tendentious you may find it, to every aspect of the book that is based on religion. Jeremiah has spent more time understanding and describing the Christian and Islamic content and implications of the plot than previous reviewers.
Here it is:

Raising good questions about the state of contemporary society, Nobody I Know is a compelling religious psychological thriller.
John J. Gaynard’s heady thriller Nobody I Know mines ideas about terrorism and the intellect to investigate the fragile nature of identity.
The book begins with a unnamed man struggling in a toilet stall. When he exits, he meets a woman who asks him to pray and who knows him as Jesus. The man’s identity forms the book’s central mystery, which takes place in the Black House, an institution created to treat and reform recovering Islamic terrorists in France. Danger lurks around the corners of the man’s mind, as something as ordinary as jiggling a bathroom door handle has the power to unearth connections best left buried and forgotten.
The book’s plot is a complicated and strange mix of religion and politics. The plot first involves the patient seeking to understand his world and to make some sense of the place he’s in, mining his visitors, the guards, and his faulty memory for clues. This makes for difficult reading. Even the facility’s lead doctor, O’Neil, comes to seem a little crazy; for him, there’s no ethical or moral limit that cannot be crossed to help his patients or meet his own greedy needs.
The story moves from a close character study to a broader exploration of religion, struggling to deal with religious extremists and asking what happens when ordinary people become trapped in their own worlds. It is violent, disturbing, and largely without hope.
The prose is tight and close, using its first-person narration to heighten the sensation of being trapped. This experience reflects the central unease of the protagonist. The novel strengthens this sensation with a focus on clear and disturbing images and phrases that often border on the grotesque. For example, the unknown man describes in terrible detail the smell of the prison guards who assault him, dissecting scents from their unwashed socks and dirty underwear to various body odors. Dialogue is often clunky, filled with complicated theories about psychology or religion that are used to explain a character’s action, and its frequent vulgarities are off-putting. These qualities may humanize the characters, but they do not engender much empathy.
The end effect is a book that is extremely unsettling. It reflects contemporary society but doesn’t point toward the hope of redemption. This bleakness comes to feel ironic given that each of the central characters, in their madness, eventually becomes an important Christian or Muslim figure, including Jesus, Judas, and the Antichrist, among others—roles designed to show how desperately the world needs the messages those figures represent.
Raising good questions, Nobody I Know is a psychological thriller that leans heavily on Christian theology, religion, and contemporary political events to fashion a disturbing account of terrorism in today’s society.
Reviewed by Jeremiah Rood February 11, 2019

JC, Charismatic Feel-Good Beach Boy, Romeo and Haphazard Worker of Miracles - A Review of Grant Leishman's The Second Coming

