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My terrifying launderette >> Two summer novellas for a steamy afternoon
by JULIET WATERS
It's also a favourite genre of obsessive filmmakers. Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut is based on the 1926 novella Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler. Francis Ford Coppola's passion for Conrad's Heart of Darkness is as legendary as the adaptation he made of it, Apocalypse Now. But Bruce Robinson, director of Withnail and I, may be one of the only filmmakers to actually write a novella. And this right after coming out with a critically acclaimed first novel, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman. Of course, Paranoia in the Launderette is not exactly a complex masterpiece. It's a glib but fun little set-piece that you could easily finish while doing your laundry. Plus, it has the added advantage of being small enough to fit in the pocket of a pair of combat shorts, making it a nice little fashion statement to carry around once you've finished your load. Once again, Robinson creates a narrator without a name. This "I" is a television screenwriter who is obsessed with murderers. As the story opens he's at work on a series of TV dramas called Decades of Death. His walls are covered with photographs of murderers. His bedroom is piled with books about them, including one book published in 1929 with over 200 examples of the "Criminal Stare." "I"'s life is filled with Robinson's trademark squalor. The plot of the novella is not much more than the story of circumstances that force the narrator to go out and do laundry, an activity he obviously has little experience with. But the terror that Robinson creates surrounding this event is extremely funny, even if it's definitely the least serious work he's ever done. For readers looking for something with a bit more depth, The Indiscernible Movement by Quebec writer Aude has recently been translated by Jill Cairns. Billed as a novella, some people might actually mistake these for linked short stories. However, as Cairns explains in the afterword, "The text turns intricately around a central theme--the innate human capacity of finding unexpected ways to exist in and overcome adversity." This unity of theme resonates so strongly that it actually does read like one long work. These are beautiful, sometimes horrifying, surreal, but deceptively simple stories. A man in a prison camp keeps his sanity by playing a Kafkaesque game of cards. An alienated, empty young adult is taught happiness by a pair of eerily intelligent dogs called Left and Right. A photographer falls in love with the 11-year-old niece who becomes his ward after the death of his brother. At one point, the photographer recalls a sentence that stuck in his mind for months, about a Spanish infanta "who was so pale and transparent that you could see the wine going down her throat as she drank." Aude's stories have almost that same quality. They are so pared down they seem almost that thin. But at the same time there's an extraordinary beauty to them. What creates this beauty is indiscernible, but unforgettable.
Book talk: Author Sarah Shulman suspects that the similarities between the play Rent and her novel People in Trouble are more than coincidental. Whether that's paranoia or an example of gay experience being co-opted once again by American Art is up for debate by anyone who reads her non-fiction work, Stagestruck. Either way, this articulate, charming and funny writer will be reading from her latest novel Shimmer as part of Divers/Cité, Thursday, July 29, 6 p.m. at the MAI. For info, call L'Androgyne: 842-4765.
Paranoia in the Launderette by Bruce Robinson, Bloomsbury, 45pp, pb, $8.99/The Indiscernible Movement by Aude, translated by Jill Cairns, Exile, 111pp, pb, $17.95 |
Novellas are perfect for summer reading. They're short enough to be read in an afternoon. There's usually some kind of compulsive theme not complicated enough for a novel, but too obsessive to be contained in a short story. "If the novel is the marriage," writes David Leavitt "the novella is a prolonged infatuation, an extended holiday."