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Fable
A love story or rather the story of a betrayal
58 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
1 person is currently reading
289 people want to read
About the author
Robert Pinget
67 books41 followersRobert Pinget was a Swiss-born French novelist and playwright associated with the nouveau roman movement.
After completing his law studies and working as a lawyer for a year, he moved to Paris in 1946 to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
In 1951, he published his first novel Entre Fantoine et Agapa. After publishing two other novels, but then having his fourth rejected by Gallimard, Pinget was recommended by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett to Jérôme Lindon, head of Éditions de Minuit, where he subsequently published Graal flibuste in 1956. Éditions de Minuit became his main publisher.
Scholars and critics have often associated his work with that of his friend Samuel Beckett, who he met in 1955.
(from Wikipedia)
After completing his law studies and working as a lawyer for a year, he moved to Paris in 1946 to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
In 1951, he published his first novel Entre Fantoine et Agapa. After publishing two other novels, but then having his fourth rejected by Gallimard, Pinget was recommended by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett to Jérôme Lindon, head of Éditions de Minuit, where he subsequently published Graal flibuste in 1956. Éditions de Minuit became his main publisher.
Scholars and critics have often associated his work with that of his friend Samuel Beckett, who he met in 1955.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 23, 2025
A man - maybe named Miaille - beds down in an abandoned barn with a knapsack full of old receipts, diary scraps, and grief, only to find himself caught in a landscape that seems to have melted. The town has vanished, “smoking under its ruins,” its people wandering like stunned survivors on a battlefield no one remembers starting.
A boy with “white skin and blue hair” is torn apart and devoured by leather-belted men who eat his groin and hang his head from a saddle. Flowers bloom from foreheads, angels have sex in the poppies, and someone keeps insisting there’s still a house, a kitchen garden, and something that once might have been called love.
“There were absences in my life which were a comfort,” someone says, “then there was a presence that ruined me.” The book plays like a memory turned inside out and stretched until it starts hallucinating.
Pinget, who sat somewhere between Beckett and Kafka on the literary family tree, builds the book on repetition, recursion, and the slow crumbling of reality.
Miaille walks the same route through collapsing barns and nettle-covered ruins, meets travelers who may be angels, poets, gypsies, or just other versions of himself.
The characters swap places, sentences echo across pages, and entire scenes replay themselves with swapped roles, like a theater where the stage has caught fire and the cast keeps reciting their lines anyway. “The torch,” one line reads, “its perpetual comings and goings until dawn over the papers in the sack.”
Everything and everyone dissolves: towns, identities, even the Virgin Mary, who sails off on a ship like a forgotten statue. Piety and obscenity trade places so quickly they become indistinguishable, and the sacred is constantly caught with its robes around its ankles.
What stuck with me, beyond the phalluses and poppies and ghostly elegies, was the feeling that this book understands something about loss that most novels fake. This is what it feels like to be haunted by a life you maybe never had, to sleep in a barn that used to be your home, to write a poem you’ll forget by nightfall. “Never spoken that language,” someone says again and again, trying to translate sorrow into sentences that keep unspooling.
Fable is full of these strange, sticky moments where language almost means something - and then slips away. You leave the book unsure whether anything really happened—but convinced that something important almost did. And (I think) that’s the point. Pinget offers the weird comfort of returning again and again to the same broken-down barn, wondering what it used to be.
"...The corteges proceed laboriously like caterpillars in the hollows of the valleys. There is something floating in the air which it is difficult to give a name to. Death is everywhere.
The Narcissus in question had become multiplied on the shore which was covered with corpses. The odor spread all over the countryside. It guided the cortèges to the littoral, and the fête would continue for ever and ever.
Et verbum caro factum est.
Its creation, said the Romany, was always imperfect, always needed to be saved, we are inextricably linked to its sin.
The most beautiful of the children of men.
It would eternally start anew with the most beautiful phallus that had ever existed. The tabernacle. He didn’t even trouble to do up his buttons, the whole lot was exposed to the sunlight and the people intoned o salutaris.
The Romany was watching his host out of the corner of his eye. This desert to enter naked, dispossessed, without memories.
I saw him he said taking off his clothes which he put on a clump of thorns and start walking but from so far away that I might have mistaken him for his comrade, they were of the same height, the same leanness, the same silhouette. And I imagined that they had both taken off their clothes and were going off in opposite directions to find in the antipodes, far from the dunes and hills, that part of themselves that one represented for the other. But it was an illusion. The lost half was lost forever and their exodus could only end in renunciation.