The Second Coming
JC, alias Jose Christian Castillo, alias Jesus Christ, Son of God, is in Manila because he interceded with his father in heaven to spare the earth from destruction, that place his father had already sent him to more than two thousand years ago, but which an angry God now says is just as much of a cesspit as it ever was. Grudgingly, his father agreed to give him a second go, lasting no longer than a year, and decreed that his son’s destination should be the Philippines, one of the three reasons for choosing that country being the need to put paid to the money grubbing antics of a televangelist impostor pretending to be the Son of God.
On earth, JC is as charismatic as ever. He easily recruits seven disciples who work in the seedier sides of Manila nightlife. The guileless six men and one woman are easily overawed by the power of his words, even if his vision statement is long on vague promises about wanting to get them all into something good but short on the details of actual implementation. Before JC can lay out the plan his disciples are waiting for, he gets knocked unconscious in a traffic accident and forgets who he is. The disciples are around him when he comes back to himself in the hospital, and as eager as before to find out what he wants them to do. But it is only when the Archangel Michael comes to give JC a kick up the a..s to remind him that he has already used six months of his allotted time on earth that he remembers his mission. Michael orders him to take his troop of dew-eyed disciples to confront the impostor Adonis in Davao, where Adonis’s next step in adding to his ill-gotten millions will be another giant meeting.
This seems to be the first job of work JC has engaged in since the crucifixion. In Leishman’s novel he seems to have whiled away two thousand years in heaven as a couch potato. Heaven is a place he eventually describes as boring compared to life on earth. On earth his main personality trait seems to be inconsistency. At one moment he can perform worldwide miracles, such as making a cross appear in the sky, or transport himself instantaneously from one end of Manila to another and appear miraculously in a meeting. At another time it’s too difficult for him to get a clear picture of where one of his kidnapped disciples is in danger of death. He can save himself from dying, he can bring a child back to life, and yet he can’t avoid getting killed in a knife fight with terrorists. It is only the faith of his disciples that brings him back to life after the killing.
JC’s disciples provoke a commotion in the impostor’s crowd at the big meeting and the impostor manages to get himself shot and killed by his own security detail. JC kisses the edges of the man’s wound, which closes up and heals in front of the cameras filming the event live and transmitting it to the duped Filipino faithful wherever they are in the world. Adonis, the impostor comes back to life a reformed man. He regrets the error of his ways and he turns the keys of his religion and its hundreds of millions of dollars of assets over to JC and his disciples.
News of this miracle frightens the gerontocratic Catholic Cardinals in Manila. They use their network of influence to get JC charged with practicing medicine without a license, the proof being the way he had healed the impostor in front of the TV cameras. JC gets off the charge, and then decides to take on the Catholic Church itself. Everything his father has wished for just seems to fall into place without much further effort from JC, Catholics get over their schisms, even the two Koreas decide to bury the hatchet. In his two or three hour work days, JC has plenty of time to spend on the beautiful beaches of the Philippines, mooning over Ma, his only female disciple (his Mary Magdalene, a single mother and former cam-girl with a heart of gold), and get up to innocent boyish pursuits with his puckish male disciples.
There are some set pieces that could be a pastiche of the UK Daily Mail’s obsession with UK royalty, such as the joint wedding arranged for JC and one of his male disciples on the island of Jolo. The wedding dresses and brides’ makeup are given the sort of glamorous, gushing treatment that paper devotes to the dress sense of Meghan Markle or her sister-in-law.
In this sort of sweet beach boy and girl atmosphere, even amid Jihadist terrorists, nothing can now stop JC from fulfilling his father’s instructions, or can it? I encourage you to read the book to find out.
Leishman’s writing in The Second Coming reminds me of one of my favorite comic and satirical writers, the Finn Arto Paasilinna. From me, that is high praise.

A Cynical, Farcical Look at Mental Health Issues Through the Prism of Religious Extremism : a review of 'Nobody I Know'

Excerpts from a review of my novel Nobody I Know by the New Zealand author Grant Leishman :
Purchase from Amazon.com

"Nobody I Know by John J Gaynard is a cynical, farcical look at mental health issues through the prism of extremism and the eyes of Patient XYJ, who doesn’t remember who he is, or indeed why he has been for the past eight years in a psychiatric institution, colloquially known as the “Black House”. Like all the returning Jihadists whom former CIA interrogator and psychiatrist Dr O’Neill has treated in the past with unusual success, Patient XYJ is subjected to inhumane treatment, scorn and ridicule by O’Neill. He uses patients merely to progress his own ambitions and wealth rather than from any innate desire to heal or to reintegrate previously violent and disturbed patients back into society...  I can honestly say that Nobody I Know is the most unusual, slightly disturbing, but eminently readable book I have been lucky enough to read in the past few years. Author John J Gaynard has reached into the depths of the human mind and provided a thought-provoking treatise on mental health, attitudes to mental health and, in general, the human condition. By using the absolute polar extreme of a mental institution run by a “mad doctor” along with a procession of “crazy” trustee patients, Gaynard has made readers focus on our attitudes not just to mental health, but life in general. Totally topical and up to date in its current world focus... At times the narrative is harrowing and difficult to stomach, but the message is loud and clear and, if nothing else, this focus on the behavior and excesses of both characters... presents two sides of the same coin for readers to consider. Who is the sane one here and who is the insane one? Because of the nature of the narrative, the characters are necessarily overdrawn to the point of caricature, but this is wonderfully well done by the author. I particularly liked the connections between the characters in the story and historical figures. This is a book that leaves you thinking and asking yourself questions long after you put it down and that is probably the highest praise I can give this author."

