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language: French
country: France
year: 1863/1994
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 8.2.23-10.2.23
I’ve never read anything by Verne before, so I decided why not start with Paris au XXe siècle, a rejected manuscript from 1863 that was only discovered and published in 1994? this isn’t because I put any thought into it, but rather because I already had a copy that I acquired in May 2011 and have been carrying around with me from place to place since.
my brief review is: fuck France and especially fuck French nationalism.
my longer review is: this is a depressing little dystopian novel that imagines the world in 1960 as one consumed by STEM, with industry (especially) and finance (secondarily) having displaced all interest in literature, art, and, indeed, anything that makes life meaningful. what art exists is tailored to the sciences, producing some poetry collection titles that frankly sound really cool: Harmonies électriques, Méditations sur l’oxygène, Parallélogramme poétique, Odes décarbonatées. I’d at least consider reading them. Verne’s protagonist, the young poet Michel, is horrified, however, and the book is a litany of encounters with representative “modern” art that we are meant to regard with horror: electronic music, various modernist musics in the vein of Cage (but a century avant la lettre, imagined on the basis that 19th-century composers were ~destroying melody~ lmao), abstract art and sculpture, the aforementioned poetry collections.
in some ways I can appreciate the dystopia: as a person with a PhD in literature it is extremely depressing to see job after job in business, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology, anything but what I work on, while governments set immigration policies designed to attract “skilled workers”, which only means people with sciences degrees. perhaps the most striking section in terms of the rejection of art is the chapter where Michel works for the theater company, which is owned and controlled by the government with a strict mandate to amuse but never actually, you know, provoke thought. it’s very Disney/Hollywood: Michel is tasked with reworking several (apparently) classic plays to suit the priorities of the capitalist state. he is, of course, horrified and ends up getting fired because he can’t bring himself to do any work.
in other ways, it’s all very silly. I love John Cage and hate most “classic” Euro-French literature I’ve encountered, except Molière (the one “classic” playwright who’s staged in unedited form), so…can’t relate, Jules. also — and this isn’t his fault, exactly — he failed to predict one absolutely crucial invention, namely the typewriter, which means that Michel’s second job is to dictate the contents of the “Grand Livre”, the official ledger of the bank he works for, to another worker — his only friend, Quinsonnas, an aspiring musician — who will hand-write the contents of the ledger. they both get fired when, in a moment of passion, Quinsonnas accidentally knocks over a bottle of ink and destroys the ledger. there’s a whole chapter that’s basically just a list of French writers from ca. the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, as Michel admires his uncle’s library.
the best part of the novel is also the worst: Quinsonnas is extremely written as a cynical gay guy, and when Michel — who has a very close relationship with him; the chapter where he visits Quinsonnas and one of his friends literally ends with Quinsonnas showing the two of them his bed — asks him his opinion on women, marriage, and, more specifically, the prospect of Michel getting married, Quinsonnas goes on a bizarre little antifeminist rant about how there are no real women anymore because they’ve been “masculinized” by industrial culture. this is a bad look! at the same time, though, coming from a gay-coded character (intentionally or otherwise) whose principle objection to marriage is that he likes bachelorhood I also can’t shake the feeling that this is a defense mechanism to justify staying single. I love that Quinsonnas and Michel are clearly fucking. literally Michel kisses him goodbye when Quinsonnas finally heads to Germany to try to become famous abroad (“je vais me faire importer”).
I can’t shake the feeling that the whole overwrought thing is a parody, but Verne apparently meant it seriously. lmao.
moods: dark, informative