The hermit had taken up his quarters in the wooded region, so well hidden that what they call a stroke of luck was necessary in order to find him..."
??????? what the heck
A boy with “white skin and blue hair” is torn apart and devoured by leather-belted men who eat his groin and hang his head from a saddle. Flowers bloom from foreheads, angels have sex in the poppies, and someone keeps insisting there’s still a house, a kitchen garden, and something that once might have been called love.
“There were absences in my life which were a comfort,” someone says, “then there was a presence that ruined me.” The book plays like a memory turned inside out and stretched until it starts hallucinating.
Pinget, who sat somewhere between Beckett and Kafka on the literary family tree, builds the book on repetition, recursion, and the slow crumbling of reality.
Miaille walks the same route through collapsing barns and nettle-covered ruins, meets travelers who may be angels, poets, gypsies, or just other versions of himself.
The characters swap places, sentences echo across pages, and entire scenes replay themselves with swapped roles, like a theater where the stage has caught fire and the cast keeps reciting their lines anyway. “The torch,” one line reads, “its perpetual comings and goings until dawn over the papers in the sack.”
Everything and everyone dissolves: towns, identities, even the Virgin Mary, who sails off on a ship like a forgotten statue. Piety and obscenity trade places so quickly they become indistinguishable, and the sacred is constantly caught with its robes around its ankles.
What stuck with me, beyond the phalluses and poppies and ghostly elegies, was the feeling that this book understands something about loss that most novels fake. This is what it feels like to be haunted by a life you maybe never had, to sleep in a barn that used to be your home, to write a poem you’ll forget by nightfall. “Never spoken that language,” someone says again and again, trying to translate sorrow into sentences that keep unspooling.
Fable is full of these strange, sticky moments where language almost means something - and then slips away. You leave the book unsure whether anything really happened—but convinced that something important almost did. And (I think) that’s the point. Pinget offers the weird comfort of returning again and again to the same broken-down barn, wondering what it used to be.
"...The corteges proceed laboriously like caterpillars in the hollows of the valleys. There is something floating in the air which it is difficult to give a name to. Death is everywhere.
The Narcissus in question had become multiplied on the shore which was covered with corpses. The odor spread all over the countryside. It guided the cortèges to the littoral, and the fête would continue for ever and ever.
Et verbum caro factum est.
Its creation, said the Romany, was always imperfect, always needed to be saved, we are inextricably linked to its sin.
The most beautiful of the children of men.
It would eternally start anew with the most beautiful phallus that had ever existed. The tabernacle. He didn’t even trouble to do up his buttons, the whole lot was exposed to the sunlight and the people intoned o salutaris.
The Romany was watching his host out of the corner of his eye. This desert to enter naked, dispossessed, without memories.
I saw him he said taking off his clothes which he put on a clump of thorns and start walking but from so far away that I might have mistaken him for his comrade, they were of the same height, the same leanness, the same silhouette. And I imagined that they had both taken off their clothes and were going off in opposite directions to find in the antipodes, far from the dunes and hills, that part of themselves that one represented for the other. But it was an illusion. The lost half was lost forever and their exodus could only end in renunciation.
The hermit had taken up his quarters in the wooded region, so well hidden that what they call a stroke of luck was necessary in order to find him..."
??????? what the heck
August 3, 2019
Didn't understand it. Don't care.
March 13, 2019
Extraordinarily beautiful and haunting prose poem where each and every sentence deserves pondering.
Read
February 27, 2009Woah, this deceptively short book is making my head spin. I thought it would be a slight diversion from Gormenghast but it's dense and full of bad stream-of-conscious translation jargon, though often the prose is beautiful. Still, it is the sort of book one must pay utmost attention to, and I am often reading while being totally distracted, which I find to be the best way to read. Like Gunslinger, it is poetry and I enjoy some of it but I am having difficulty simply understanding what is going on. And I come here for help and no one's even reviewed it! I may have to dump this one.
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Well I finished "reading" this, though don't ask me what it was about. I eagerly await someone else's thoughts, and a brief summary would also be much appreciated.
"The author now disapproves of the sometimes blasphemous tone of this book." - note on last page.
--------------------
Well I finished "reading" this, though don't ask me what it was about. I eagerly await someone else's thoughts, and a brief summary would also be much appreciated.
"The author now disapproves of the sometimes blasphemous tone of this book." - note on last page.