US Readers: Please Enter the Goodreads Giveaway for my latest novel NOBODY I KNOW

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Goodreads Book Giveaway Nobody I Know by John J. Gaynard Giveaway ends February 15, 2019.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter Giveaway Below are the main excerpts from a review of Nobody I know by the New Zealand author Grant Leishman : 
"Nobody I Know by John J Gaynard is a cynical, farcical look at mental health issues through the prism of extremism and the eyes of Patient XYJ, who doesn’t remember who he is, or indeed why he has been for the past eight years in a psychiatric institution, colloquially known as the “Black House”. Like all the returning Jihadists whom former CIA interrogator and psychiatrist Dr O’Neill has treated in the past with unusual success, Patient XYJ is subjected to inhumane treatment, scorn and ridicule by O’Neill. He uses patients merely to progress his own ambitions and wealth rather than from any innate desire to heal or to reintegrate previously violent and disturbed patients back into society...  I can honestly say that Nobody I Know is the most unusual, slightly disturbing, but eminently readable book I have been lucky enough to read in the past few years. Author John J Gaynard has reached into the depths of the human mind and provided a thought-provoking treatise on mental health, attitudes to mental health and, in general, the human condition. By using the absolute polar extreme of a mental institution run by a “mad doctor” along with a procession of “crazy” trustee patients, Gaynard has made readers focus on our attitudes not just to mental health, but life in general. Totally topical and up to date in its current world focus... At times the narrative is harrowing and difficult to stomach, but the message is loud and clear and, if nothing else, this focus on the behavior and excesses of both characters... presents two sides of the same coin for readers to consider. Who is the sane one here and who is the insane one? Because of the nature of the narrative, the characters are necessarily overdrawn to the point of caricature, but this is wonderfully well done by the author. I particularly liked the connections between the characters in the story and historical figures. This is a book that leaves you thinking and asking yourself questions long after you put it down and that is probably the highest praise I can give this author."

Michel Houellebecq's Phenomenology of Fellatio

Sérotonine on Amazon
Jean Birnbaum is responsible for the literary section of Le Monde newspaper which appears as a supplement every Thursday. He has recently written two important books about the unhealthy relationship between French extreme left wing politics and radical Islam: La religion des faibles - The Religion of the Weak: what Jihadism tells us about ourselves, and Un silence réligieux - A Religious Silence: the Left faced with Jihadism. I read the Religion of the Weak a few weeks ago and I hope to post a review of it soon to this blog.
If I'm writing about Jean Birnbaum today it is because of a very striking mention of his with regard Michel Houellebecq's novel Sérotonine (which, as you've probably guessed, would be Serotonin in English), which is out in France today. He contributed his witty, unusual take on the way Houellebecq has written his new novel to the France Culture radio station.

Below are the main passages from it in English (my translation):

"I would like to mention the new book by Houellebecq. It is called Sérotonine... There is a possiblity we will be able to read this novel as it is meant to be read since, for the moment, its author has remained silent about it, and that is good. For once, Michel Houellebecq has not given in to this obsession with interviews which is one of the major pathologies of the contemporary press, which tends to reduce each text to a pure pretext, in order to question the author about this or that aspect of the news cycle. So far, therefore, Houellebecq has managed to let his novel live its life as a novel, without parasiting it with the (calculated) "provocations" and (controlled) "gaffes" that have so often biased the reception of other novels...

 The Absence of Ideology

...with Sérotonine Houellebecq shows, more than ever, his amazing virtuosity, his ability to probe the various layers of language in which we dabble collectively; a book where he also demonstrates his technical superiority, his art of juggling with writing styles, between apocalyptic meditation and the saving power of irony, and this permanent oscillation prevents the text from closing in upon itself, on a form, or an idea. And as much as his previous book, Submission, yielded to the somewhat rigid delights of the novel of ideas, which could be seen as the wish to dominate his readers, to force their hands, Sérotonine gives back to them real freedom.

Phenomenology of Fellatio

This taking leave of ideology marks Houellebecq's full return to literature the liberating powers of which he celebrates. Far from the colorless and petty writing some criticize him for, this new novel radiates the ardent generosity of an author who sincerely understands and loves his readers.

The reading of this novel, moreover, encourages us to dwell on the very haunting passages in which Houellebecq insists on describing the "devotion" shown by a woman caressing a man (there is, in Houellebecq, a real phenomenology of fellatio), and we reflect that this is similar to the way he gives himself to us, the readers, as he "carries out his task with competence", takes care of us so well and for that deserves all of our "gratitude" and our "admiration".

I wonder how many writers consider, as they are writing their novels, that they are performing an act akin to fellatio on their readers? I recommend that this piece of literary criticism by Jean Birnbaum be immediately integrated into every creative writing class, at the place in the curriculum where the relationship between the author and his or her reader can best be discussed. All copyright for this article (and my partial translation of it) of course remains with Jean Birnbaum.

Michel Houellebecq and the Phenomenology of Fellatio

Sérotonine on Amazon
Jean Birnbaum is responsible for the literary section of Le Monde newspaper which appears as a supplement every Thursday. He has recently written two important books about the unhealthy relationship between French extreme left wing politics and radical Islam: La religion des faibles - The Religion of the Weak: what Jihadism tells us about ourselves, and Un silence réligieux - A Religious Silence: the Left faced with Jihadism. I read the Religion of the Weak a few weeks ago and I hope to post a review of it soon to this blog.
If I'm writing about Jean Birnbaum today it is because of a very striking mention of his with regard Michel Houellebecq's novel Sérotonine (which, as you've probably guessed, would be Serotonin in English), which is out in France today. He contributed his review to the France Culture radio station.

Below are the main passages from it in English (my translation):

"I would like to mention the new book by Houellebecq. It is called Sérotonine... There is a possiblity we will be able to read this novel as it is meant to be read since, for the moment, its author has remained silent about it, and that is good. For once, Michel Houellebecq has not given in to this obsession with interviews which is one of the major pathologies of the contemporary press, which tends to reduce each text to a pure pretext, in order to question the author about this or that aspect of the news cycle. So far, therefore, Houellebecq has managed to let his novel live its life as a novel, without parasiting it with the (calculated) "provocations" and (controlled) "gaffes" that have so often biased the reception of other novels...

 The Absence of Ideology

...with Sérotonine Houellebecq shows, more than ever, his amazing virtuosity, his ability to probe the various layers of language in which we dabble collectively; a book where he also demonstrates his technical superiority, his art of juggling with writing styles, between apocalyptic meditation and the saving power of irony, and this permanent oscillation prevents the text from closing in upon itself, on a form, or an idea. And as much as his previous book, Submission, yielded to the somewhat rigid delights of the novel of ideas, which could be seen as the wish to dominate his readers, to force their hands, Sérotonine gives back to them real freedom.

Phenomenology of Fellatio

This taking leave of ideology marks Houellebecq's full return to literature the liberating powers of which he celebrates. Far from the colorless and petty writing some criticize him for, this new novel radiates the ardent generosity of an author who sincerely understands and loves his readers.

The reading of this novel, moreover, encourages us to dwell on the very haunting passages in which Houellebecq insists on describing the "devotion" shown by a woman caressing a man (there is, in Houellebecq, a real phenomenology of fellatio), and we reflect that this is similar to the way he gives himself to us, the readers, as he "carries out his task with competence", takes care of us so well and for that deserves all of our "gratitude" and our "admiration".

I wonder how many writers consider, as they are writing their novels, that they are performing an act akin to fellatio on their readers? I recommend that this piece of literary criticism by Jean Birnbaum be immediately integrated into every creative writing class, at the place in the curriculum where the relationship between the author and his or her reader can best be discussed. All copyright for this article of course remains with Jean Birnbaum.

The Gilets jaunes : the man who saw them coming

Over the month of December last year everybody in the world who had a television screen probably saw the French Yellow Vests demonstrating in the middle of Paris, their demonstrations often including violence against police officers, the burning of barricades along the Champs Elysées and outright desecration of national monuments (in addition to scrawling graffiti over the Arc de Triomphe, they are suspected of chopping off the heads of the three Marshals of France I mentioned in a previous post). Their discontent is still alive. Now, every traditional politician in France is wondering what they will do in 2019. Emmanuel Macron has made promises to raise low salaries through a variety of technocratic sleights of hand, and to eliminate some proposed taxes on gasoline. He is now faced with the challenge of delivering on those promises in the next three months. Failure to follow through will not be taken lying down by the Gilets jaunes movement, which at first refused all attempts to organize itself, but is now crystallizing around a few emerging figures, such as the truck driver Eric Drouet who was arrested last night on his way to an unauthorized demonstration he had organized near the Champs Elyées, and Jacline Mouraud, 'The Muse of November 17th', the date she posted to Youtube a video now considered as one of the founding acts of the Gilets jaunes movement.
During my time consulting to industry I realized that whenever something went wrong there was always a person in the company or the team who had known days or months in advance what it was. But that person was never listened to until people were forced to pay attention to him or her by the difficulty of the situation the company found itself in (if then, sometimes the person was never listened to and the company went bust). In 2014, Reuters published an interview with Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, who had just brought out a book called "La France périphérique - Peripheral France", which described the environment from which the Giles jaunes movement has sprung. In that interview, Guilluy predicted that the Socialist Party would implode if it didn't start addressing the problems of peripheral France, but he hoped that the fact François Hollande, the French President of the time, was asking him for advice would lead to results. François Hollande ignored Guilluy's advice, and the Socialist Party did implode: in the 2017 presidential election in which Emmanuel Macron seemed to come from nowhere to win while the Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon only won 6.36 percent of the vote and was eliminated in the first round. The example of Macron and now the example of Drouet has led some political commentators in France to say the political parties, in the way they were traditionally understood, no longer exist and now it has become a country of political movements (I agree with them).
Below is an excerpt from the 2014 Reuters interview with Guilluy:  

"Guilluy’s argument is simple, yet provocative: an ostensibly unified country is, in fact, split in two, between rich, globalized, culturally vibrant cities like Paris and Lyon, and a depressed “periphery” being left behind. 
The latter, which he says covers most of the population, never caught up with big cities plugged into a global market for jobs and investment. Instead, the largely white, working class inhabitants — former mine and factory workers many of them — of small- and mid-sized towns, suburbs and rural areas have seen their jobs and livelihoods steadily eroded, to the point where they no longer share political ideas with their big city peers.
Guilluy argues the inhabitants of this “peripheral France” could be worse off than people living in the immigrant-heavy “banlieues” (city suburbs), that have loomed large in public debate, because they are more isolated from economic centers. 
As a result of the split, Guilluy says most of the country has lost faith in the mainstream center-right and center-left political parties, which tend to concentrate on the big cities, and are turning toward the far-right National Front party
Guilluy’s analysis is catching on, and not just in France, where his book sold 13,000 copies in two weeks, nearly five times the average for a geography book, publisher Flammarion said. The geographer has briefed advisers to President Francois Hollande and given talks to European ambassadors about his findings. Their response to his grim view of French society? “The split exists in our countries, too.”

Q: What do you describe as “peripheral France”?
Christophe Guilluy: Peripheral France encompasses 60 percent of the population. It’s small towns, suburbs and rural zones. It’s everything that is far from a globalized metropolis. It’s the vast, hidden, forgotten part of the country that lacks jobs, prospects, any sense of connection with the political class in Paris. For people who live in this part of France, there is no political party offering any sort of social or economic alternative truly adapted to their problems. The only party trying to speak to them is the National Front, and even they only capture a minority of their votes
Officials in peripheral France know they are facing gigantic social problems. They are looking for answers, for an economic model that could help their communities complement the globalized economies of the big metropolises. But so far, nobody has anything to offer them." 

In October this year, shortly before the Yellow Vests began to congregate around road roundabouts in rural France to share their daily challenges and their analysis of the situation and began planning how to make themselves heard on the national stage, Guilluy brought out a new book "No Society: la fin de la classe moyenne occidentale", which translates as "No Society: the End of the Western  Middle Class."
There is an interview with Christophe Guilluy in the December edition of the unnconventional French monthly Causeur: "Guilluy le prophète - Guilluy the Prophet". Here are the first two Q & As from that interview (in my translation, which sometimes adds a few to the original French to clarify the context):

Q. from Causeur: Since the beginning of the "yellow vests" movement, you can be seen everywhere. You are a kind of prophet: you invented peripheral France before the rise in the cost of diesel fuel brought it onto our radar screens.What do all these French people who wear the yellow vests have in common?

A. from Christophe Guilluy. Prophet? Let's just say that I've been saying for the past fifteen years that there's a sick bull (the middle class) in the china shop (the West) and yet everybody explains to me that there is no bull. The "yellow vests" do indeed correspond to the sociology and geography of 'Peripheral France' which has been my subject of research for years. Many types of workers, whether employees or lowly paid self-employed people have difficulty making ends meet. They live in difficult social conditions, they work in low-paid categories of employment. They inhabit the 'territories' (cities, towns, small and medium-sized enterprises, the countryside) that create the least number of jobs. These people who feel they have suffered a downgrade in modern society illustrate a movement rooted in a long term trend: the end of the middle class, of which they were the foundation.

Q. In addition to being economically fragile, do the "Gilets jaunes" show that France is a loser in the culture wars?

A. Absolutely. All along the spectrum, from the agricultural worker who has historically been on the right to the industrial worker who has traditionally been on the left, the "yellow vests" have realized that globalization no longer has a place for them. They drive diesel cars because they have been told to do so (as part of previous French governments drives to encourage purchase of French-manufactured diesel cars), but are called polluters by members of the elites living in big cities. There is a world that they feel considers itself above them, constantly reaffirming its cultural identity (the globalized city, organic food, successful coexistence...), but the "yellow vests" do not intend to submit to this economic and cultural model they feel excludes them...     A populist leader could emerge as fast as Macron emerged."

Let us hope that Emmanuel Macron, who has often been described as disconnected from what is happening in the 'real' France, is now listening to a man like Guilluy.

Karl Ove Knausgaard and the Skull of Voltaire as a Child: reading one book review and understanding another

I subscribe to a number of literary reviews so I often read six or seven reviews of the same book, especially when it is expected to sell as many copies as Karl Ove Knausgaard's latest novel, My Struggle: Book 6. The End, translated by Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett. The first review I read was by Fredric Jameson in the London Review of Books and its title 'Itemised' straightaway reminded me why I hadn't been able to finish the first volume of Knausgaard's struggle, the unrelenting itemization of the man's daily grind. I can take a lot of detail from some writers, but not from others, don't ask me why. I immediately admired the way Jameson had structured his critique around seven questions, and then wondered if it wasn't six questions, four or five of which which could usefully be used to review any other end volume of a series of novels, including science fiction, crime, romance and young adult:

1 - Can I read this before reading the other five books in the series?2 - Is this fiction or autobiography ?3 - Is it anything like Proust ?4 - Does anything happen in it ?5 - Will I like it better if I start with this volume and go back and read the others afterwards, or should I start with them and work my way up to it, in which case by that time I may have started to get bored with it ?6 - Does anything happen in these books (I surmised that Jameson was referring to the five previous novels in the series) ?7 - Does anything happen in this novel ? (which reminded me of question 4) 

Jameson's review was probably better than Knausgaard's book, although I didn't agree with his opinions about Knausgaard's use of dialog and there was one passage that flummoxed me until I read another review of the book. The stretch of dialog (or 'banter') Jameson picked out to show how Knausgaard's conversations in the book are "...often unobtrusively witty and entertaining... distinctive dialogue, interesting, (with) the characters talk(ing) with style but... not mannered," I found quite simply stodgy. Judge for yourselves, from my excerpt of the dialog excerpted in the review:

"You don't have to say everything that comes into your mind, you know. Kids do that. Adults can put their utterances through quality control first."

"I remember crying when I read about Julius Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt."

"You read Theodore Roosevelt's biography when you were a kid?"

"I did, yes. There was a series. About twenty of them, I suppose. One on each. Most were about Americans. A lot of presidents..."

And so on...
The passage in his review that flummoxed me (admittedly, it was late at night and I'd already been reading for twelve hours that day) reads as follows:

"...there is something rather different running through all this, which is a kind of thinking, even if one cannot quite call it a thought: it is the constant preoccupation with the pronouns, the ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘it’, a kind of ‘you’ … The ‘he’ and ‘she’ get absorbed in the narrative; on the abstract level Heidegger’s ‘das man’ fights it out with Levinas’s Other; the ‘I’ gets lost in ruminations about identity; the ‘we’ becomes the collectivity of Nazism: ‘an extreme reinforcement of the we, and the attendant weakening of the I’, a kind of banal philosophical psychologising which leads the author to rather sterile personal dead ends (‘Personally I have never felt myself to belong to any we’) and disquisitions on the permanence of death and war that become interesting only when one thinks of them as a matter of daily life and how one narrates that (the death of the father or the sordid, littered and messy rooms left after his death)."

I read that through five or six times, to see what it was about the 'I' and the 'we' that was struggling to get out of the Heidegger and Levinas book ends, and then I gave up. And then, I read a review of the book in the November paper edition of The Atlantic which made it all clear. The review was written by Ruth Franklin, and titled "Knausgaard Devours Himself". (It has now been given the less cannibalistic title "How 'My Struggle' Undid Knausgaard" on The Atlantic's website.)
Here is the passage from Ruth Franklin's excellent review, that allowed me to understand what problems Knausgaard has had with the 'I' and the 'we' and the 'he' and the 'she'.

"His books, he writes, have “tried to transcend the social world by conveying the innermost thoughts and innermost feelings of my most private self, my own internal life, but also by describing the private sphere of my family as it exists behind the façade all families set up against the social world.” The social pressures, however, are too powerful to withstand:

I imagined I was going to write exactly what I thought and believed and felt, in other words to be honest, this is how it is, the truth of the I, but it turned out to be so incompatible with the truth of the we, or this is how it is meant to be, that it foundered after only a few short sentences.

The sentences may have flowed, but his work, he now concludes, has not only refused to abide by social norms but has fallen short of capturing the truth of the “I.” In violating prevailing standards of appropriate personal disclosure, “this novel has hurt everyone around me, it has hurt me, and in a few years, when they are old enough to read it, it will hurt my children,” he writes. “It has been an experiment,” he continues,

and it has failed because I have never even been close to saying what I really mean and describing what I have actually seen, but it is not valueless, at least not completely, for when describing the reality of an individual person, when attempting to be as honest as possible is considered immoral and scandalous, the force of the social dimension is visible and also the way it regulates and controls individuals.

By the end of the volume, after Linda has spent weeks in the hospital, he vows that he is finished with writing: “I will never do anything like this to her and our children again … I will revel in, truly revel in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.”"

In her review, Franklin goes into a level of example from the writing that Jameson does not, and persuaded me that perhaps the sixth volume in the series is worth reading. On the other hand, Jameson brings into his review out of the way nuggets of knowledge which show me why I read the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books: the craft of reviewing, and a whole cadre of great thinkers doing justice to works they may be only vaguely interested in. What made me laugh out loud when reading Jameson's review was his reminder of  '...the story by Raymond Roussel of his discovery, in a dusty provincial museum, under glass, of the skull of Voltaire as a child.' and this has given me the desire to ferret out of my shelves any books of Raymond Roussel I may have absentmindedly kept since the eighties, when Michel Foucault helped to cement his place as a man to be reckoned with in French literature.