(the exquisite)/laird hunt
every now and then i'll come across a book i simply cannot read. it's not that i don't want to read it, or have read some of it and decided it's not worth finishing. it's not like how i don't want to read through the instruction manual for my antique, vibrating belt machine, with all of its technical jargon and promises of effortless, jiggle-induced fat loss. or how i started reading sri chinmoy's the wings of joy, but decided to stop for fear of spontaneously combusting into a cloud of light and bliss. rather, there are some books i just can't get through, regardless of how worthwhile they are. unfortunately, laird hunt's the exquisite happened to be one such book. but i can't seem to remember why...
now, i was really, really looking forward to reading this book. well, no, what i really had a hankering for was hunt's debut novel the impossibly. but the exquisite was what the library hads so the exquisite is what i gots. which is great, it turned out to be a wonderful book.
A brief synopsis: Henry is a thieving vagrant who somehow ends up in the gainful employ of the
eccentric and enigmatic Aris Kindt, performing murders for paying victims which may or may not be simulated. At the same time, Henry is a mental patient residing in the same hospital as one Mr. Kindt, also a mental patient, and together they heist drugs and other medical goods from the facility.
as i seem to recall, the exquisite had everything a committed reader of fine fiction could hope for, and then some: a profoundly unreliable narrator. schizophrenia. alternate realities. a complex, though not convoluted narrative structure. characters that are simultaneously quirky, menacing, and unfathomable. the soft skinned, fish and gravy loving eccentric, mr. kindt. doppelgangers. a lynchian kind of world, full of temporal paradoxes and ontological rabbit holes. metafiction up the yin. placelessness in a post 9-11 world. noir. investigations into the nature of memory and history. basically, the whole shebang.
oh, and let's not forget the multiple, direct references to w.g. sebald's magnificent the rings of saturn, from which the exquisite largely derives.
oh, right. that. now it's coming back. this is what stymied me. this is what took the wind out of my sails, and left me to go at hunt's book with all the virve of someone who's just chugged a gallon of milk. let me explain.
while an excellent book in its own right, the exquisite is undoubtedly a tribute book, an homage to and extension of what many consider to be sebald's masterpiece (the many being me). this isn't good or bad, it's just how it is, and it's actually kind of a great idea on hunt's part. but at the same time i felt hunt was placing his book in the big, long shadow of tros.
if you haven't read tros then you should. its a haunting, curious, splendid book. the kind you read through once thinking almost nothing of it but which lingers in your mind, surfacing in your thoughts, from seemingly nowhere, on those gray and barren days you seem to be having more and more of. i'm not going to do it the disservice of trying to review it here, or anywhere in this bumbling blog o' mine. suffice to say, it's something you should read at least once, and preferably six or seven times before you die.
what i will say, though, is that tros is something of a literary cabinet of curiosities, with references to unusual or obscure artifacts, personages, and occurrences, such as the elusive preserved skull of thomas browne, the herring, the exploits of the chinese dowager empress, etc. of significance is sebald's mention and alaysis of rembrandt's the anatomy lesson. it is this work, and particularly sebald's reading of the painting not so much as the document of medical discovery, but punitive violence done via literature and art, that hunt's book draws on. this is most explicit in the characters of tulip/dr. tulp and aris kindt. while tulip/tulp are women and the objects of henry's desire, tulp is also the name of the surgeon depicted in the anatomy lesson. as you can probably guess, aris kindt, aside from being the sticky fingered mastermind behind henry's petty thefts and staged murders, is also the guy getting cut open by tulp and his cronies in rembrandt's painting. it is worth noting that his corpse was donated to science after he'd been executed for theft. (thanks wikipedia)
so, what tripped me up, what i couldn't seem to get over is that they are two very different books, and while reading the exquisite i couldn't help but be distracted by thoughts of sebald's work. and despite the resonance between them, there's also a hierarchy of sorts, with tros being the "master" text, not simply because it was published first and cited in the exquisite, but also because i'm biased and consider tros to be maybe the best book i've ever read. so when i'm reading the exquisite i'm thinking "this is really good, but tros is just plain great". or, to put it another way, reading the exquisite made me wish i was reading tros. which us just how it is, with the one so intimately related to the other, there's no getting around it.
which isn't to say that they're the same book, by any means. if thematically related, the two books differ vastly in style, tone, atmosphere. everything. there's something sinister and understated about tros. there's no plot really, beyond the collected observations and histories of a man walking about the coast of england, looking at things that remind him of other things. sebald writes in a fairly plain style that quietly and gradually accumulates a poetic gravity beyond its documentary function. the seemingly simple description of a cloud or a field of heather will leave you feeling profoundly squashed and melancholy, despite having little in teh way of verbal flourish. what appear to be straightforward historical and personal accounts turn out to be peculiar reconstructions, a disquieting mixture of the bizarre and the unremarkable into something else entirely. not only will tros linger in you like a fog, it will make you feel as though you are slowly becoming fog, drifting, dissipating always into shapeless oblivion.
the exquisite, on the other hand, for all of its noiry shadows and existential disorientation, is a relatively quirky, fun read. firstly, it's a more dynamic, traditional piece of fiction in that there are characters and a kind of cohesive plot (well, a couple actually), as opposed to a series of studies and meditations. things happen, dilemmas arise, questions are asked. things get resolved, maybe. it's as much a who dunnit as it is a dissection of memory, history, and all that blah. hunt's writing is deft, beautiful and easy without being too precious, stylish without being overwrought or postured. characters are developed as more than just allegories or illustrations of a theme, but as, well, characters, meant to be engaging and entertaining and explicitly weird. more than a figure of punishment and violence, kindt has been imagined as part zany, part highly refined renaissance old man with a taste for burdensomely heavy food and convoluted schemes, a guy you know nothing about but can't help but be interested in. tulp is hot now. so are all the other women, one of whom is actually known as "the knockout". tros dunt have any of that. oh, and it's often quite funny, for all of its moroseness.
i'm not saying that the exquisite isn't a serious, magnificent novel. on the contrary, if tros is a misty monolith of a book, then the exquisite is a complicated, kaleidoscopic work that operates on more levels than tros is capable of.
still... there's something about how accomplished and definitively literary, how simultaneously baroque and almost whimsically fun the exquisite is, relative to the nebulous tros that makes it seem somehow... i don't know. trivial? no, that's not quite fair. kind of like sneaking glances at your book of dirty haikus when you should be turning over that zen koan? maybe.
but really i'm just comparing apples and oranges here. or maybe apples and apple juice. yeah.
either way, in the end, the exquisite is still a book i've read only a few pages more than half of, so what do i really know? well, i know that it's worth finishing. even though i didn't.
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