July 31, 2022
A man named Mielle stays the night in an old familiar barn where he reminisces on various images after a cataclysm destroys the town, carrying with him a knapsack full of old photos and receipts. He obsesses over memories of invading barbarians eating a dead boy by the lake, exiles leaving the ruins of their home, a threadbare instrument and its music, Narcissus staring at his reflection in the water, Delphiniums, a priestess-poetess who likes looking at Christ’s circumcised statute a little too much and keeps some smutty photos by her bed, and an aromatic herb garden. At some point, he meets with a gypsy and his family who he invites to stay at his barn, and blinds himself in despair, then later under a different name and on the verge of death develops plans to renovate his home. Towards the end, he discovers a gypsy in the barn who occupies the same spot he was in at the beginning of the novel. Is he really the gypsy and he only imagined himself inviting the gypsy? What is one to make of all this?
In many ways, I am bringing more order to the narrative than really exists. This novel is a messy hodge-podge of images, which includes lines within the book that acknowledges its own chaotic lack of structure:
“Was thinking about that hodge-podge transformed by the magic of successive revelations, they were pretty precarious (13).”
There really is no obvious coherent structure. The book is an incoherent mess, a hodge-podge of images that eschews a sense of time or meaning, but it strives for this quality on purpose. Robert Pinget belongs to a movement of writers known as nouveau roman that attempted to write novels that avoided and challenged the characteristics of the traditional novel.
Some paragraphs almost give us a foothold to gain a sense of what is going on such as the temptation that these bizarre images are reflections and memories of the main character. However, as the quote above describes any temporary sense of meaning is precarious. The main character also assumes various roles throughout the novel, leaving open his identity, and what is happening. Which description of him is the version of him that the reader is supposed to recognize as the authentic character? Which one is merely a fantasy of the “real” character?
We never know what is reality and what is imagination. Another example would be the repeating image of the barbarians. Are those barbarians eating the boy at the lake meant to be a dream-like nightmare that is haunting the character’s subconscious or did actual barbarians invade the town after a cataclysm? When exactly did this happen? Did it happen at all or some sort of mental symbolism? Likewise, the repeated image of Narcissus at the lake who at some point kills himself connects to the image of the dead boy at the lake being eaten by the barbarians. This book is more difficult than stream-of-consciousness as it attempts to “dissolve” time, reality and imagination, and even to some extent only has the faintest hint of a character who himself becomes part of the dream-like images. The only thing really holding the book together is the repetition of images that appear over and over again, are sometimes combined, and sometimes varied and transformed.
The goal seems to be to write a book with no sense of present, past, future, any sense of what is real and what is imaginary. I can’t say I particularly liked this book as it was a little too disjointed for my tastes.
In many ways, I am bringing more order to the narrative than really exists. This novel is a messy hodge-podge of images, which includes lines within the book that acknowledges its own chaotic lack of structure:
“Was thinking about that hodge-podge transformed by the magic of successive revelations, they were pretty precarious (13).”
There really is no obvious coherent structure. The book is an incoherent mess, a hodge-podge of images that eschews a sense of time or meaning, but it strives for this quality on purpose. Robert Pinget belongs to a movement of writers known as nouveau roman that attempted to write novels that avoided and challenged the characteristics of the traditional novel.
Some paragraphs almost give us a foothold to gain a sense of what is going on such as the temptation that these bizarre images are reflections and memories of the main character. However, as the quote above describes any temporary sense of meaning is precarious. The main character also assumes various roles throughout the novel, leaving open his identity, and what is happening. Which description of him is the version of him that the reader is supposed to recognize as the authentic character? Which one is merely a fantasy of the “real” character?
We never know what is reality and what is imagination. Another example would be the repeating image of the barbarians. Are those barbarians eating the boy at the lake meant to be a dream-like nightmare that is haunting the character’s subconscious or did actual barbarians invade the town after a cataclysm? When exactly did this happen? Did it happen at all or some sort of mental symbolism? Likewise, the repeated image of Narcissus at the lake who at some point kills himself connects to the image of the dead boy at the lake being eaten by the barbarians. This book is more difficult than stream-of-consciousness as it attempts to “dissolve” time, reality and imagination, and even to some extent only has the faintest hint of a character who himself becomes part of the dream-like images. The only thing really holding the book together is the repetition of images that appear over and over again, are sometimes combined, and sometimes varied and transformed.
The goal seems to be to write a book with no sense of present, past, future, any sense of what is real and what is imaginary. I can’t say I particularly liked this book as it was a little too disjointed for my tastes.
January 11, 2025
It was aight. I’m just coming outta surgery so I’ve had a decent amount of time to read, but while I was reading this my meds kicked in and I gotta say I really zoned out. It was pretty cool, but idk it might’ve not been the best Pinget to start with, and maybe my perception of it will change as I read the rest of his work.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews