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Darconville's Cat
Alaric Darconville is a young professor at a southern women’s college. He falls in love with one of his students, is deserted, and the consequences are almost beyond the telling. But not quite. This novel is an astonishing wire-walking exhibition of wit, knowledge, and linguistic mastery.
Darconville’s Cat is a novel about love and hate. Among other matters, it deals with delicate tensions between Life and Art, the Ideal and the Real, God and Satan, and, above all, with the crises and conflicts between Man and Woman, the tragic implications of which reach all the way back to the Primal Fall.
Its chapters embody a multiplicity of narrative forms, including a diary, a formal oration, an abecedarium, a sermon, a litany, a blank-verse play, poems, essays, parodies, and fables. It is an explosion of vocabulary, rich with comic invention and dark with infernal imagination.
Alexander Theroux restores words to life, invents others, liberates a language too long polluted by mutters and mumbles, anti-logic, and the inexact lunacies of the modern world where the possibility of communication itself is in question. An elegantly executed jailbreak from the ordinary, Darconville’s Cat is excessive; funny; uncompromising; a powerful epic, coming out of a tradition, yet contempo- rary, of both the sacred and the profane.
Darconville’s Cat is a novel about love and hate. Among other matters, it deals with delicate tensions between Life and Art, the Ideal and the Real, God and Satan, and, above all, with the crises and conflicts between Man and Woman, the tragic implications of which reach all the way back to the Primal Fall.
Its chapters embody a multiplicity of narrative forms, including a diary, a formal oration, an abecedarium, a sermon, a litany, a blank-verse play, poems, essays, parodies, and fables. It is an explosion of vocabulary, rich with comic invention and dark with infernal imagination.
Alexander Theroux restores words to life, invents others, liberates a language too long polluted by mutters and mumbles, anti-logic, and the inexact lunacies of the modern world where the possibility of communication itself is in question. An elegantly executed jailbreak from the ordinary, Darconville’s Cat is excessive; funny; uncompromising; a powerful epic, coming out of a tradition, yet contempo- rary, of both the sacred and the profane.
720 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1981
About the author
Alexander Theroux
45 books175 followersAlexander Theroux is a novelist, poet, and essayist. The most apt description of the novels of Theroux was given by Anthony Burgess in praise of Theroux's Darconville's Cat: Theroux is 'word drunk', filling his novels with a torrent of words archaic and neologic, always striving for originality, while drawing from the traditions of Rolfe, Rabelais, Sterne, and Nabokov.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 98 reviews
July 23, 2023
Love can be a miracle… And love can be a disaster…
Darconville’s Cat by Alexander Theroux is a complex, convoluted, fabulous, dark and tragic love story – the best I’ve ever read…
There is a cosmic love – love that rises above anything in this world. And there is love that tortures and incarcerates… And there’s no way to escape… And nowhere to run…
Arms that chain… Eyes that lie…
If a true and only love is unrequited it turns into a lethal affliction.
Darconville, the schoolmaster, always wore black. The single tree, however, that shanked out of the front yard he now crossed in long strides showed even more distinct a darkness, a simulacrum of the dread probationary tree – trapfall of all lost love – for coming upon it, gibbet-high and half leafless in the moonlight, was to feel somehow disposed to the general truth that it is a dangerous and pagan notion that beauty palliates evil.
Darconville’s Cat by Alexander Theroux is a complex, convoluted, fabulous, dark and tragic love story – the best I’ve ever read…
It has been said by some and several that Desire wishes, Love enjoys, and that the end of one is the beginning of the other. That which we love is present; that which we desire is absent. But it was not so with smitten Darconville. He felt he would never know enough of her, present or absent, so little, in fact, he knew. His love only compounded his desire. And, as he wished to enjoy, he enjoyed this wish: his love to desire.
There is a cosmic love – love that rises above anything in this world. And there is love that tortures and incarcerates… And there’s no way to escape… And nowhere to run…
He seemed as he closed his eyes to be listening to something beyond him, as if in bizarre and unhallowed colloquy with his inner self, and then he turned, moving now around the ancient relics of the room, and in the falsetto modulations of that impossible voice began to recite in a cold drawn-out prolation the queerest litany ever heard:
“– from Eve and her quinces, libera nos, Domine
– from Jael, the jakesmaid,
– from Pasiphaë, the Cretan motherlord,
– from Venus Illegitima, goddess of unnatural acts…”
Arms that chain… Eyes that lie…
If a true and only love is unrequited it turns into a lethal affliction.
August 11, 2016
I failed, I failed, I gave up, I'm sorry. It was written in English, Jim, but not as we know it, and I flipped forward and it was all like that. This book has too many brains and it frightened me in the way a sufferer from dementia must be frightened when they look at a clock and realise they no longer can tell the time. It's not a novel at all, it's a cruel and unusual punishment. Using oven gloves I placed it in a plastic bag then I double-bagged it and hid the whole thing in a dark recess of my cellar, shuddering the while. I couldn't throw it in the bin because I tried that the previous week and they refused to take it.
October 1, 2023
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to slice open the chests of our sacrificial victims with razor sharp obsidian blades, spill their blood on the temple altar, and offer their still-beating hearts to Huitzilopochtli, least darkness overtake the world. But first, let us propitiate the word-drunk bastard of a caribou whose dopaminergic system has been deeply influenced by sustained usage of a thesaurus as an extemporary Fleshlight. Whose mesolimbic pathway has been eroded by antiquarian verbation so thoroughly that one might look upon it as a veritable Gehenna of archaic remains. Whose Cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loop channels twin beams of subatomic neologisms at relativistic speeds - Alexander Theroux. And in order to do so, I must first start with a question:
Have you ever, while imbibing a psychoactive Amazonian brew which holds a central place in healing rituals and popular syncretic religions, especially in South America (i.e. Ayahuasca) in a desperate attempt to ameliorate certain existential anxieties, experienced tertiary, (the second gift bearing lexical fruit in the form of long forgotten trivia dredged up from times spent marshaling my cadre of fellow anoraks during Academic Decathlon’s through dreadful mnemonic hexadecimal beatboxing), benefit in a veritable storm of insights into your personal relationships? In which you truly understood, for the first time, that novel expressions are practically infinite due to the recursive nature of language? Did this prompt you to resolve a long standing conflict by kicking down a door and saying, “If you insist on attempting to chicane me, in your beef-wit manner, certes belike you should meet ends sanguinary with a bodkin in your Callipygian breech, you cockalorum, you brabble rousing grouse. Sepulchral in the herbary with all your suitors circumjacent wondering which doxy slew the dandiprat in his very own Demesne with such esurient viciousness. His fandangle hewed from him and the exceedingly modest scruple stuffed in his scrag to forefend another fizgig from becoming a gorgonized gudgeon and breaking her feminal upon it and inflicting other ghastly immedicable lacerations upon her very soul. Savage expiry of a kind only inflicted by jilted magdalens. Parfay, Reginald! You picaroon pismire I am no one’s quockerwodger, and I will reave your ever-loving guts from your body and hang you by them as recompense if you continue to treat me as such. This wonder-wench carries 1-Diazidocarbamoyl-5-azidotetrazole in her pouncet-box!” Did he then turn, already clutching the receiver of a telecommunications device, and nervously reply, “The police are on their way.” ?
Just 2.5 cubic millimeters (approximate volume; grain of rice) of neocortical tissue in your brain contains roughly one hundred thousand neurons, five hundred million connections between neurons and kilometers of axons and dendrites. These brain cells, which, taken singularly, comprehend nothing, are, as you’re reading this, working in concert to create a model of the world based on symbols whose light is battering photosensitive cells at the back of your ocular gelatin which are powerless before my semiotic sadism but to transduce these syntactical morphologies into currents which are propagating along the twin fuses of your optic nerves like detcord (i.e. Detonation Cord consisting of a high-explosive (either PETN or RDX) core wrapped in a reinforced, waterproof, olive-drab plastic coating that transmits a detonating wave at a det-velocity of no less than 5,900 m/s which makes it suitable for synchronizing multiple charges, even when placed at different distances from initiation, which dovetails nicely with the idea of parallactic displacement between concepts vaguely apprehended, and those arriving with immediate clarity, creating a kind of perceived depth, a three dimensionality to the dynamic play of concepts etched into inert substrates, which is nothing short of spiritual in its most powerful instantiations) and breaching your brain with pressure waves which deform the elastic medium of your intellect’s electro-chemical stew with the force of their decrypted abstractions stirring your mind like like a ladle and leaving you forever changed.
I’m brought once again to one of my favorite quotes, in which Bradbury’s fictional character says: “This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition anyway.” As it captures the parallel I’m attempting to make between the crumpled cortical sheet which enfolds the cerebrum, with its staggering internal complexities, and the internal structure evinced not only by the sum of Theroux’s efforts here, this book - of a length which lends itself to easy weaponization, of a weight and heft which thrums with bludgeoning ideations of literary violence - but by its parts as well, with each page so saturated by imaginative inlets that the Pauli Exclusion Principle cannot but collapse in deepest humiliation as you pass through the pervious prose like the ectoplasm of a mortal dissolved by unrelenting pugilistic pedantry.
What’s the book about? Read the goddamn summary! Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego!
Is *that* what you wankers are looking for here? You must know by now you’re in the wrong place. But let me say this; it’s inconsequential. This could be about anything and it would be one of the greatest novels ever written on the strength of how creative it is. This is a book for lovers of language. It is not, I must emphasize, a book for reader’s seeking to be conveyed through a story on the back of transparent writing and traditional narrative flourishes. This is dense, experimental, playful, and concerned, above all else, with expressing things in the most beautiful way possible. The prose is primary, and it is fucking sublime.
Have you ever, while imbibing a psychoactive Amazonian brew which holds a central place in healing rituals and popular syncretic religions, especially in South America (i.e. Ayahuasca) in a desperate attempt to ameliorate certain existential anxieties, experienced tertiary, (the second gift bearing lexical fruit in the form of long forgotten trivia dredged up from times spent marshaling my cadre of fellow anoraks during Academic Decathlon’s through dreadful mnemonic hexadecimal beatboxing), benefit in a veritable storm of insights into your personal relationships? In which you truly understood, for the first time, that novel expressions are practically infinite due to the recursive nature of language? Did this prompt you to resolve a long standing conflict by kicking down a door and saying, “If you insist on attempting to chicane me, in your beef-wit manner, certes belike you should meet ends sanguinary with a bodkin in your Callipygian breech, you cockalorum, you brabble rousing grouse. Sepulchral in the herbary with all your suitors circumjacent wondering which doxy slew the dandiprat in his very own Demesne with such esurient viciousness. His fandangle hewed from him and the exceedingly modest scruple stuffed in his scrag to forefend another fizgig from becoming a gorgonized gudgeon and breaking her feminal upon it and inflicting other ghastly immedicable lacerations upon her very soul. Savage expiry of a kind only inflicted by jilted magdalens. Parfay, Reginald! You picaroon pismire I am no one’s quockerwodger, and I will reave your ever-loving guts from your body and hang you by them as recompense if you continue to treat me as such. This wonder-wench carries 1-Diazidocarbamoyl-5-azidotetrazole in her pouncet-box!” Did he then turn, already clutching the receiver of a telecommunications device, and nervously reply, “The police are on their way.” ?
Just 2.5 cubic millimeters (approximate volume; grain of rice) of neocortical tissue in your brain contains roughly one hundred thousand neurons, five hundred million connections between neurons and kilometers of axons and dendrites. These brain cells, which, taken singularly, comprehend nothing, are, as you’re reading this, working in concert to create a model of the world based on symbols whose light is battering photosensitive cells at the back of your ocular gelatin which are powerless before my semiotic sadism but to transduce these syntactical morphologies into currents which are propagating along the twin fuses of your optic nerves like detcord (i.e. Detonation Cord consisting of a high-explosive (either PETN or RDX) core wrapped in a reinforced, waterproof, olive-drab plastic coating that transmits a detonating wave at a det-velocity of no less than 5,900 m/s which makes it suitable for synchronizing multiple charges, even when placed at different distances from initiation, which dovetails nicely with the idea of parallactic displacement between concepts vaguely apprehended, and those arriving with immediate clarity, creating a kind of perceived depth, a three dimensionality to the dynamic play of concepts etched into inert substrates, which is nothing short of spiritual in its most powerful instantiations) and breaching your brain with pressure waves which deform the elastic medium of your intellect’s electro-chemical stew with the force of their decrypted abstractions stirring your mind like like a ladle and leaving you forever changed.
I’m brought once again to one of my favorite quotes, in which Bradbury’s fictional character says: “This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition anyway.” As it captures the parallel I’m attempting to make between the crumpled cortical sheet which enfolds the cerebrum, with its staggering internal complexities, and the internal structure evinced not only by the sum of Theroux’s efforts here, this book - of a length which lends itself to easy weaponization, of a weight and heft which thrums with bludgeoning ideations of literary violence - but by its parts as well, with each page so saturated by imaginative inlets that the Pauli Exclusion Principle cannot but collapse in deepest humiliation as you pass through the pervious prose like the ectoplasm of a mortal dissolved by unrelenting pugilistic pedantry.
What’s the book about? Read the goddamn summary! Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego!
Is *that* what you wankers are looking for here? You must know by now you’re in the wrong place. But let me say this; it’s inconsequential. This could be about anything and it would be one of the greatest novels ever written on the strength of how creative it is. This is a book for lovers of language. It is not, I must emphasize, a book for reader’s seeking to be conveyed through a story on the back of transparent writing and traditional narrative flourishes. This is dense, experimental, playful, and concerned, above all else, with expressing things in the most beautiful way possible. The prose is primary, and it is fucking sublime.
December 16, 2012
A stupefying triumph of superhuman eloquence. A loved-up homage to the OED and Roget’s Thesaurus. A sacrificial offering to the Gods Rabelais, Sterne & Burton. A starry-eyed drooling hymn to amour, esp. with down-at-heel bimbos. A caustic and comic whirligig of varnished-to-perfection insults and Dickensian character-assassinations. A nuclear missile launched at the Southern United States. An enormous loving hug to all literature of significance pre-1800s. A novel bursting with prose so sublime, inventive, haunting and spiteful only quackshites would let it slip out of print. A novel to induce encomiums of stut-tut-tuttering adoration and spells of sp-sp-speechless drooling. A novel that makes you beg for more, and more, that makes you scream out in literary ecstasy for another 400, 600, 800, 1200 pages—more, more, more! That’s all I have to say, except the implied READ THIS. Holy bejesusing mercy, this is the real deal.
[My contribution to the explosive outpouring of Darconville’s Cat scholarship will be an exhaustive list (with definitions) of the deliciously recondite wordage Theroux uses in the book. Watch this face].
[My contribution to the explosive outpouring of Darconville’s Cat scholarship will be an exhaustive list (with definitions) of the deliciously recondite wordage Theroux uses in the book. Watch this face].
October 6, 2013
As a matter of honour...
Against the disease of writing [meviews] one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.Debating in the quiet chambers of the mind many hours how to review this book. Flinging ideas at the ever-patient partner about the dialectic of why a thought is what is thought, asking to be challenged because this book is seductive by nature and intellectual by design and how can a reader resist such a potent combination? Writing many opening sentences and discarding those, concocting a structure and burying it under a dense blanket of autobiographical rhetoric consigned to the bonfire of the vanity, and considering simply silence, as the excruciating riposte. At the last, it begins and ends with a list.
--Abelard
Read this book if you love:
--vocabulary (any adjective here would render me asinine);
--reading for (as near as you will find) perfect sentence structure;
--sustained voice (pages upon pages);
--puns in apundance, some clever, some from the school yard;
--labyrinthine caricature, sarcasm, invective and ridiculing the stereotypical foibles and follies of those you hold in contempt;
--discourse on the nature of romantic, heterosexual love;
--the logic of hate;
--the rationale of revenge;
--plunging into the abyss of anguish as the rejected;
--virtuous death;
--puzzles that you may or may not decipher;
--lists within books;
--books within lists;
--stories within stories;
--carnevalesque description;
--innovatively phrased aphorisms;
--discovering a source for literature you have yet to read;
--observing a writer's joy in displaying her/his deep knowledge of the literary tradition to which he/she lays claim;
--clues within the text which lead you to obscure knowledge which is valuable the more because of its obscurity;
--re-reading;
--uncovering forgotten and deserving authors; and
--living authors.
Avoid this book if you would:
--define satire as:-
1. Criticism of behaviour with the intent to educate an audience and foster social change;--prefer writers who reject sexism in both their writing and their public persona;
2. Irony, used humorously, to illuminate the behaviour criticised; and
3. Connotation, to infer the verdict against the criticised behaviour without explicit statement;
--insist on finding misogyny (either vindicated or venerated);
--feel offended that the enormity of misogyny is trivialised via the creation of a character which serves not the purpose of villifying misogynistic behaviour, but to satisfy a writer's grudge; and
--expect a writer to maintain authorial distance from her/his protagonist and antagonist.
Read these reviews:
Megha "They don't write [books] like this anymore."
Garima The cause of it all - "How I loved this book!"
Nathan "N.R." "Onanism is the terrible core of creation" and other notes of interest.
Paul Bryant The Lone Ranger lost in the wilderness (it was the cat in the cellar).
Ali "lol" For the updates.
MJ Nicholls A bunch of sentences starting with A for Alex.
Stephen M Disquisition on the moral philosophy of a Cat and its Keeper.
Rob Mayhap misogyny but mystery delights.
Anthony Vacca Two sides of the same heart.
Geoff Wilt Soul saviour.
Jonfaith "...an obstinate macroce[p}hallic umbrage..."
Other reviews
Read these links:
http://www.bookforum.com/interview/8796
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008...
http://www.themillions.com/2010/06/li...
http://vunex.blogspot.com/2008/06/mon...
http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.p...
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa...
Read
May 20, 2017Recent bloggish-review of The Cat in which some of you good goodreaders get yourselves quoted and a tip o' the hat to someone [sic] who looked up every godsdamn oversized $10 word.
“Darconville’s Cat”: The Power and Glory of Vengeance Writ Fantastically Large, by Stuart Mitchner, 21 Mar 2013: http://www.towntopics.com/wordpress/2...
________________
My review will be a bit delayed, likely until I revisit our Spellvexit story.
Meanwhile, the vocabulic efforts of MJ, Megha, Ali, and myself is available under My Writings, a not-thorough annotation of big words and Therouvian word mastery: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/3...
If you find yourself in difficulties about locating a copy, which should not be a difficulty just yet until Ali's flaming therouvianism gets truly out of hand and dries up the entire non-collectors market, there is what should be a prime bit of therouvian word and language love forthcoming in February 2013, The Grammar of Rock: Art and Artlessness in 20th Century Pop Lyrics.
_______________
To my merriment I have not run across the word ‘masturbatory’ in any goodreads review of Darconville’s Cat, although we well know this word has popped up in reviews of other Theroux books and books by other very smart people. To call an author of Theroux’s talents ‘self-indulgent’ or ‘masturbatory’ is the abyss of stupidity. Onanism is the terrible core of creation:
__________
A Theroux Primer from The Millions; an essay by Colin Marshall which covers all four Theroux novels. Highly recommended for an orientation within Therouxville.
___________
Interview with Steven Moore from
Review of Contemporary Fiction Spring 1991 regarding Darconville’s Cat and An Adultery.
_______________
Audio interview with Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm.
____________
My copy:
Purchased 03 November 2011 at Powell’s City of Books hot off the Buy Table for a mere $6.95. It is a 1st edition/ 2nd printing hardcover, not inscribed; 1st printing having p483 a dot-matrix/checkerboard rectangle, 2nd a solid black rectangle (altogether now, “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”). Red speckle/spray on the bottom edge apparently indicates having-been-remaindered, but dust jacket is not price-clipped. The jacket is in rather a tattered state with price tag gunk residue on the lower right corner of the front. An aborted reading by a previous possessor of this volume is indicated by underlining (in black ink) on the first few pages.
The following words are underlined:
p1 -- imperscrutable
p2 -- gulsar
p3 -- skite
p4 -- archistrateges
p5 -- mundus
-- grimoire
-- demulcents and rubefacients
p6 -- (none)
p7 -- . . .ther, though that, than on the invest. . .
-- . . .tle boy whose earliest memory was of trying to pick up pieces of moonlight that had fallen through the window onto his . . .
-- in the left margin, accompanying the above two underlinings, “?”
p8 -- (none)
p9 -- Spellvexit
fin de la lecture
The Committee for Cataloguing Underlinings and Annotations would like to apologize for peremptorily entering “fin de la lecture" into the record. Further instances of Underlining and Annotating have been discovered subsequent to its prior report.
p84 -- quopped
p94 -- kaleidogyns
p100 -- dysphemism
p101 -- . . . like a small batrachian in a hide. . .; in margin is written: “pompous prattle!”
p106 -- Scaurous
p108 -- below the final words of the chapter, “’I love you!’”, is written: “Boo!”
[What kind of reader would make notations like “pompous prattle” or say “Boo!” to a character’s discovering his being in love?]
The Committee acknowledges that the condition of this copy of Darconville’s Cat is such that it may well have been previously read in its entirety. Our earlier judgement concerning the despair in reading of a prior reader may well have been simply mistaken. The Committee, as a preliminary finding, would recommend that, even for book buyers in the habit of buying only clean, unmarked books, consider purchasing a well marked, annotated and underlined exemplar, being as this novel lends itself well to entertaining previous readings.
______________
"Nothing exceeds like excess." -- Crucifer
______________
"Anthony Burgess chose Theroux's Darconville's Cat as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It contains multitudes. It is a story of love, obsession and revenge -- and it is a story and celebration of the life of the English language -- all styles of writing and demotic species are incorporated in its vast body (I speak of the book at its near Proustian bulk, and of the language). And, it is as funny as anything you'll ever read in your life." - Ben Waugh.
“In his dazzling, invective-filled novel Three Wogs, Alexander Theroux noted (in an afterword of sorts) that he has ‘a very amplified prose style,’ and he spoke of ‘the leisure, the languor, necessary to art.’ It's clear that the language Mr. Theroux has employed in his own books is closer to that of such writers as Dickens, Sterne and Corvo than to the minimalist offering of his contemporaries; and [all his work] demonstrates a love of verbal pyrotechnics and an instinct for the grand. In the same essay quoted at the beginning of this review Mr. Theroux wrote, ‘Writing is life become art, not simply the random copy made out of one's dishwatery day or diary or panfurious whims. It selects, must do it beautifully.” - Michiko Kakutani.
“What's best about Darconville's Cat is the advantage Theroux takes of the tradition of The Book, the large storehouse of knowledge such as The Bible, Gargantua, or Moby-Dick. Elaboration is all. The reader who doesn't care for a chapter on college girls' late-night rap sessions or the dialogue in verse between Alaric and his beloved Isabel or a classical oration by Crucifer can skip ahead or back without losing essential continuity. There are learned disquisitions on love, hate, and the human ear; wonderful odd-lot lists; Shandyian japes such as a one-word chapter and a page of asterisks; and Swiftian renderings of small-town southern life, ranting religionists, academic foolery, and much more. The parts are all related but don't disappear into a whole, into an illusion of reality.
“Darconville's Cat is boring and brilliant, both puerile and profound, self-indulgent and often cruel. Theroux lacks Thomas Pynchon's interest in this century and the popular humor of Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, the novel Theroux's most closely resembles. ‘Madness,’ Darconville says of a book very like the one in which he is a character. But like that excessive anomaly of the 1950s, William Gaddis's The Recognitions, Darconville's Cat should find a dedicated following, readers with an appetite for ambition and literary aberration, for a prodigal art that, in Darconville's world, ‘declassifies.’” - Tom LeClair .
“Darconville’s Cat”: The Power and Glory of Vengeance Writ Fantastically Large, by Stuart Mitchner, 21 Mar 2013: http://www.towntopics.com/wordpress/2...
________________
My review will be a bit delayed, likely until I revisit our Spellvexit story.
Meanwhile, the vocabulic efforts of MJ, Megha, Ali, and myself is available under My Writings, a not-thorough annotation of big words and Therouvian word mastery: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/3...
If you find yourself in difficulties about locating a copy, which should not be a difficulty just yet until Ali's flaming therouvianism gets truly out of hand and dries up the entire non-collectors market, there is what should be a prime bit of therouvian word and language love forthcoming in February 2013, The Grammar of Rock: Art and Artlessness in 20th Century Pop Lyrics.
_______________
To my merriment I have not run across the word ‘masturbatory’ in any goodreads review of Darconville’s Cat, although we well know this word has popped up in reviews of other Theroux books and books by other very smart people. To call an author of Theroux’s talents ‘self-indulgent’ or ‘masturbatory’ is the abyss of stupidity. Onanism is the terrible core of creation:
Away with a prose squeezed free of the real! The shallow jealousies he’d felt low in his soul ate through to his conscience, shot through with self-indulgence and merciless egotism where the difficulty of writing--even the attempt--had its origins. He had committed, he saw, Durtal’s sin of ‘Pygmalionism’: corruptly falling in love with his own work while bearing a grudge against anything that went against it. Onanism! Onanism and incest! It was a new sin, the exclusive crime of artists, a vice reserved for priests of art and princes of gesture, the father violating his spiritual child, deflowering his dream, and polluting it with a vanity that was only a mimicry of love.” (p157).
__________
A Theroux Primer from The Millions; an essay by Colin Marshall which covers all four Theroux novels. Highly recommended for an orientation within Therouxville.
___________
Interview with Steven Moore from
Review of Contemporary Fiction Spring 1991 regarding Darconville’s Cat and An Adultery.
_______________
Audio interview with Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm.
____________
My copy:
Purchased 03 November 2011 at Powell’s City of Books hot off the Buy Table for a mere $6.95. It is a 1st edition/ 2nd printing hardcover, not inscribed; 1st printing having p483 a dot-matrix/checkerboard rectangle, 2nd a solid black rectangle (altogether now, “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”). Red speckle/spray on the bottom edge apparently indicates having-been-remaindered, but dust jacket is not price-clipped. The jacket is in rather a tattered state with price tag gunk residue on the lower right corner of the front. An aborted reading by a previous possessor of this volume is indicated by underlining (in black ink) on the first few pages.
The following words are underlined:
p1 -- imperscrutable
p2 -- gulsar
p3 -- skite
p4 -- archistrateges
p5 -- mundus
-- grimoire
-- demulcents and rubefacients
p6 -- (none)
p7 -- . . .ther, though that, than on the invest. . .
-- . . .tle boy whose earliest memory was of trying to pick up pieces of moonlight that had fallen through the window onto his . . .
-- in the left margin, accompanying the above two underlinings, “?”
p8 -- (none)
p9 -- Spellvexit
fin de la lecture
The Committee for Cataloguing Underlinings and Annotations would like to apologize for peremptorily entering “fin de la lecture" into the record. Further instances of Underlining and Annotating have been discovered subsequent to its prior report.
p84 -- quopped
p94 -- kaleidogyns
p100 -- dysphemism
p101 -- . . . like a small batrachian in a hide. . .; in margin is written: “pompous prattle!”
p106 -- Scaurous
p108 -- below the final words of the chapter, “’I love you!’”, is written: “Boo!”
[What kind of reader would make notations like “pompous prattle” or say “Boo!” to a character’s discovering his being in love?]
The Committee acknowledges that the condition of this copy of Darconville’s Cat is such that it may well have been previously read in its entirety. Our earlier judgement concerning the despair in reading of a prior reader may well have been simply mistaken. The Committee, as a preliminary finding, would recommend that, even for book buyers in the habit of buying only clean, unmarked books, consider purchasing a well marked, annotated and underlined exemplar, being as this novel lends itself well to entertaining previous readings.
______________
"Nothing exceeds like excess." -- Crucifer
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"Anthony Burgess chose Theroux's Darconville's Cat as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It contains multitudes. It is a story of love, obsession and revenge -- and it is a story and celebration of the life of the English language -- all styles of writing and demotic species are incorporated in its vast body (I speak of the book at its near Proustian bulk, and of the language). And, it is as funny as anything you'll ever read in your life." - Ben Waugh.
“In his dazzling, invective-filled novel Three Wogs, Alexander Theroux noted (in an afterword of sorts) that he has ‘a very amplified prose style,’ and he spoke of ‘the leisure, the languor, necessary to art.’ It's clear that the language Mr. Theroux has employed in his own books is closer to that of such writers as Dickens, Sterne and Corvo than to the minimalist offering of his contemporaries; and [all his work] demonstrates a love of verbal pyrotechnics and an instinct for the grand. In the same essay quoted at the beginning of this review Mr. Theroux wrote, ‘Writing is life become art, not simply the random copy made out of one's dishwatery day or diary or panfurious whims. It selects, must do it beautifully.” - Michiko Kakutani.
“What's best about Darconville's Cat is the advantage Theroux takes of the tradition of The Book, the large storehouse of knowledge such as The Bible, Gargantua, or Moby-Dick. Elaboration is all. The reader who doesn't care for a chapter on college girls' late-night rap sessions or the dialogue in verse between Alaric and his beloved Isabel or a classical oration by Crucifer can skip ahead or back without losing essential continuity. There are learned disquisitions on love, hate, and the human ear; wonderful odd-lot lists; Shandyian japes such as a one-word chapter and a page of asterisks; and Swiftian renderings of small-town southern life, ranting religionists, academic foolery, and much more. The parts are all related but don't disappear into a whole, into an illusion of reality.
“Darconville's Cat is boring and brilliant, both puerile and profound, self-indulgent and often cruel. Theroux lacks Thomas Pynchon's interest in this century and the popular humor of Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, the novel Theroux's most closely resembles. ‘Madness,’ Darconville says of a book very like the one in which he is a character. But like that excessive anomaly of the 1950s, William Gaddis's The Recognitions, Darconville's Cat should find a dedicated following, readers with an appetite for ambition and literary aberration, for a prodigal art that, in Darconville's world, ‘declassifies.’” - Tom LeClair .
January 18, 2013
Gosh! What a book!
They don't write them like this anymore.
Most of us have come across books that we adored and worshiped despite their flaws. There are those long books with some boring portions we are willing to forgive. There are books which we find more admirable than enjoyable. There are those where we have to give ourselves a pep-talk to make the difficult journey so we can eventually find the treasure.
The Cat demands none of that forgiveness and apology. A pure pleasure to read - from cover to cover. There was not a moment when I wished it to be over, not even when it really was over.
The Cat is full of riches - from comical satire to sublime emotions to abyssal darkness, all brought to life via eloquent and exquisite prose. The Cat is a tale of love and hate and of Darconville's obsession with love. Revolving more around Darconville's interior life than exterior, his consciousness and brooding thoughts slowly seep into the pages. His intensity is difficult to ignore, and at some point you find yourself living inside Darconville's mind, thus bringing him alive in your mind. All the while, you can imagine a quiet, subdued atmosphere, perhaps dimly lit by candles, with an old-timey smell. There is something haunting about it.
The narrative rises in a crescendo with the entry of the antagonist, Dr. Crucifer. Despite his brief appearance, he easily joins the ranks of the most memorable characters to be found in literature. He contributes what must be the vilest and most intense tirade against the woman kind I have (and will?) ever come across. He is the keeper of The Misogynist's Library, the catalog of which is long enough to occupy 10 pages. Not impressed? Here, take this 20 page long formal oration on the subject. Not convinced yet? Here are 20 more pages of The Unholy Litany chanting the names of women he wants his soul to be saved from. And if all of this isn't enough, he gives you 10 pages worth of never-before-heard-of ways to torture and kill a former girlfriend. This is a character fully wrapped in darkness, the kind that can make a reader uneasy. But somewhere he crosses over from serious to ridiculous, to the point of appearing comical.
Between Darconville and Crucifer, there is a satirical portrayal of the American South. There are numerous peripheral characters, often painted as hilarious caricatures. There are excerpts from literary works, prefacing each chapter. There is wit and scholarship at display everywhere. And there is that luscious prose (swoon!).
I could read this book and rate it 5+ stars, for the prose alone. It's a great celebration of the English language. Pick any adjective of your choice for the best prose you've ever read, and it will, without doubt, be fitting here. It is the kind of writing that can cause you to drool, and render you speechless, rapt in admiration. There are many a sentences that make you want to read them aloud. Sure, he uses plenty of archaic words you've never heard of before, but it certainly isn't about showing off. It see it more as being about using the perfect word. There is a certain flow to Theroux's writing and despite the presence of difficult words, nothing about his sentences sounds out of the place. One can easily read through without knowing the meanings of the arcane words and still be fully engrossed. Whether you decide to read it with or without the knowledge of the word meanings, be sure to enjoy the sound and the rhythm of Theroux's writing. Immerse yourself in his words and let them wash over you.
________________________________________
Book-jacket Trivia: The portrait of Darconville on the cover was painted by Theroux himself.
________________________________________
Vocabulary: If you are reading or planning to read Darconville's Cat, you may find the following link useful:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/3...
January 1, 2024
Made another dream of mine come true and met the man, the myth, the legend: Alexander Theroux. He and his wife were very kind and hospitable. We ended up talking for 2 and a half hours about many different topics, including his meetings with Jorge Luis Borges, his thoughts on Infinite Jest and his correspondence with David Foster Wallace, his time as a Trappist monk, his twin daughters, what he’s currently writing, regret, The Leftovers, and much more. He also loves the idea for my third novel.
Alex said I’m the only one who has seen and taken photos of his workspace, a dark cloister with teetering towers of books this side of Alaric Darconville (speaking of which, he still lives in the home in which he wrote Darconville’s Cat, and he greeted me with a cat under his arm, no, not Spellvexit but surely some incarnation of that literary kitty.). These photos, as well as others, including his Marilyn Monroe collection, will be available exclusively to Patreon supporters soon.
They say not to meet your idols but meeting both Alex and Joseph McElroy turned out to be significant and frankly surreal experiences that were enriching in different but overlapping ways. Two trips of a lifetime back to back. I’m very grateful.
And yes, a piece will be written about this visit but probably not until late next year as I need to put the finishing touches on Morphological Echoes.
***
“Art creates the Eden where Adam and Eve eat the serpent.”
Darconville’s Cat is literature incarnate. Half of it could be bound with human skin, the other half with the fatty stools from a cystic fibrosis tryst, glazed with lovejuice jizzum. For the book is the body and the pages are the brain, crackling with emotional intellect and intellectual emotion.
Read my full review here for free: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/03/0...
I interviewed Alex here: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/07/0...
January 26, 2018
Twenty years ago I worked in an antiquarian bookstore in Boston (JP), wrapping and shipping rare books and lugging mail bags to the post office for $7/hr plus side benefits like learning at least the titles of so many interesting books, running the side of my hand along the signatures of so many immortal writers, being introduced to Shunga, and experiencing the sort of restlessness and depression that comes from working in a generally closed-to-the-public antiquarian bookstore located in a place where it's usually cold from October through June. I worked with an older guy (35) who spent his day at a computer describing and pricing stacks of books. He loved incunabula and fishing and dreamed of hosting a TV show in which he fished and talked books (their form, not so much their content).
One afternoon I asked this older bibliophile for suggestions on what to read. He was only ten years older than I was but already seemed more or less middle-aged -- he was graying and wore a jacket and tie to work every day and had quit drinking and found God after surviving immersion in the '80s East Village NYC poetry scene -- he occasionally mentioned some connection, possibly amorous, to Ginsberg. He suggested Elias Cannetti's Auto-da-Fé, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ, and Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat. I acquired three of these four. Read half of the first one but wasn't into it, read all of the second one but wasn't into it, read nearly none of the third one because I didn't want to quit drinking and find God, and couldn't find the fourth one at the time.
Years later, I found an inexpensive first-edition hardcover, I'm pretty sure for $1 at a thrift store, of Darconville's Cat that included this letter from the publisher: https://ibb.co/h2V4UG -- the Cat was there on my shelves for years, always enticing, always something I stayed away from, maybe because I wasn't all that into the bookseller's other recommendations. On here of course I encountered so much love for Theroux that my eye always returned to its spine when I wondered what to read next, but not until mid-November 2017 did I finally start it -- and find myself pleasurably surprised by how much I loved it.
Oh I should have read this twenty years ago, I thought, really enjoying the ridiculously high-flung style juxtaposed with the simplest teacher/student love story set in rural Virginia spatially and doubly dated temporally in what felt like the early 1970s but also a sort of Dickensian 19th century thanks to the scrim of language o'er it all. The vocabulary of course revealed delights when I looked up the words and so often found them not only not neologisms but also perfectly descriptive. The characters were finely drawn and ridiculous but memorable. The whole thing fizzed along through its first 200 pages as love bloomed and the figure of Darconville, so out of place in the place he found himself, his plight expressed in such high language, negotiated new love and old-school academia.
But then what happened? The story began to turn as the relationship with Isabel became inevitably complicated. There was a stint in Charlottesville so the author could describe Charlottesville and its inhabitants, a stint in London so the author could describe London, more of a sense of estrangement as Darconville tried to capture the feeling slipping from him via marriage, and then a stint at Harvard so the author could describe Cambridge and introduce a nefarious concoction known as Dr. Crucifer, so perfectly named, a diabolical misogynist eunuch, but ultimately for me where my attention and affection for ye olde Cat pretty much died out.
By page 450 to 500, with 200 more to go, I just couldn't stick with Crucifer's rants and I didn't really believe in or care for Darconville or Isabel or any of it. The story seemed too simple, too stereotypical, dressed up in excessive language and ideation and reference in a way that I had little patience for. I skimmed for plot points and paragraphs that didn't repel my eyes with thickets of fireworks. Like my reading experience of Gravity's Rainbow, the book seemed to transform into a hose of prose opened all the way and aimed right between my eyes. In moderation, revved-up language is all the rage, but over 700 pages, in this, I found my experience of the reality of the situation and the characters and their emotions undermined. I tried to commit to extended sittings and be patient with the book but I found myself falling asleep or not really caring or discovering the delights (I certainly wasn't looking up words anymore) when I did keep my eyes open. My rating therefore mostly reflects my love for the opening 200 pages and my affection up to page 400-- I ultimately failed the final 300 pages, despite Dr. Crucifer's efforts to bring me back into it.
The book is a celebration of excessiveness -- and I partied with it up to a point, after which I started to fade and wanted to switch to water (I kept eyeing a collection of Richard Yates stories) and head home. I don't think I'll get to my copy of Laura Warholic or, the Sexual Intellectual anytime soon, although I am glad to have a better sense of Mr. Theroux and can cross the Cat off from the list of well-loved masterpieces recommended to me long ago that I can't really say I unconditionally loved.
One afternoon I asked this older bibliophile for suggestions on what to read. He was only ten years older than I was but already seemed more or less middle-aged -- he was graying and wore a jacket and tie to work every day and had quit drinking and found God after surviving immersion in the '80s East Village NYC poetry scene -- he occasionally mentioned some connection, possibly amorous, to Ginsberg. He suggested Elias Cannetti's Auto-da-Fé, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ, and Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat. I acquired three of these four. Read half of the first one but wasn't into it, read all of the second one but wasn't into it, read nearly none of the third one because I didn't want to quit drinking and find God, and couldn't find the fourth one at the time.
Years later, I found an inexpensive first-edition hardcover, I'm pretty sure for $1 at a thrift store, of Darconville's Cat that included this letter from the publisher: https://ibb.co/h2V4UG -- the Cat was there on my shelves for years, always enticing, always something I stayed away from, maybe because I wasn't all that into the bookseller's other recommendations. On here of course I encountered so much love for Theroux that my eye always returned to its spine when I wondered what to read next, but not until mid-November 2017 did I finally start it -- and find myself pleasurably surprised by how much I loved it.
Oh I should have read this twenty years ago, I thought, really enjoying the ridiculously high-flung style juxtaposed with the simplest teacher/student love story set in rural Virginia spatially and doubly dated temporally in what felt like the early 1970s but also a sort of Dickensian 19th century thanks to the scrim of language o'er it all. The vocabulary of course revealed delights when I looked up the words and so often found them not only not neologisms but also perfectly descriptive. The characters were finely drawn and ridiculous but memorable. The whole thing fizzed along through its first 200 pages as love bloomed and the figure of Darconville, so out of place in the place he found himself, his plight expressed in such high language, negotiated new love and old-school academia.
But then what happened? The story began to turn as the relationship with Isabel became inevitably complicated. There was a stint in Charlottesville so the author could describe Charlottesville and its inhabitants, a stint in London so the author could describe London, more of a sense of estrangement as Darconville tried to capture the feeling slipping from him via marriage, and then a stint at Harvard so the author could describe Cambridge and introduce a nefarious concoction known as Dr. Crucifer, so perfectly named, a diabolical misogynist eunuch, but ultimately for me where my attention and affection for ye olde Cat pretty much died out.
By page 450 to 500, with 200 more to go, I just couldn't stick with Crucifer's rants and I didn't really believe in or care for Darconville or Isabel or any of it. The story seemed too simple, too stereotypical, dressed up in excessive language and ideation and reference in a way that I had little patience for. I skimmed for plot points and paragraphs that didn't repel my eyes with thickets of fireworks. Like my reading experience of Gravity's Rainbow, the book seemed to transform into a hose of prose opened all the way and aimed right between my eyes. In moderation, revved-up language is all the rage, but over 700 pages, in this, I found my experience of the reality of the situation and the characters and their emotions undermined. I tried to commit to extended sittings and be patient with the book but I found myself falling asleep or not really caring or discovering the delights (I certainly wasn't looking up words anymore) when I did keep my eyes open. My rating therefore mostly reflects my love for the opening 200 pages and my affection up to page 400-- I ultimately failed the final 300 pages, despite Dr. Crucifer's efforts to bring me back into it.
The book is a celebration of excessiveness -- and I partied with it up to a point, after which I started to fade and wanted to switch to water (I kept eyeing a collection of Richard Yates stories) and head home. I don't think I'll get to my copy of Laura Warholic or, the Sexual Intellectual anytime soon, although I am glad to have a better sense of Mr. Theroux and can cross the Cat off from the list of well-loved masterpieces recommended to me long ago that I can't really say I unconditionally loved.
July 26, 2016
As the world goes by, with actions and reactions taking place at a light speed, I grant myself few blissful moments of solitude in the lap of nature, where I’m partial towards the splendor of our empyreal sky. The playfulness of various celestial bodies fascinates me by their resplendence and teases me by their yonder charm. One of the phenomena which I long to see is that of Earthshine. The lovely sight is not only one of the few treasures I keep in my small box of happy memories, but it signifies something very special in terms of a promise of completeness, brightness and most importantly, beauty. The exquisiteness of this view is something that comes closest, metaphorically to express the beautiful writing in Darconville’s Cat.
I, for one, haven’t read anything like this. It’s a rarity of rarities, of which there is a huge dearth in the world of literature. On one hand, I was completely besotted by Theroux's prose and on the other; almost jealous of his talent by repeatedly questioning myself as to how on earth such heavenly writing is even possible. If there is a thing like magical pen that exists in this world, then Sir Alexander is definitely its worthy owner and the magic begins from the very first page of this book.
The simple and old school premise of the story starts with Alaric Darconville, a former student of priesthood, a writer and later a school teacher at Quinsy College for girls in Quinsyburg, a fictitious town in American South, which Darconville detest to almost hateful extent. In college, he fell in love , with one of the students, Isabel Rawsthorne, who reciprocated but later betrayed him. Darconville, all this while experienced the supreme ecstasy of being in love, the agony and pain of betrayal, bouts of depression, obsession with love, giving in to hatred and finally turning vindictive.
This unexceptional plot is elated to such an exceptional level of literary feat primarily because of Theroux's writing, that anyone should feel lucky to read it. There are times when I feel guilty of not having read many of those popular classics, stories of which many readers have on their tips. And then I read books like DC, and feel a rush of almost smug pride. Recently this book has garnered some modest popularity here and like many, I also want from others to make a nice, comfortable place for this cat in their library but at the same time I admit, that there is also a sense of possessiveness developed in all these days of reading it that some notorious corner of my heart suggests that let it remain obscure. As clueless I ventured into reading this presumable word beast, I found myself immersed in it, by connecting with it at both emotional and deeply personal way. The nasty games of Love, when the definition of both being in love and lost in love lies in the rhetoric question of: What else do I need in this world?
The display of myriad emotions is handled with such vividness, that the effect is almost like reading a three-dimensional novel. About dynamics of love, it says:
On one hand there are temporary beings whom we love but who are ever changing, and beyond them there is the eternal object of love itself which is incorruptible, permanent, and ideal. And yet it is not only through the former that we can take cognizance of the latter, we would, without the former, actually have no idea of the latter, the imperfect relative giving us our only idea of the perfect absolute, and we advance by the dangers of delay, shipwrecked from a boat to know the sea, where mildness, glassed in the fragments of storm, must be discerned. Time is the evil, usurping the semblance of eternity. Your prayer, your disappointment, are the same.
On hate, it says:
One hates in order to rob from another a life stolen from himself, for hate not only hates what it lacks, but lacks what it loved, and in its grip—an oxbrake in which you’re completely shod of mercy by the very creature you'd swiftly gore to pieces if but freed—the only possible pleasure attains to its secret illusions and intentions of vengeance.
Agreed this is a word drunk novel but that in no way interrupts the flow of narrative. This is as erudite as erudite can get but at the same time, it’s hugely interesting and accessible. Almost half way through the book, one would experience everything from some exquisite poetry, the diary entries, exhaustive lists to social commentary on racial discrimination, religion, vernacular, etc etc.
The story reaches its artistic pinnacle with the entry of one of the most memorable character in literature, Dr. Abel Crucifer. He is Darconville’s alter-ego, a retired Professor of Harvard and dyed-in-the-wool misogynist. His misogynistic ramblings would be enough to last anyone their lifetime. He assumed Darconville as his possible heir or an accomplice because of Darconville’s lineage. This is where one can witness, what Theroux is capable of. With bewitching display of encyclopedic knowledge and use of grandiose vocabulary, in words of Steven Moore: This novel celebrates the finest example of learned wit ever produced in American literature. He justified the usage of archaic words and neologism by Theroux by commenting that No word is too arcane, too obsolete for his use and chose them because of their precision and color. Apart from all the great things, this book is extremely funny. For eg. This excerpt is from one of the books Dr. Crucifer wrote in order to verbally kill a Philosopher
Then sometime about 428 B.C. Socrates, patron saint of equivokes, fartwhooshed onto the scene with his little grab-bag of famous questions, the type of which, when, perversely became answers. I look back to Maieuticville and see a self-absolving bore, an inkle-beggar with his pockets full of Crito’s money, a farting whaw-drover with ears like a question mark and more gall than bladder.
Trust Me! No one would like to get insulted by Sir Alexander ever. He would take a part of your anatomy and form a detailed analysis of your personality in such a way that would even make you laugh at yourself. Through Crucifer, one can witness the extent of darkness of a human soul when that very soul is sold to Devil and through Darconville, one can observe the social and emotional anguish developed as a result of being part of a society. The way he observe and describe the girly gossips, the ways of people of Fawx Mt. and various other digressed but entertaining things are a treat to read.
The relentless misogynism can also raise question of author’s relation to this vice. In this book itself, the narrator says: Every book is about its author. This book is no different because it’s partly an autobiographical novel. Theroux suffered the same fate as that of Darconville when he fell in love with a Southern girl, who told him that he talks like a book, eventually deserted him and baited Do your worst and the result was Darconville’s Cat. So, he may or may not be a misogynist, but such judgment should not be passed on the basis of this novel.
This book must be having some scope of criticism, but I don’t see myself in possession of that level of intellect to criticize it in any way. Anthony Burgess, although included it in his list of best 99 novels published in English from 1939 to 1984, raised some questions about this book in the year of its publication while hinting at the commercial and conventional aspect of novel writing.
http://books.google.co.in/books?id=_O...
As for me, this is a perfect novel which has spoiled me for all the books I will read in the future. Every alternate page has one or more quotable quotes, that one would wish to use at some point in life. With influences like Rabelais, Joyce, Nabokov or a more obscure Edward Dahlberg, the voice of Theroux is very much his own. He might appear as a bit distant at first but shall soon dazzle you with his magical writing and you'd become friends with him or more aptly, his students, with a belief and grit that you won't won’t let him disappear but rather make him and his writing immortal. This is the book to read, to cherish and to treasure. The bittersweet surprises of the world and words. How I loved this book!
October 3, 2013
Fantastic reviews of Darconville’s Cat exist on this site, browse through and “like” them all, but they are by people other than myself. I can’t bring myself to push many buttons or keys or whatever in coherent succession today, so those will have to do. This is one of the great novels, though, one of the GREAT NOVELS, kin to Lolita and Madame Bovary, that was my impression, and if you love language as this living, loving, lovely, saving, graceful, eloquent, hilarious, dark, all-creating, all-encompassing thing, one of the only things that makes us not-animals, one of the only things that lets humanity even approach divinity, one of the only things that can’t be stripped from us, turned into a commodity to use against our interests, owned by others, devalued and defamed by market forces, something that only dies when the universe dies, something that can’t be used to beat prisoners or assemble weapons, something that can be employed to cause pain but can also just as well and even better act as a shield and counterattack against those causing verbal treachery, something that is in fact yours and yours alone to do with as you please, but that at the same time allows you access into the very minds and hearts and secret worlds of everyone else around you, the only something that allows you to approach reality in any way, approach another being in any way, approach a god or a demon in any way, approach a color or a texture or a scent in any way that means anything, something that makes love and hate exist, you should read this immediately. Drop what you’re reading and read Darconville’s Cat today. Or don’t. Finish what you’re reading and read it next. You should pay attention to Alexander Theroux. You should turn off your devices and go to museums and libraries and look at dead things and go breathe outside air and touch other people. You should be okay with being still and silent. You should be okay with being overwhelmed by the immensity of your vacant interior. A chaos of thoughts are within you, you should be okay with that, to let them be and boil and rise. Human life is very funny and very tragic and very ugly and very beautiful and very calm and very terrifying. When all is said and done, it ends- so whose side are you on when the deal goes down? How have your hours gone down the drain? Read read read and think. Think think think and make. Temper your ecstatic energy into lasting works of art or acts of beneficence. There’s lots of things humans can make and actions we can undertake that aren’t destructive. Dreams say, view, create, shadow leads. You can make something beautiful out of your life or you can do the opposite, which is vanish. I direct you now to reviews of Darconville’s Cat by Anthony Vacca, Megha, Nathan “N.R.” Gaddis, Scribble Orca, Garima, Stephen M, Rob, Jonfaith, MJ Nicholls, David Lentz, and anyone else you damn well please who doesn't happen to be my Goodreads friend but has written a review of this book. If you are one of those hucksters who is always seeking out “The Great American Novel”, thus to chain it up and show it around in a cage like a freak at the fair, I give you another candidate for your pointless chase.
August 25, 2017
"That night God and Satan fought long hours for his soul. And God conquered. It was only left to be determined which of the two was God. "
Thus we bear witness to the struggle for Darconville’s soul, the eternal struggle of man against his own nature. Darconville’s Cat is at once an ode to love, and its indictment and trial, its prosecution and defence. Through the promised heights of love it delicately drifts, yet it exposes with force its hidden correlates, and descends to its darkest depths. It examines the interplay between love and hate, life and death, art and suffering, and in the process exposes these antonyms as inseparable counterparts. The story is at once thrilling, tender, strange, unsettling, absurd, poignant, shocking, profound, immense, silly, pretentious, immersive, illuminating, surreal, bizarre. The writing is incredible. It is transcendent, superb, from the first word to the last. No description I can offer will do it justice. Five stars are not enough. It is like nothing else I have read.
March 26, 2020
Darconville’s Cat is a story of Love and Hate, of revenge, memory and revelation. And Art. And a Cat(holicism).
Early on, within the high style of Darconville’s Cat —a style evoking Cervantes, Rabelais and Sterne— our protagonist Alaric Darconville, an English professor at a Virginia women's college, pores over a letter from his newfound love, Isabel. His analysis of her handwriting echoes the iconic opening sentence in Nabokov's Lolita with its obsessive, compulsive fetishisation. Through his examination of the ascenders and descenders of letter forms, flourishes and embellishments, Darconville foreshadows the author’s deep and unfathomable love of language.
Darconville’s Cat is itself a love letter to writing, language and prose style. It is scythe–shaped–grin inducing work of genius. It’s the most extravagant satirical word feast; a kaleidoscopic-verbalistic-riotous-Maximalist novel. It is disturbing, mesmerising and beautiful, divine and poetic. Every page is rich with exquisite sentences and stylings of spectacular creativity and written with verve and linguistic flair.
Within its bonkers and brilliant syntactic structure, are:
• Arcane epigraphs
• Dreams
• Essays
• Lists
• Literary allusions
• Parodies
• Poems
• Prayers
• Quotes
• Songs
• Sermons
• Speeches
• Travelogue
• Nightmares
Et al.
I am besotted with the sentence craft, but it is also the peculiar and entertaining personalities in the story that enthral. Amongst the myriad daft named characters is Dr. Crucifer. As Love's treachery scorches Darconville’s world, he meets this vampiric and repugnant eunic, Dr. Abel Crucifer, a retired Harvard Professor, who feeds on Darconville’s failure in love and relentlessly saturates him in verbalistic misogyny. He steadily erodes Darconville’s residual spirit. Darconville never loses his repugnance for Crucifer, realises he risks becoming a Crucifer himself, but slowly, after relentless onslaughts of Crucifer’s rambling rhetoric, agrees revenge against Isabel is inescapable and essential to end his suffering.
Darconville’s Cat is teeming with rich philosophical, historical and mythological references. The density of knowledge and detail is invigorating and compelling, and oftentimes lifted me up, twirled me around and spun me out in its wordilicious elliptical structure. It reads like an incantation and I fear, on reading it I may have inadvertently been reciting dark sorcery and casting spellz.
'It is only when you have grazed on the lower slopes of your own ignorance, and begun to understand the great vistas of non-knowledge that you have, that you can claim to have been educated at all.' – The Hitch
Early on, within the high style of Darconville’s Cat —a style evoking Cervantes, Rabelais and Sterne— our protagonist Alaric Darconville, an English professor at a Virginia women's college, pores over a letter from his newfound love, Isabel. His analysis of her handwriting echoes the iconic opening sentence in Nabokov's Lolita with its obsessive, compulsive fetishisation. Through his examination of the ascenders and descenders of letter forms, flourishes and embellishments, Darconville foreshadows the author’s deep and unfathomable love of language.
Darconville’s Cat is itself a love letter to writing, language and prose style. It is scythe–shaped–grin inducing work of genius. It’s the most extravagant satirical word feast; a kaleidoscopic-verbalistic-riotous-Maximalist novel. It is disturbing, mesmerising and beautiful, divine and poetic. Every page is rich with exquisite sentences and stylings of spectacular creativity and written with verve and linguistic flair.
Within its bonkers and brilliant syntactic structure, are:
• Arcane epigraphs
• Dreams
• Essays
• Lists
• Literary allusions
• Parodies
• Poems
• Prayers
• Quotes
• Songs
• Sermons
• Speeches
• Travelogue
• Nightmares
Et al.
I am besotted with the sentence craft, but it is also the peculiar and entertaining personalities in the story that enthral. Amongst the myriad daft named characters is Dr. Crucifer. As Love's treachery scorches Darconville’s world, he meets this vampiric and repugnant eunic, Dr. Abel Crucifer, a retired Harvard Professor, who feeds on Darconville’s failure in love and relentlessly saturates him in verbalistic misogyny. He steadily erodes Darconville’s residual spirit. Darconville never loses his repugnance for Crucifer, realises he risks becoming a Crucifer himself, but slowly, after relentless onslaughts of Crucifer’s rambling rhetoric, agrees revenge against Isabel is inescapable and essential to end his suffering.
Darconville’s Cat is teeming with rich philosophical, historical and mythological references. The density of knowledge and detail is invigorating and compelling, and oftentimes lifted me up, twirled me around and spun me out in its wordilicious elliptical structure. It reads like an incantation and I fear, on reading it I may have inadvertently been reciting dark sorcery and casting spellz.
'It is only when you have grazed on the lower slopes of your own ignorance, and begun to understand the great vistas of non-knowledge that you have, that you can claim to have been educated at all.' – The Hitch
Read
April 8, 2023Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdTHJ...
February 18, 2013
Sitting there, turning the pages, Darconville nevertheless found one particular aspect of the treatise disagreeable—its misogyny. That bias rose like a poison fume from almost every paragraph, and Darconville, who, even in his early teens, had been somewhat scandalized the first time he read it, was no less so now—and, possible for being in love, more. How he wondered could anyone hate women?
A Portrait of the Philosopher as a Forlorn Lover
If Joyce took the english language to extremes never thought possible, and Pynchon dissected the paranoia of a post-war world, and Wallace brought out the connection between addiction and entertainment, then Theroux’s contribution to the encyclopedic canon would be an examination of misogyny and its close relation to romantic, idealized love. Owing stylistic debts to the Victorian era novels—with its elevated prose, plot twists and melodrama—Darconville’s Cat is, if nothing else, a wonderful thing to read on the sentence level. Within the first few pages, Theroux provides a devastating critique of life in isolated areas of the south and the religiosity that permeates in the region that the book takes place.
It was a little world unpardonably misled by fundamentalist drivel, a stronghold of biblicism, and one drowned in the swamp of its execrable simplicities. Nowhere could be found anything in the way of adornment. It was a place that liked its coffee black, its flapjacks dry, its adjectives few, its cheeses hard, its visits short, its melodies whistleable, and its dreams in black and white—preferably the latter.
Almost every page features this type of piercing judgement. While they make for an engaging and sometimes hilarious read, they also work with an overall conceit within the novel that concerns itself with the problematic relationship between philosophical thinking and human interaction. The free-indirect style is a function of the main character, Alaric Darconville, an intellectual of academia who falls head-over-in-heels in love with one of his students, Isabel. Darconville bears such a close resemblance to his creator, that parsing the differences between intentional and unintentional personality traits imbued in him, and their subsequent significance in the novel, would be an exercise in futility. Judgements, of the type excerpted above, are often intertwined with postulations about philosophy and direct references to famous philosophers—Plato and Kant especially. The writing is infused with analysis and critical examination as directed against those unlucky enough to fall under Darconville’s judgements. There is no doubt that philosophy, as a field of study and practice, takes as its defining characteristic to be critical thinking and a dependance on the foundations of logic. Whether intentional or not, the novel applies the practices of critical thinking and analysis to all aspects of Darconville’s relationships with paranoiac intensity. Darconville overhears a conversation where a man says that “no Quinsy girl could ever love”. Darconville’s love, Isabel, is a girl who attends Quinsy college, so Darconville spends the whole night (a whole chapter in the book) working out a sixteen step argument to try to assuage the fear that Isabel might not love him. And when not relying on strict syllogisms, Darconville bides his time analyzing everyone around him (in an negative, degrading way—as it seems sometimes the trajectory of philosophy aims). Anyone of Darconville’s temperament can relate to the discomfort of an overstimulating social situation. The presence of other human beings, causes him the extreme discomfort that all introverts struggle to overcome and Darconville automatically resorts to his defense mechanism, over-intellectualization and analysis, a mechanism which Darconville becomes acutely aware in a rare moment of honest self-reflection. But the majority of his interactions go as follows:
This particular party was characterized by that mood of horrid democracy one so loathes; disparate factions didn’t separate but actually tried to relate to each other—and while old farts, trying to dance, flapped about like wounded birds, self-assured teenagers—in whom confidence is such a vile characteristic—pontificated above the noise about politics, careers, and money-schemes.
It is unclear what argument, if any, that Theroux makes against the usage of philosophy in aspects of personal relationships, but it is apparent that the majority of this book relies on such a wealth of philosophical lingo that it makes the association between Darconville’s actions and the role of philosophy that much stronger. In another move of philosophical self-defense, Darconville dissects the otology of the word “fun” when Isabel says that she never has “fun” with him.
The value assigned the abstract notion (Fun) in this rigorous proposition, while it may seem only putatively factual, actually extends itself here to a philosophical calculus of common truth-functions beyond ostensive definition. . . to the suggestion of an unsubstitutable and immutable absolute (in life) by which, had it never been uttered, the straightforwardly empirical protocol established in the pursuit of sufficient linguistic assessment might otherwise be distorted.
The book rides on the weight of western thought which, as evidenced by selections from Dr. Crucifer’s Misogynist’s Library, is absolutely male-centric and oppressive of women. It may not be the true that Theroux is decrying logical thought entirely but he makes it obvious that the type of mind that Darconville has—high-brow intellectual, logical, and ultra-sensitive—is susceptible to the erroneous, misogynistic thinking that the character Dr. Crucifer embodies. We are exposed to a painful bout of rhetoric-infused word dumping in which Dr. Crucifer propounds the virtues of hatred and the degradation of women. The entire speech bears a remarkable similarity to an essay written earlier by Darconville on Love. Thus, we see the strong connection between Love and Hate, that they are not just the flip-side of the other but so intricately tied that they become one in the same.
The heavy emphasis on misogynist rhetoric may leave many with more than a few qualms with the author and his intentions of such liberal usage of hatred towards the “other” sex. A good chunk of its usage can be subsumed into this conceit about the history of western thought and the usage of “logical” thought in trying to make sense of volatile human emotions but much of the misogyny seems in excess and lacking in the justification that our moral conscience craves. But I don’t think any book exploring misogyny would be doing its job if I wasn’t offended at some point in the narrative. That, added with the fact of the intentional fallacy should prevent anyone from completely hating the author for his aestheticization of misogyny. These qualms are bound to arise any time that someone writes a story as male-centric as Darconville’s Cat. The strengths that this book exhibits far outweighs this potential flaw and the book gives enough substance for any reasonably thoughtful person to chew on and struggle with.
Despite the thematic weight that this carries, the book remains multifaceted and finds time—in proper maximalist fashion—to explore a wealth of various topics in different writing genres. The book is stuffed with lists, poems, prayers, telephone conversations, “unholy” litanies, essays, arguments, rants, syllogisms and Shakespearean blank verse in play format.
Much of the novel celebrates the english language and excavates the OED for nearly every word imaginable. Dictionaries are required and an etymological knowledge of greek and latin roots is recommended. Some paragraphs rip through vocabulary left and right and Theroux is not shy about making up words to fit the rhythm of a sentence or compliment the sounds of the adjacent words.
Regardless of any vocabulary pretensions, Theroux has an impressive command of narrative and narrative-delivery. His sentences are often long, but they never feel run-on.
The wind was up and the pale undersides of the few leaves left on the trees were layered to windward as, frantically, Darconville set off on the run to find a recording machine—across Langdell, over to Paine Hall, into the science Center, and then cutting back through the Yard he found one upstairs on the fifth-floor of the Lamount Library where, conveniently, no one was about. The librarian pointed to a machine. Darconville tore off his coat, clicked the tape into place, and—holding his breath—pushed the button to play.
Many will be surprised by how fast they can read his chapters as they are often plot-centric and aim for suspense and excitement. The first four hundred pages could be published on its own as a quality romantic novel. And what’s so unique about Theroux’s addition to the encyclopedic novel is the straight-forward narrative and limitation of characters. Anyone familiar with the novels in the canon are well-aware of the demands it can make on the reading w/r/t character, plot threads, and shifts in style. Much of this book is flat-out fun to read.
Theroux muses on writing frequently and makes sure to sprinkle aphoristic, one-liners throughout.
The present tense, he thought, overflows categories of past, present, and future and drifts into the unreal, timeless realm of ideation.
When love isn’t proof of itself, it is suddenly impossible to prove—and words, which fit to fill the mouths of myst and mummer alike, cheapen on the tongue.
In short, this novel is extraordinary in its ability to communicate and for anyone who has a love of great writing, this book will fill their heart’s content with its mellifluous prose and deft descriptions. But for anyone with commitments against the problems inherent in a male-centric society and a male-centric tradition of philosophical thought, they may find a lot of the morally questionable aspects of the novel lacking in justification and lacking in a direct refutation of its presentation in the narrative.
Regardless, Darconville’s Cat deserves a place among the literary greats that tackle the difficult issues; it ought to be argued and dissected by the fans and detractors of such literature, literature that does as it should: push its readers to think, push its readers to feel.
A Portrait of the Philosopher as a Forlorn Lover
If Joyce took the english language to extremes never thought possible, and Pynchon dissected the paranoia of a post-war world, and Wallace brought out the connection between addiction and entertainment, then Theroux’s contribution to the encyclopedic canon would be an examination of misogyny and its close relation to romantic, idealized love. Owing stylistic debts to the Victorian era novels—with its elevated prose, plot twists and melodrama—Darconville’s Cat is, if nothing else, a wonderful thing to read on the sentence level. Within the first few pages, Theroux provides a devastating critique of life in isolated areas of the south and the religiosity that permeates in the region that the book takes place.
It was a little world unpardonably misled by fundamentalist drivel, a stronghold of biblicism, and one drowned in the swamp of its execrable simplicities. Nowhere could be found anything in the way of adornment. It was a place that liked its coffee black, its flapjacks dry, its adjectives few, its cheeses hard, its visits short, its melodies whistleable, and its dreams in black and white—preferably the latter.
Almost every page features this type of piercing judgement. While they make for an engaging and sometimes hilarious read, they also work with an overall conceit within the novel that concerns itself with the problematic relationship between philosophical thinking and human interaction. The free-indirect style is a function of the main character, Alaric Darconville, an intellectual of academia who falls head-over-in-heels in love with one of his students, Isabel. Darconville bears such a close resemblance to his creator, that parsing the differences between intentional and unintentional personality traits imbued in him, and their subsequent significance in the novel, would be an exercise in futility. Judgements, of the type excerpted above, are often intertwined with postulations about philosophy and direct references to famous philosophers—Plato and Kant especially. The writing is infused with analysis and critical examination as directed against those unlucky enough to fall under Darconville’s judgements. There is no doubt that philosophy, as a field of study and practice, takes as its defining characteristic to be critical thinking and a dependance on the foundations of logic. Whether intentional or not, the novel applies the practices of critical thinking and analysis to all aspects of Darconville’s relationships with paranoiac intensity. Darconville overhears a conversation where a man says that “no Quinsy girl could ever love”. Darconville’s love, Isabel, is a girl who attends Quinsy college, so Darconville spends the whole night (a whole chapter in the book) working out a sixteen step argument to try to assuage the fear that Isabel might not love him. And when not relying on strict syllogisms, Darconville bides his time analyzing everyone around him (in an negative, degrading way—as it seems sometimes the trajectory of philosophy aims). Anyone of Darconville’s temperament can relate to the discomfort of an overstimulating social situation. The presence of other human beings, causes him the extreme discomfort that all introverts struggle to overcome and Darconville automatically resorts to his defense mechanism, over-intellectualization and analysis, a mechanism which Darconville becomes acutely aware in a rare moment of honest self-reflection. But the majority of his interactions go as follows:
This particular party was characterized by that mood of horrid democracy one so loathes; disparate factions didn’t separate but actually tried to relate to each other—and while old farts, trying to dance, flapped about like wounded birds, self-assured teenagers—in whom confidence is such a vile characteristic—pontificated above the noise about politics, careers, and money-schemes.
It is unclear what argument, if any, that Theroux makes against the usage of philosophy in aspects of personal relationships, but it is apparent that the majority of this book relies on such a wealth of philosophical lingo that it makes the association between Darconville’s actions and the role of philosophy that much stronger. In another move of philosophical self-defense, Darconville dissects the otology of the word “fun” when Isabel says that she never has “fun” with him.
The value assigned the abstract notion (Fun) in this rigorous proposition, while it may seem only putatively factual, actually extends itself here to a philosophical calculus of common truth-functions beyond ostensive definition. . . to the suggestion of an unsubstitutable and immutable absolute (in life) by which, had it never been uttered, the straightforwardly empirical protocol established in the pursuit of sufficient linguistic assessment might otherwise be distorted.
The book rides on the weight of western thought which, as evidenced by selections from Dr. Crucifer’s Misogynist’s Library, is absolutely male-centric and oppressive of women. It may not be the true that Theroux is decrying logical thought entirely but he makes it obvious that the type of mind that Darconville has—high-brow intellectual, logical, and ultra-sensitive—is susceptible to the erroneous, misogynistic thinking that the character Dr. Crucifer embodies. We are exposed to a painful bout of rhetoric-infused word dumping in which Dr. Crucifer propounds the virtues of hatred and the degradation of women. The entire speech bears a remarkable similarity to an essay written earlier by Darconville on Love. Thus, we see the strong connection between Love and Hate, that they are not just the flip-side of the other but so intricately tied that they become one in the same.
The heavy emphasis on misogynist rhetoric may leave many with more than a few qualms with the author and his intentions of such liberal usage of hatred towards the “other” sex. A good chunk of its usage can be subsumed into this conceit about the history of western thought and the usage of “logical” thought in trying to make sense of volatile human emotions but much of the misogyny seems in excess and lacking in the justification that our moral conscience craves. But I don’t think any book exploring misogyny would be doing its job if I wasn’t offended at some point in the narrative. That, added with the fact of the intentional fallacy should prevent anyone from completely hating the author for his aestheticization of misogyny. These qualms are bound to arise any time that someone writes a story as male-centric as Darconville’s Cat. The strengths that this book exhibits far outweighs this potential flaw and the book gives enough substance for any reasonably thoughtful person to chew on and struggle with.
Despite the thematic weight that this carries, the book remains multifaceted and finds time—in proper maximalist fashion—to explore a wealth of various topics in different writing genres. The book is stuffed with lists, poems, prayers, telephone conversations, “unholy” litanies, essays, arguments, rants, syllogisms and Shakespearean blank verse in play format.
Much of the novel celebrates the english language and excavates the OED for nearly every word imaginable. Dictionaries are required and an etymological knowledge of greek and latin roots is recommended. Some paragraphs rip through vocabulary left and right and Theroux is not shy about making up words to fit the rhythm of a sentence or compliment the sounds of the adjacent words.
Regardless of any vocabulary pretensions, Theroux has an impressive command of narrative and narrative-delivery. His sentences are often long, but they never feel run-on.
The wind was up and the pale undersides of the few leaves left on the trees were layered to windward as, frantically, Darconville set off on the run to find a recording machine—across Langdell, over to Paine Hall, into the science Center, and then cutting back through the Yard he found one upstairs on the fifth-floor of the Lamount Library where, conveniently, no one was about. The librarian pointed to a machine. Darconville tore off his coat, clicked the tape into place, and—holding his breath—pushed the button to play.
Many will be surprised by how fast they can read his chapters as they are often plot-centric and aim for suspense and excitement. The first four hundred pages could be published on its own as a quality romantic novel. And what’s so unique about Theroux’s addition to the encyclopedic novel is the straight-forward narrative and limitation of characters. Anyone familiar with the novels in the canon are well-aware of the demands it can make on the reading w/r/t character, plot threads, and shifts in style. Much of this book is flat-out fun to read.
Theroux muses on writing frequently and makes sure to sprinkle aphoristic, one-liners throughout.
The present tense, he thought, overflows categories of past, present, and future and drifts into the unreal, timeless realm of ideation.
When love isn’t proof of itself, it is suddenly impossible to prove—and words, which fit to fill the mouths of myst and mummer alike, cheapen on the tongue.
In short, this novel is extraordinary in its ability to communicate and for anyone who has a love of great writing, this book will fill their heart’s content with its mellifluous prose and deft descriptions. But for anyone with commitments against the problems inherent in a male-centric society and a male-centric tradition of philosophical thought, they may find a lot of the morally questionable aspects of the novel lacking in justification and lacking in a direct refutation of its presentation in the narrative.
Regardless, Darconville’s Cat deserves a place among the literary greats that tackle the difficult issues; it ought to be argued and dissected by the fans and detractors of such literature, literature that does as it should: push its readers to think, push its readers to feel.
December 15, 2015
PRAEAMBULUM:
What the Critic Says [Professor Emeritus Murray Jay Siskind]
...a masterpiece of creative irreverence...written in pedantic sentimeter...
It yields nothing of sense to those intellectual quackshites, daubers of logic, and gowned vultures and spies who...surround it in some kind of official jingbang...
[Yet] if you're a good listener, you'll find it's made of extraordinary talk that scales the heavens and ransacks the earth, talk in which memories of a curious past mingle preposterously with doctrines of art, comic mimicries, and prevaricating theories about love and hate...
[It] thoroughly deserves your full, large-hearted, open-hearted, humble attention...
What the Author Says [Alexander Theroux]
One of the things I loathe...is self-promotion and self-aggrandizement...
When I review a book, I consider it almost a mission, not a trade, to review it with all my strongest intelligence and my largest heart...You have an obligation as a reviewer and as a liver of life to seek meaning, to find the meaning, to turn over stones...
I have great respect for readers, but they very rarely live up to my dream counterpart. I think people just want to go to the beach with a beach read...
Using my novel as a benchmark, I think people just don't want anything complicated...people are just not learned...people don't want to think! They don't want to have their feet put to the fire. They don't want to look up a word! They don't want to listen to that allusion! That's why I'm basically very sympathetic to Thomas Pynchon, because I deeply appreciate the work he's done in his books...
Dostoevsky once advised someone to write short chapters, and I always was very appreciative in his novels that the chapters were short...
Why obfuscate?...I'm proud of the fact that my books can all be read...[even if you] might have to look up a word or go back a few pages to check something out...
I do have a pyrotechnic or maximalist prose style...In Darconville's Cat...there's a very serious plot...I read one critic that said I just wrote a bunch of essays and basically have no talent as a fiction writer, that this is just a compilation of essays. It's a ludicrous point, because there's an actual story from the beginning to the end of this book...[though] I will drop the story in order to make a chapter I felt I need to put in there...
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksda...
Luca Signorelli, detail from "The Damned Cast into Hell", 1499-1504, fresco, 23' wide (San Brizio chapel, Orvieto Cathedral, Orvieto, Italy)
HUMBLE, LARGE-HEARTED REVIEW:
Maximal Insufficiency
There are 100 chapters in this 700 page novel, an average of just seven pages per chapter.
It tends to be lumped into the genre of Maximalism, and Theroux even admits to its stylistic maximalism.
Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that this description is of any critical value. It doesn't communicate anything about a book other than its length, nor does it suggest any commonality with other long books (other than their length).
The qualities usually associated with Maximalism can equally be found in and applied to the style of some shorter fiction.
Ultimately, I think it's just a term that's been used by one or more generations of writer, critic, academic and reader to differentiate themselves from earlier and/or later generations, in some cases to acquire the jobs or limelight of their predecessors (who are viewed as having outstayed their welcome or not sufficiently earned their status).
However, this is not to detract from the supreme merits of Theroux' book, just to say that they need to be stated more precisely without the crutch of Maximalism.
Fall from Grace
Although it presents to some extent as a work of metafiction, "Darconville's Cat" is really a deeply religious and metaphysical novel.
At the heart of its concerns is the metaphor of Man's fall from grace, our abandonment of God for the attraction of the world and each other, starting with Adam and Eve. Some of the blame for this Fall is attributed to God's rival, Satan.
Religion would have us believe that beauty is truth, and truth is God. If we seek truth elsewhere, in an other, then perhaps we turn our backs on God.
It's Satan's avowed goal to lure us away from God. One of his tools is the love between a man and a woman; then when we find love wanting, when the allure of love expires, Satan tries to attract us to hate.
Both love and hate (of the earthly variety) seem to be designed to partition us from God.
Michelangelo - "The Fall from Grace"
Darconville, the Novel and the Third Person
The novel is narrated primarily in the third person, although mostly it reflects the perspective of the protagonist, a 28 year old college lecturer, Alaric Darconville.
By the end of the novel, we learn that he has written a novel much like this one (although it's not clear whether or to what extent this is the novel he is supposed to have written).
It's clear, however, that Theroux is ploughing metafictional ground.
Do Your Worst!
Darconville's one great love is Isabel Rawsthorne, a student at his college nine years his junior.
A third of the novel describes their idyllic love; the rest, their break up, and the repercussions.
Angered by his continuing attention, Isabel urges Darconville to "do your worst", almost defying him to seek revenge against her and her new beau.
Darconville falls under the influence of Crucifer, a Harvard professor who's, needless to say, a metaphor for Satan. The remainder of the novel concerns the impact of the pact between the two (including the mysterious disappearance of Darconville's cat and soulmate, Spellvexit).
For all the unrelenting verbal negativity of the Crucifer chapters (including the chapter in which the contents of the Misogynist Library are catalogued or listed book by book at length), they make for the most amazing reading. They locate and distil the misogynist prejudice and sexual imbalance that seems to have sat latent, if not patent, in society since the beginning of time.
It's fascinating to witness these diabolical monologues, as manic and horrific as they are. It's proof, if we needed it, that the Devil has all the best tunes.
An Aelurophile in the Misogynist Library
Many reviews of the novel express discomfort with the level of misogyny.
I don't feel this concern does justice to Theroux' positioning of the subject matter.
We need to remember that it's Crucifer, not Darconville (or Theroux), who is the misogynist and the owner of the Misogynist Library.
In fact, the dramatic tension of the entire novel effectively revolves around whether Crucifer can convert Darconville into a vengeful misogynist after the bitter end of his relationship with Isabel.
The Golden Apple of Discord
For the Fairest
Darconville is torn between God and Satan/Crucifer, good and evil.
Thus, Theroux gives us one of the great dialectical conflicts, and we can do little but watch in awe as it unfolds.
Theroux alludes frequently to Adam and Eve, whose love of each other and the contents of the world is one of the reasons (the other being Satan) for their Fall from grace with God.
He asks, implicitly, whether the Homeric quest "for the fairest (three words that had started the Trojan war)" conflicts with or detracts from the love of God.
Similarly, he questions whether hate can and must fill the hole left by the failure of love.
Return to God's Embrace
Alternatively, can what remains of the abstract capacity for love return the individual to God's love and embrace?
In other words, if Darconville can't reconcile with his former lover, can he at least turn his back on Crucifer and hatred, and reconcile with God?
Can he be reunited with God's love, if not that of Isabel, after the Fall?
Truth and Beauty
Darconville's life might turn ugly after the end of his relationship, but it's a book (and from a metafictional point of view, potentially this book) that restores at least beauty, if not also truth, to his life.
Ultimately, the novel is both a work of beauty, and a celebration of the beauty and art/-ifice of human creation (whether inspired by God, nature or each other), regardless of the repercussions of the Fall.
So it is that, in this novel, Darconville fails to do his worst. Instead, he does his best, his most truthful and his most beautiful, as does Theroux.
Overloaded
I came to this work sceptical of its merit, or at least sceptical of the basis upon which its merit has been declared. Paradoxically, most of this Maximalist acclaim actually deters readers.
This is yet another case where the ideological and agenda-based shaping of a novel's promotion and reception deters or obscures a deeper reading, understanding and appreciation of its greatness.
"Darconville's Cat" is literally loaded, if not overloaded, with a love of ideas, words, language, rhetoric and allusion.
The Pleasure of the Definitionary
I tend to avoid the term "encyclopaedic novel", just as much as Maximalism. However, there is a sense in which one of its connotations might apply to "Darconville's Cat".
To the extent that the novel is more than the plot and its characters, it's an album, a digest, a companion, a compendium, a treasury of words about love and hate, beauty and truth, a garland subtly assembled around a schema of 100 chapters.
The novel doesn't purport to be a portrait of an entire culture. However, it does take these few key characteristics, focus a lens on them, and describe them in detail, perhaps definitively as well as definitionally.
Theroux really knows his subject matter, but his knowledge is both revealed and relevant to his subject (Darconville) and the narrative.
There is nothing to fear in this novel, nothing about which to be apprehensive.
For the intellectually curious reader, it will enrich your heart, your soul, your life...even, perhaps, your cat.
One Creation under God
"Darconville's Cat" honours and celebrates Man's creativity, as well as God's creation.
In it, Theroux has fashioned a tribute to thousands of years of literature, a classically inspired and inspiring fairy tale, fable, allegory, satire, farce, tragedy, comedy, morality tale, entertainment.
Every page compels you to think of Homer, Cervantes, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Sterne, Milton, Donne, Dante, de Sade, Goethe, Bunyan, Poe, Pope, Joyce, Thomas Mann, and/or Nabokov.
In true Rabelaisian and Shandian fashion, the alchemical Theroux creates something precious and vital from a blend of profound learning, profane intercourse and mischievous play.
Love of Life and Language
When compared with other late twentieth century works, "Darconville's Cat" deserves to be read and lauded in the same company as William Gaddis' "The Recognitions".
On the other hand, it contrasts a love of life and language with the documentation of hatred that William H. Gass seems to have made his preserve. In short, Theroux achieves with words both more and more beauty than Gass.
Whatever your concerns about the length of the novel, it never ceases to stimulate and reward, qualities that tend to make length irrelevant.
You could spend a lifetime in this labyrinth of truth and beauty.
What the Critic Says [Professor Emeritus Murray Jay Siskind]
...a masterpiece of creative irreverence...written in pedantic sentimeter...
It yields nothing of sense to those intellectual quackshites, daubers of logic, and gowned vultures and spies who...surround it in some kind of official jingbang...
[Yet] if you're a good listener, you'll find it's made of extraordinary talk that scales the heavens and ransacks the earth, talk in which memories of a curious past mingle preposterously with doctrines of art, comic mimicries, and prevaricating theories about love and hate...
[It] thoroughly deserves your full, large-hearted, open-hearted, humble attention...
What the Author Says [Alexander Theroux]
One of the things I loathe...is self-promotion and self-aggrandizement...
When I review a book, I consider it almost a mission, not a trade, to review it with all my strongest intelligence and my largest heart...You have an obligation as a reviewer and as a liver of life to seek meaning, to find the meaning, to turn over stones...
I have great respect for readers, but they very rarely live up to my dream counterpart. I think people just want to go to the beach with a beach read...
Using my novel as a benchmark, I think people just don't want anything complicated...people are just not learned...people don't want to think! They don't want to have their feet put to the fire. They don't want to look up a word! They don't want to listen to that allusion! That's why I'm basically very sympathetic to Thomas Pynchon, because I deeply appreciate the work he's done in his books...
Dostoevsky once advised someone to write short chapters, and I always was very appreciative in his novels that the chapters were short...
Why obfuscate?...I'm proud of the fact that my books can all be read...[even if you] might have to look up a word or go back a few pages to check something out...
I do have a pyrotechnic or maximalist prose style...In Darconville's Cat...there's a very serious plot...I read one critic that said I just wrote a bunch of essays and basically have no talent as a fiction writer, that this is just a compilation of essays. It's a ludicrous point, because there's an actual story from the beginning to the end of this book...[though] I will drop the story in order to make a chapter I felt I need to put in there...
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksda...
Luca Signorelli, detail from "The Damned Cast into Hell", 1499-1504, fresco, 23' wide (San Brizio chapel, Orvieto Cathedral, Orvieto, Italy)
HUMBLE, LARGE-HEARTED REVIEW:
Maximal Insufficiency
There are 100 chapters in this 700 page novel, an average of just seven pages per chapter.
It tends to be lumped into the genre of Maximalism, and Theroux even admits to its stylistic maximalism.
Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that this description is of any critical value. It doesn't communicate anything about a book other than its length, nor does it suggest any commonality with other long books (other than their length).
The qualities usually associated with Maximalism can equally be found in and applied to the style of some shorter fiction.
Ultimately, I think it's just a term that's been used by one or more generations of writer, critic, academic and reader to differentiate themselves from earlier and/or later generations, in some cases to acquire the jobs or limelight of their predecessors (who are viewed as having outstayed their welcome or not sufficiently earned their status).
However, this is not to detract from the supreme merits of Theroux' book, just to say that they need to be stated more precisely without the crutch of Maximalism.
Fall from Grace
Although it presents to some extent as a work of metafiction, "Darconville's Cat" is really a deeply religious and metaphysical novel.
At the heart of its concerns is the metaphor of Man's fall from grace, our abandonment of God for the attraction of the world and each other, starting with Adam and Eve. Some of the blame for this Fall is attributed to God's rival, Satan.
Religion would have us believe that beauty is truth, and truth is God. If we seek truth elsewhere, in an other, then perhaps we turn our backs on God.
It's Satan's avowed goal to lure us away from God. One of his tools is the love between a man and a woman; then when we find love wanting, when the allure of love expires, Satan tries to attract us to hate.
Both love and hate (of the earthly variety) seem to be designed to partition us from God.
Michelangelo - "The Fall from Grace"
Darconville, the Novel and the Third Person
The novel is narrated primarily in the third person, although mostly it reflects the perspective of the protagonist, a 28 year old college lecturer, Alaric Darconville.
By the end of the novel, we learn that he has written a novel much like this one (although it's not clear whether or to what extent this is the novel he is supposed to have written).
It's clear, however, that Theroux is ploughing metafictional ground.
Do Your Worst!
Darconville's one great love is Isabel Rawsthorne, a student at his college nine years his junior.
A third of the novel describes their idyllic love; the rest, their break up, and the repercussions.
Angered by his continuing attention, Isabel urges Darconville to "do your worst", almost defying him to seek revenge against her and her new beau.
Darconville falls under the influence of Crucifer, a Harvard professor who's, needless to say, a metaphor for Satan. The remainder of the novel concerns the impact of the pact between the two (including the mysterious disappearance of Darconville's cat and soulmate, Spellvexit).
For all the unrelenting verbal negativity of the Crucifer chapters (including the chapter in which the contents of the Misogynist Library are catalogued or listed book by book at length), they make for the most amazing reading. They locate and distil the misogynist prejudice and sexual imbalance that seems to have sat latent, if not patent, in society since the beginning of time.
It's fascinating to witness these diabolical monologues, as manic and horrific as they are. It's proof, if we needed it, that the Devil has all the best tunes.
An Aelurophile in the Misogynist Library
Many reviews of the novel express discomfort with the level of misogyny.
I don't feel this concern does justice to Theroux' positioning of the subject matter.
We need to remember that it's Crucifer, not Darconville (or Theroux), who is the misogynist and the owner of the Misogynist Library.
In fact, the dramatic tension of the entire novel effectively revolves around whether Crucifer can convert Darconville into a vengeful misogynist after the bitter end of his relationship with Isabel.
The Golden Apple of Discord
For the Fairest
Darconville is torn between God and Satan/Crucifer, good and evil.
Thus, Theroux gives us one of the great dialectical conflicts, and we can do little but watch in awe as it unfolds.
Theroux alludes frequently to Adam and Eve, whose love of each other and the contents of the world is one of the reasons (the other being Satan) for their Fall from grace with God.
He asks, implicitly, whether the Homeric quest "for the fairest (three words that had started the Trojan war)" conflicts with or detracts from the love of God.
Similarly, he questions whether hate can and must fill the hole left by the failure of love.
Return to God's Embrace
Alternatively, can what remains of the abstract capacity for love return the individual to God's love and embrace?
In other words, if Darconville can't reconcile with his former lover, can he at least turn his back on Crucifer and hatred, and reconcile with God?
Can he be reunited with God's love, if not that of Isabel, after the Fall?
Truth and Beauty
Darconville's life might turn ugly after the end of his relationship, but it's a book (and from a metafictional point of view, potentially this book) that restores at least beauty, if not also truth, to his life.
Ultimately, the novel is both a work of beauty, and a celebration of the beauty and art/-ifice of human creation (whether inspired by God, nature or each other), regardless of the repercussions of the Fall.
So it is that, in this novel, Darconville fails to do his worst. Instead, he does his best, his most truthful and his most beautiful, as does Theroux.
Overloaded
I came to this work sceptical of its merit, or at least sceptical of the basis upon which its merit has been declared. Paradoxically, most of this Maximalist acclaim actually deters readers.
This is yet another case where the ideological and agenda-based shaping of a novel's promotion and reception deters or obscures a deeper reading, understanding and appreciation of its greatness.
"Darconville's Cat" is literally loaded, if not overloaded, with a love of ideas, words, language, rhetoric and allusion.
The Pleasure of the Definitionary
I tend to avoid the term "encyclopaedic novel", just as much as Maximalism. However, there is a sense in which one of its connotations might apply to "Darconville's Cat".
To the extent that the novel is more than the plot and its characters, it's an album, a digest, a companion, a compendium, a treasury of words about love and hate, beauty and truth, a garland subtly assembled around a schema of 100 chapters.
The novel doesn't purport to be a portrait of an entire culture. However, it does take these few key characteristics, focus a lens on them, and describe them in detail, perhaps definitively as well as definitionally.
Theroux really knows his subject matter, but his knowledge is both revealed and relevant to his subject (Darconville) and the narrative.
There is nothing to fear in this novel, nothing about which to be apprehensive.
For the intellectually curious reader, it will enrich your heart, your soul, your life...even, perhaps, your cat.
One Creation under God
"Darconville's Cat" honours and celebrates Man's creativity, as well as God's creation.
In it, Theroux has fashioned a tribute to thousands of years of literature, a classically inspired and inspiring fairy tale, fable, allegory, satire, farce, tragedy, comedy, morality tale, entertainment.
Every page compels you to think of Homer, Cervantes, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Sterne, Milton, Donne, Dante, de Sade, Goethe, Bunyan, Poe, Pope, Joyce, Thomas Mann, and/or Nabokov.
In true Rabelaisian and Shandian fashion, the alchemical Theroux creates something precious and vital from a blend of profound learning, profane intercourse and mischievous play.
Love of Life and Language
When compared with other late twentieth century works, "Darconville's Cat" deserves to be read and lauded in the same company as William Gaddis' "The Recognitions".
On the other hand, it contrasts a love of life and language with the documentation of hatred that William H. Gass seems to have made his preserve. In short, Theroux achieves with words both more and more beauty than Gass.
Whatever your concerns about the length of the novel, it never ceases to stimulate and reward, qualities that tend to make length irrelevant.
You could spend a lifetime in this labyrinth of truth and beauty.
January 16, 2015
A bonfire was then lit under a huge pole, and on that pole a huge banner, to hysterical applause, was suddenly unfurled and upon it, upsidedown, were written the words: "In The End Was Wordlessness."
I recall contacting my best friend Joel when marvelling at the rich depths of The Recognitions. Riveted as I was by the symbolism, I was sure I was missing half of the action. My best friend retorted that there are instances where a Catholic education demonstrates its benefits.
Darconville's cat was Melvillean in all its senses, the pejorative maintaining a lasting sting. It was a lengthy effort qua struggle, no doubt also influenced by those medical minds, Celine and Rabelais. Throughout were scattered truly touching scenes which throbbed with impact and emotion. Those stood in opposition to an obstinate macrocehallic umbrage. That said, I'm not sure we needed a six page inventory of Dr. Cruciifer's library. Isn't that a wicked fun name, Crucifer?
I recall contacting my best friend Joel when marvelling at the rich depths of The Recognitions. Riveted as I was by the symbolism, I was sure I was missing half of the action. My best friend retorted that there are instances where a Catholic education demonstrates its benefits.
Darconville's cat was Melvillean in all its senses, the pejorative maintaining a lasting sting. It was a lengthy effort qua struggle, no doubt also influenced by those medical minds, Celine and Rabelais. Throughout were scattered truly touching scenes which throbbed with impact and emotion. Those stood in opposition to an obstinate macrocehallic umbrage. That said, I'm not sure we needed a six page inventory of Dr. Cruciifer's library. Isn't that a wicked fun name, Crucifer?
January 17, 2013
Here's an origin story as inauspicious as they come: a bookish nerd with a flair for the dramatic, passionately in love with big words and big rhetoric, is struck with an even deeper passion for a southern gal who's gorgeous but doesn't share his interests. They come together, they come apart, and at the bitter end of the relationship he tells her he'll have the last laugh: he'll immortalize her immoral ways in a novel! "Do your worst," she says. Oh, he will. Oh, he will. The nerd ignotas animum dimittit in artes and produces a 700-page tome packed with words no one has used in centuries and populated almost entirely by grotesque caricatures -- except of course for its handsome, brooding, sensitive, brilliant protagonist and (before she falls out of favor) its surpassingly beautiful heroine.
If the book you're picturing is a vanity-published disaster that reads like an extended version of this, I don't blame you. But in at least one iteration of the above story -- there have probably been many -- the result has been a legitimately good book. A really good book. Surpassingly, unbelievably, "did someone sell their soul to write this" good. "Burst out laughing on the subway in a socially inappropriate manner because of just one phrase" good. "Remember vividly the moment you first decided staring at bound wood pulp for hours was fun" good.
The word that best describes how Alexander Theroux writes in Darconville's Cat is vigorous. His range extends from vicious satire to near-embarrassing panegyric and can switch between the two at high frequency without jarring the reader, because unlike so many misanthropes and cynics, his spite comes from the same well of energetic intensity that also fuels his moments of approbation. He isn't an enervated, jaded critic, celebrating only in that which does not pass his stringent threshold for annoyance; he's the kind of guy who experiences love and hate symmetrically, as states of energetic activation, reasons to write furiously until the sun rises. This book crackles with electricity. It goes to 11. The smallest motions of feeling are amplified into pages and pages of self-possessed lists and disquisitions and dramatic monologues until every other modern novel begins to seem wimpy by comparison.
Theroux's subject matter is mundane: a campus love story in the rural American South. A lot of writers would use such a premise as an opportunity to portray small subtleties and gradations of feeling and to observe that there's worth even in lives with no great dramatic resonance. Not Theroux. In his archaic style, unembarrassed by its own grand rhetorical gestures, love becomes Love, hate becomes Hate, and this story of a college professor and his girlfriend becomes the great Book that swallows all other books. Which might seem bathetic until you remember just what intense love and intense hate -- the book's two symmetrical subjects -- are like (in any context). Capturing emotion is not just a matter of subtlety; it is possible for one's microphone to distort the loud notes even as it picks up the quiet ones. Theroux's style befits his material. As one memorable character says: "nothing exceeds like excess." Melodrama? Megadrama!
That's about all I want to say, except that this is a good book, that you should read it, and that it's really not all that difficult to read (the funny words all make sense in context) and way more entertaining than anything this obscure has any right to be. (Why aren't they selling this kind of thing in airport bookstores? I'd buy it!) There's something else I should go into, though: the presence of misogyny in the book.
If Darconville's Cat has any kind of notoriety, it's for a set of chapters near the end in which a particularly deranged character goes on a set of misogynistic tirades, sometimes for over 20 pages at a time. With a less extraordinary novel I would simply be able to assure you that this character has nothing to do with the author's own perspective. We all know that Nabokov is not Humbert. It is harder for me to make this kind of judgment of Darconville's Cat precisely because of the autobiographical content I mentioned at the beginning of this review, and the vigorous writing style I've been praising for the rest of it.
Theroux's writing, which often seems to strike away from irony in its pursuit of intensity, leaves me unable to determine where the narrator ends and Theroux himself begins. Should I simply avoid speculating about Theroux's private life, and imagine the narrator only as an abstract and polemical adopted persona? But given that the university in Theroux's book is reported to be directly based on a university where Theroux himself taught, it is hard not to ask, when (say) presented with a long scene in which a set of college girls have a lewd, catty and incredibly vapid bull session: is this how Prof. Theroux viewed his female students? When Theroux himself has said that the novel served as a kind of therapy after a bad relationship, am I really not supposed to think about the relation between the particular romance presented therein and the views held by its creator?
What I am getting at here? The famous rants, bad as they are (I would say "too bad to be taken seriously" if only their brand of excess were not so close to the one embraced throughout the book), are put in the mouth of a character who is not only repulusive but unsubtly coded as demonic. I shouldn't read the views of a Bad Guy as those of the author, right? But the book is, I'd argue, more subtly misogynistic long before that. It contains not a single female character who does not conform to one or another sexist stereotype. That includes the over-pedestaled, under-characterized heroine, who is so thoroughly passive and without intellectual substance that, when the Bad Guy starts to talk about how she's essentially a void or lack with nothing at her spiritual core, it's hard not to feel like the whole book has been leading up to it. The Bad Guy's explicit misogyny is rejected by the narrative voice, sure, but an implicit version of it lurks throughout the narrative. Theroux presents us with a parade of bimbos and bitches, then gives us an explicitly misogynistic character and says, wait, don't be that guy! Meanwhile, the character in question talks on for scores of pages in something that sounds very close to Theroux's own voice, and the book still does not contain any woman who can serve as counterexample to his generalizations.
In short, I'm not convinced that Alexander Theroux is not a misogynist. Maybe he's not a misogynist on the level of some of the stuff that appears in his book. But he might be the kind of guy who prides himself on rejecting that stuff while succumbing to its milder alternatives. I recognize that some other Catters might get Mad at me for suggesting this. Well, so be it.
My real point, if anyone is still reading, is that even if Theroux is a misogynist, that doesn't make his book bad. This is not a foregone conclusion: pseudo-rational bigots tend to produce bad art. They flatter themselves for clinging to generalizations, claiming that their tendency to think in general rules and principles (all X are Y) reflects a rationalistic or scientific tendency, when spurious generalization is really one of the most commonplace and pre-rational gestures of human thought. It's the easiest thing in the world to see one example of an X that's Y and casually induct to the "principle" that all Xs are Ys. It takes much more care and intelligence to recover what it was we actually saw (a single X that was Y, and also probably Z and A and B and many other things). A writer who trusts his own incautious generalities will only give us the sort of thing we're already used to thinking (and, hopefully, rejecting).
Theroux is not that writer. He is a great observer of the mind's mistakes, and, crucially, never signs on to any view of them except that they happen. Even as he gives you rules without counterexamples (as with those female characters), he mocks the way his characters leap from examples to rules. Does this tendency have an exception when it comes to his own thoughts? I honestly am not sure. But then I suspect that much about Alexander Theroux will remain a mystery -- a delightful mystery -- to me for some time.
If the book you're picturing is a vanity-published disaster that reads like an extended version of this, I don't blame you. But in at least one iteration of the above story -- there have probably been many -- the result has been a legitimately good book. A really good book. Surpassingly, unbelievably, "did someone sell their soul to write this" good. "Burst out laughing on the subway in a socially inappropriate manner because of just one phrase" good. "Remember vividly the moment you first decided staring at bound wood pulp for hours was fun" good.
The word that best describes how Alexander Theroux writes in Darconville's Cat is vigorous. His range extends from vicious satire to near-embarrassing panegyric and can switch between the two at high frequency without jarring the reader, because unlike so many misanthropes and cynics, his spite comes from the same well of energetic intensity that also fuels his moments of approbation. He isn't an enervated, jaded critic, celebrating only in that which does not pass his stringent threshold for annoyance; he's the kind of guy who experiences love and hate symmetrically, as states of energetic activation, reasons to write furiously until the sun rises. This book crackles with electricity. It goes to 11. The smallest motions of feeling are amplified into pages and pages of self-possessed lists and disquisitions and dramatic monologues until every other modern novel begins to seem wimpy by comparison.
Theroux's subject matter is mundane: a campus love story in the rural American South. A lot of writers would use such a premise as an opportunity to portray small subtleties and gradations of feeling and to observe that there's worth even in lives with no great dramatic resonance. Not Theroux. In his archaic style, unembarrassed by its own grand rhetorical gestures, love becomes Love, hate becomes Hate, and this story of a college professor and his girlfriend becomes the great Book that swallows all other books. Which might seem bathetic until you remember just what intense love and intense hate -- the book's two symmetrical subjects -- are like (in any context). Capturing emotion is not just a matter of subtlety; it is possible for one's microphone to distort the loud notes even as it picks up the quiet ones. Theroux's style befits his material. As one memorable character says: "nothing exceeds like excess." Melodrama? Megadrama!
That's about all I want to say, except that this is a good book, that you should read it, and that it's really not all that difficult to read (the funny words all make sense in context) and way more entertaining than anything this obscure has any right to be. (Why aren't they selling this kind of thing in airport bookstores? I'd buy it!) There's something else I should go into, though: the presence of misogyny in the book.
If Darconville's Cat has any kind of notoriety, it's for a set of chapters near the end in which a particularly deranged character goes on a set of misogynistic tirades, sometimes for over 20 pages at a time. With a less extraordinary novel I would simply be able to assure you that this character has nothing to do with the author's own perspective. We all know that Nabokov is not Humbert. It is harder for me to make this kind of judgment of Darconville's Cat precisely because of the autobiographical content I mentioned at the beginning of this review, and the vigorous writing style I've been praising for the rest of it.
Theroux's writing, which often seems to strike away from irony in its pursuit of intensity, leaves me unable to determine where the narrator ends and Theroux himself begins. Should I simply avoid speculating about Theroux's private life, and imagine the narrator only as an abstract and polemical adopted persona? But given that the university in Theroux's book is reported to be directly based on a university where Theroux himself taught, it is hard not to ask, when (say) presented with a long scene in which a set of college girls have a lewd, catty and incredibly vapid bull session: is this how Prof. Theroux viewed his female students? When Theroux himself has said that the novel served as a kind of therapy after a bad relationship, am I really not supposed to think about the relation between the particular romance presented therein and the views held by its creator?
What I am getting at here? The famous rants, bad as they are (I would say "too bad to be taken seriously" if only their brand of excess were not so close to the one embraced throughout the book), are put in the mouth of a character who is not only repulusive but unsubtly coded as demonic. I shouldn't read the views of a Bad Guy as those of the author, right? But the book is, I'd argue, more subtly misogynistic long before that. It contains not a single female character who does not conform to one or another sexist stereotype. That includes the over-pedestaled, under-characterized heroine, who is so thoroughly passive and without intellectual substance that, when the Bad Guy starts to talk about how she's essentially a void or lack with nothing at her spiritual core, it's hard not to feel like the whole book has been leading up to it. The Bad Guy's explicit misogyny is rejected by the narrative voice, sure, but an implicit version of it lurks throughout the narrative. Theroux presents us with a parade of bimbos and bitches, then gives us an explicitly misogynistic character and says, wait, don't be that guy! Meanwhile, the character in question talks on for scores of pages in something that sounds very close to Theroux's own voice, and the book still does not contain any woman who can serve as counterexample to his generalizations.
In short, I'm not convinced that Alexander Theroux is not a misogynist. Maybe he's not a misogynist on the level of some of the stuff that appears in his book. But he might be the kind of guy who prides himself on rejecting that stuff while succumbing to its milder alternatives. I recognize that some other Catters might get Mad at me for suggesting this. Well, so be it.
My real point, if anyone is still reading, is that even if Theroux is a misogynist, that doesn't make his book bad. This is not a foregone conclusion: pseudo-rational bigots tend to produce bad art. They flatter themselves for clinging to generalizations, claiming that their tendency to think in general rules and principles (all X are Y) reflects a rationalistic or scientific tendency, when spurious generalization is really one of the most commonplace and pre-rational gestures of human thought. It's the easiest thing in the world to see one example of an X that's Y and casually induct to the "principle" that all Xs are Ys. It takes much more care and intelligence to recover what it was we actually saw (a single X that was Y, and also probably Z and A and B and many other things). A writer who trusts his own incautious generalities will only give us the sort of thing we're already used to thinking (and, hopefully, rejecting).
Theroux is not that writer. He is a great observer of the mind's mistakes, and, crucially, never signs on to any view of them except that they happen. Even as he gives you rules without counterexamples (as with those female characters), he mocks the way his characters leap from examples to rules. Does this tendency have an exception when it comes to his own thoughts? I honestly am not sure. But then I suspect that much about Alexander Theroux will remain a mystery -- a delightful mystery -- to me for some time.
November 15, 2015
“Use,” said Darconville, “your definitionary. It’s one of the last few pleasures left in life.”— and it's not just said for effect; this book lives its truth.
DC took me completely by surprise on many levels - so many controversies, such din over & around it, when it overflows with so much love that I nearly drowned in it!
It has a plot that is deliberately retro – that has more in common with an 18th-19th century novel than something written in 1981– an aristrocratic, idealistic, English lecturer-writer hero, a beautiful country girl with a poor background ( cause pity is the surest way to the hero's heart [ and here I was thinking respect is the surest way to love, silly me!] )*, a rich & beautiful vamp, a motley crew of catty girls-women, dunces of all hues in churches & academia, a monomaniacal evil genius, a diabolical pact...It looked like a pretty conventional set up.
It's anything but that (!) & this is achieved mainly through the devastating use of irony, satire & a superbly imaginative-inventive language – Theroux's bold experiments with form ensconces DC in the great tradition of maximalist literature blazed by the likes of Cervantes, Rabelais, & Sterne. A "dipsomaniac of prose," Theroux creates a lush world within his words. DC is a masterpiece, a tour de force and I can't emphasise that fact enough.
In an interview, Steven Moore had mentioned a unique quality of Theroux's writing:
"Nonmainstream artworks usually express untraditional, iconoclastic views—political, sociological, sexual, religious—which is why I find them more interesting and appealing. There may be some innovative, eccentric novels that express conservative views, but I can’t think of many, beyond those of Alexander Theroux."
Theroux writes early on that "The facts of one’s childhood are always important when touching on a genius."–- likewise the book lays out its main thematic concerns in the initial chapters itself:
According to its publisher, Darconville’s Cat, is: "about love and hate. Among other matters, it deals with the delicate tensions between Life and Art, the Ideal and the Real, God and Satan, and, above all, with the crises and conflicts between Man and Woman, the tragic implications of which reach all the way back to the Primal Fall."
In fact, the very first paragraph combines the idea of Fall with lost love & Beauty: "The single tree, however, that shanked out of the front yard he now crossed in long strides showed even more distinct a darkness, a simulacrum of the dread probationary tree—trapfall of all lost love—for coming upon it, gibbet-high and half leafless in the moonlight, was to feel somehow disposed to the general truth that it is a dangerous and pagan notion that beauty palliates evil."
Darconville's highly religious nature, finding no mutual sympathy within institutionalised religion, turns to another holy vocation – a writer's life. With the entry of beautiful Isabel, life and art are combined but in a supreme irony, the beauty in which he seeks to find the meaning of life, is, deeply flawed. Darconville deserved a Juliet, a Beatrice but he gets a Delilah. But then "wasn’t Genius the clerk of Venus?"
A Romantic is, after all, a man of extremes, and ideas like these don't really help much: "his general conviction that the state of art should be in constant panic. The artistic nature, he knew, had an inborn proneness to side with the beauty that breaks hearts, to single out the aristocratic contours of what in human glory quickens the impulses of life to mystic proportions."
The chapter Bright Star lays out in no uncertain terms, the tragic nature of this tale ( the backdrop of Keats' unrequited love for Fanny Browne) but more importantly the idea that the ideal Art is inspired by a Beauty that is not divorced from Truth:
"Love has been mentioned,” said Darconville,(...) And suffering, as well. The history of romantic disappointment, I don’t doubt, often does nothing more than document the schism between Beauty and Truth or, better, proves that Beauty, when it becomes an end in itself, often yields no Truth. The simple line, in such cases, had no complexity within it—there can, of course, never be too much. A knowledge of many things is possible, it’s been said, but one can never know everything about one thing, though, sadly, one perhaps tries. The relationship with a boy or girl you spontaneously took for perfection-in-beauty but didn’t sequentially know by examination-in-truth can result in disaster. The implications of the Ideal?
Who can really know? It is the chance one takes when one falls in love—"
Darconville's experiences in the blighted world of Quinsyburg & Fawx's Mt., reflect the conflicts & frustrations a higher nature experiences when forced to interact with base & pettyminded humanity at large – The American South, for Theroux, remains, a low point, not only in a vertical but in every sense - the bile-soaked, over-the-top send up of it is, disturbing at times – you get the feeling that nothing good & healthy could grow here but as he observes:
"Darconville, who didn’t want to, noticed everything. He fought not to notice. If the people there, however, could have known with what punctilious accuracy their every movement and mannerism was recorded by him, not through viciousness, not smugness, nor any premeditation, they’d have sued him on the spot. He couldn’t help it. Behavior is comment, the articulation of action, and these nopsters? With their fipple-fluting tongues? Their pretentious piety? Any satirist worth salt would have banished them forthwith in a jingle, not as victims but as executioners: an authorized punishment, seeking to cure disease by remedies which produce effects similar to the symptoms of the complaint, for what to correct as hangmen they’d have to know as the hanged. There is not a bauble thrown by the silly hand of a dunce, thought Darconville, that may not be caught with advantage by the hand of art."
Disappointed in love, disillusioned with life, what's an artist to do?
"Onanism is the terrible core of creation." However, "The true writer, thought Darconville, must not only be a man whose Christ shows no discontinuity between Creator and Redeemer—a perfection, he knew, he failed—but a man with faith in that perfection."
Art then becomes the salvation – Darconville's Cat is "about the redemption of the imagination. We get back to paradise that way." Because:Art is the Eden where Adam and Eve eat the serpent.
Thus it is clear that DCs energy derives from the tension between contrasting ideas/ideals & the effort to reconcile them in a meaningful wholeness.
DCs structure works on the mirroring/doubling & contrast – there are chapters that echo one another eg. all the misunderstandings that threaten to sunder aside D & Isabel's relationship & then suddenly, reconciliation follows, is repeated many times.
And the foreshadowing via embedded references like Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, & Fuseli's The Nightmare.
It's in this context that Crucifer's portrayal makes perfect aesthetic sense - his rage presents the necessary contrast to the earlier love-soaked first part of the book. His speech on Hate, & The Misogynist's Library, are but a hellish inversion of the earlier essay on Love & the exotic possibilities of future happiness explored in Darconville's first journey to Harvard. But more importantly, the Crucifer chapters bring the nascent misogyny of the text to a boiling point & in doing so; bring about a catharsis.
The readers who were so far admiring the powerful rhetoric of chapters like Oratio Contra Feminas, & Hate, are appalled when confronted with the insane brutality of Why Don't You-? – because hate, when no longer an abstract idea, is ugly as hell & thus we as readers are no longer fascinated by it and
A book has its own internal logic & in that sense, everything in this book makes sense, still, most readers might not be able to see that & instead of hating the idea of hate, end up hating the book itself! For me, however,the most painful chapter remains The Nowt of Cambridge & you thought only women suffer in love!
It's a book that will divide people – that's the mystery of great art. Did I mention DC is highly rich in humour & learned wit?
This is what Theroux had to say to Steven Moore about the two most controversial chapters in this book:
"SM: Some people found the book hard to read.
AT: That, to make an understatement, is an overstatement. I was particularly surprised so many people missed so many points. It’s supposed to be often funny. Nobody seemed to see that "Why Don’t You — ?" was a chapter about verbs, "The Unholy Litany" about nouns. Someone said there are only 2400 people in the world worth writing for, anyway. I wonder if that’s true. But readers are so lazy."
That was some grammar lesson indeed! Thanks,Theroux Sir.
Anyway, back to Crucifer:
Dr. Crucifer is Darconville's potential self if he didn't watch out. He is also an exemplar of the book's piety as expressed in D, taken to its opposite, fanatic extreme.
Need I say he is also one of fiction's best negative characters - standing shoulder to shoulder with Ahab & Iago.The name is ambiguous though - is it a play on Lucifer? ( That would be too easy.) Or is it a take on the crucified Christ – Dr. Abel Crucifer, more sinned against than sinning?
Yet I can't help wondering why Theroux made him an Egyptian, Coptic Arab – is it cause his exotic background would make his highly controversial views more palatable than say if they were coming from an Upper class, intellectual White American Male! It's true that in the highly paternalistic Arab society; a man's honour means everything & rivers of blood flow to exact an injury upon it - an eye for an eye doesn't seem an anachronism here. I understand Crucifer; heck, at times, I even felt for him!
I think the misogyny charges stick because of Theroux's own admission: "In a 1978 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Theroux called “Darconville’s Cat” a “great misogynist treatise,” and said he’d written it to take revenge on a young woman down in Virginia who dumped him at the altar."
When a writer like Gass says that his writing comes from hate, it's not the hate born of cynicism, rather, the hate of Gass & Theroux comes from disappointed idealism – the frustration that there are no longer ideals worth loving or fighting for - mediocrity has corrupted everything:
"Why do you have such attitudes?” people tell me. “You’re so extreme! You’re so opinionated! This is so savage!” But satire, my point is, is savage. I’m thinking of a remark that Nathanael West made in The Day of the Locust, when he said, “Nothing is sadder than the truly monstrous.”
DC doesn't need a defense - mine or anybody else's – its beauty is its truth - the keatsian line is most apt in this case. As Nabokov said:what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art, and DC is a work of art. Period.
The kind of chaste love it celebrates is something that went out of fashion with my parents' generation. It's heartening that Theroux built his masterpiece on such a premise for what is love worth if not pure, what is its promise if not true?
" DC is a work of erudition. But you don't need erudition to read it."
That is cause it celebrates love & true love is all about the heart - a heart that experiences love and its obverse hate in equal measure & that's okay cause what lovers can't bear; is indifference.
Heathclif would've called Darconville a soul-brother, & Shakespeare would've applauded Theroux for creating a character like Dr. Crucifer - he would've understood.
Darconville's obsessive attempts to woo Isabel back & her cruel rejection of him may have had their genesis in the author's real life but here in this beautiful, tragic, artwork, the coarseness of everyday life has been burnished away by the alchemical writerly craft just as gold's impurity is melted away in the furnace & what you get is pure 24 carat gold:
he wrote down everything he could remember—for victory without blood, he saw, was twice achieved—filling page after page of what had happened to him, not lying, telling the truth, writing to record rather than to imagine, not inventing what never existed by trying to discover the meaning of what had and as he worked, distinguishing between the impulse to impose a meaning ( animus impotentium) and the impulse to interpret ( animus interpretantium), language became the objective of which self-consciousness was the subjective. The bee had fertilized the flower it robbed. Words were all he had left.
And what words they are! I really have no words to describe them so I must stop here cause as Theroux wrote: "Put Not More Inke on thy Paper Than Thou Hast Brains in thy Head."(!)
* * *
A Table Alphabeticall of Thinges Passynge
Theroux had rollicking fun with this format. Here's my pathetic attempt:
A is for Alaric, the knight in black, constant in love and pure
B for the baggage that comes with expectations galore
C for all the catty ladies eyeing the hero, cynosure
D for the academe dunces burping and f**ting evermore!
E for the elegy that is Darconville's Cat
F for the lover's faith that is ripped apart
G for Dr. W.C. Cloogy who is such a gas
H for Hypsipyle Poore persistently making a pass
I for Irony – the Bright Star (turned La Belle Dame Sans Merci)
J for jealousy without which love remains subpar
K for krackling kemistry, so near, yet so far
L is for LOVE; Darconville's swan song
M for the moon-magic-madness
N for a chronic, nocturnal sadness
O for Onanism, creation's terrible core
P for porn being enjoyed by The Clitheroe Kids all in uproar
Q for Quinsyburg, hell's own special place
R is for Rumpopulorum with which DCs world is laced
S for Spellvexit - cat, child, God – My Cat! My Cat!
T is for the thunderous rage of Crucifer
U for cheap Isabel's unctuous care
V for Venice & the verdure of Theroux's prose
W is for "Womanity," & The Weerds' josh (who would entitle this non-rhyming alphabetical rhyme, non-rhyming alphabetical rhyme)
X is for Xanadu & all the exotic places in rhapsodical Over the Hills and Far Away
Y for the romantic yearning always holding sway
Z forzutphen farm zygopleurallyzygodactyliczucchettozopissa
* * *
* "All joy worth the name, some say, is in equal love between unequal persons, that the entire disclosure of love, even its necessity, becomes irrelevant when, for instance, equals meet."
Ah but my idea is true as well! Theroux writes: "All aesthetics are created by ethics; and beauty, more often than not, is a bodily image in which morality is archetypally felt to be represented. The less transcendental the beauty is, the less permanent we are usually convinced it will be, in direct proportion, for our faith resides here, that we love what we esteem, a usufruct of heaven beckoning us to the bettermost, and so to preserve in spirit what we’ve captured in nature it often falls out that love and desire are sometimes two unalike, mutually exclusive conditions."
DC took me completely by surprise on many levels - so many controversies, such din over & around it, when it overflows with so much love that I nearly drowned in it!
It has a plot that is deliberately retro – that has more in common with an 18th-19th century novel than something written in 1981– an aristrocratic, idealistic, English lecturer-writer hero, a beautiful country girl with a poor background ( cause pity is the surest way to the hero's heart [ and here I was thinking respect is the surest way to love, silly me!] )*, a rich & beautiful vamp, a motley crew of catty girls-women, dunces of all hues in churches & academia, a monomaniacal evil genius, a diabolical pact...It looked like a pretty conventional set up.
It's anything but that (!) & this is achieved mainly through the devastating use of irony, satire & a superbly imaginative-inventive language – Theroux's bold experiments with form ensconces DC in the great tradition of maximalist literature blazed by the likes of Cervantes, Rabelais, & Sterne. A "dipsomaniac of prose," Theroux creates a lush world within his words. DC is a masterpiece, a tour de force and I can't emphasise that fact enough.
In an interview, Steven Moore had mentioned a unique quality of Theroux's writing:
"Nonmainstream artworks usually express untraditional, iconoclastic views—political, sociological, sexual, religious—which is why I find them more interesting and appealing. There may be some innovative, eccentric novels that express conservative views, but I can’t think of many, beyond those of Alexander Theroux."
Theroux writes early on that "The facts of one’s childhood are always important when touching on a genius."–- likewise the book lays out its main thematic concerns in the initial chapters itself:
According to its publisher, Darconville’s Cat, is: "about love and hate. Among other matters, it deals with the delicate tensions between Life and Art, the Ideal and the Real, God and Satan, and, above all, with the crises and conflicts between Man and Woman, the tragic implications of which reach all the way back to the Primal Fall."
In fact, the very first paragraph combines the idea of Fall with lost love & Beauty: "The single tree, however, that shanked out of the front yard he now crossed in long strides showed even more distinct a darkness, a simulacrum of the dread probationary tree—trapfall of all lost love—for coming upon it, gibbet-high and half leafless in the moonlight, was to feel somehow disposed to the general truth that it is a dangerous and pagan notion that beauty palliates evil."
Darconville's highly religious nature, finding no mutual sympathy within institutionalised religion, turns to another holy vocation – a writer's life. With the entry of beautiful Isabel, life and art are combined but in a supreme irony, the beauty in which he seeks to find the meaning of life, is, deeply flawed. Darconville deserved a Juliet, a Beatrice but he gets a Delilah. But then "wasn’t Genius the clerk of Venus?"
A Romantic is, after all, a man of extremes, and ideas like these don't really help much: "his general conviction that the state of art should be in constant panic. The artistic nature, he knew, had an inborn proneness to side with the beauty that breaks hearts, to single out the aristocratic contours of what in human glory quickens the impulses of life to mystic proportions."
The chapter Bright Star lays out in no uncertain terms, the tragic nature of this tale ( the backdrop of Keats' unrequited love for Fanny Browne) but more importantly the idea that the ideal Art is inspired by a Beauty that is not divorced from Truth:
"Love has been mentioned,” said Darconville,(...) And suffering, as well. The history of romantic disappointment, I don’t doubt, often does nothing more than document the schism between Beauty and Truth or, better, proves that Beauty, when it becomes an end in itself, often yields no Truth. The simple line, in such cases, had no complexity within it—there can, of course, never be too much. A knowledge of many things is possible, it’s been said, but one can never know everything about one thing, though, sadly, one perhaps tries. The relationship with a boy or girl you spontaneously took for perfection-in-beauty but didn’t sequentially know by examination-in-truth can result in disaster. The implications of the Ideal?
Who can really know? It is the chance one takes when one falls in love—"
Darconville's experiences in the blighted world of Quinsyburg & Fawx's Mt., reflect the conflicts & frustrations a higher nature experiences when forced to interact with base & pettyminded humanity at large – The American South, for Theroux, remains, a low point, not only in a vertical but in every sense - the bile-soaked, over-the-top send up of it is, disturbing at times – you get the feeling that nothing good & healthy could grow here but as he observes:
"Darconville, who didn’t want to, noticed everything. He fought not to notice. If the people there, however, could have known with what punctilious accuracy their every movement and mannerism was recorded by him, not through viciousness, not smugness, nor any premeditation, they’d have sued him on the spot. He couldn’t help it. Behavior is comment, the articulation of action, and these nopsters? With their fipple-fluting tongues? Their pretentious piety? Any satirist worth salt would have banished them forthwith in a jingle, not as victims but as executioners: an authorized punishment, seeking to cure disease by remedies which produce effects similar to the symptoms of the complaint, for what to correct as hangmen they’d have to know as the hanged. There is not a bauble thrown by the silly hand of a dunce, thought Darconville, that may not be caught with advantage by the hand of art."
Disappointed in love, disillusioned with life, what's an artist to do?
"Onanism is the terrible core of creation." However, "The true writer, thought Darconville, must not only be a man whose Christ shows no discontinuity between Creator and Redeemer—a perfection, he knew, he failed—but a man with faith in that perfection."
Art then becomes the salvation – Darconville's Cat is "about the redemption of the imagination. We get back to paradise that way." Because:Art is the Eden where Adam and Eve eat the serpent.
Thus it is clear that DCs energy derives from the tension between contrasting ideas/ideals & the effort to reconcile them in a meaningful wholeness.
DCs structure works on the mirroring/doubling & contrast – there are chapters that echo one another eg. all the misunderstandings that threaten to sunder aside D & Isabel's relationship & then suddenly, reconciliation follows, is repeated many times.
And the foreshadowing via embedded references like Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, & Fuseli's The Nightmare.
It's in this context that Crucifer's portrayal makes perfect aesthetic sense - his rage presents the necessary contrast to the earlier love-soaked first part of the book. His speech on Hate, & The Misogynist's Library, are but a hellish inversion of the earlier essay on Love & the exotic possibilities of future happiness explored in Darconville's first journey to Harvard. But more importantly, the Crucifer chapters bring the nascent misogyny of the text to a boiling point & in doing so; bring about a catharsis.
The readers who were so far admiring the powerful rhetoric of chapters like Oratio Contra Feminas, & Hate, are appalled when confronted with the insane brutality of Why Don't You-? – because hate, when no longer an abstract idea, is ugly as hell & thus we as readers are no longer fascinated by it and
A book has its own internal logic & in that sense, everything in this book makes sense, still, most readers might not be able to see that & instead of hating the idea of hate, end up hating the book itself! For me, however,the most painful chapter remains The Nowt of Cambridge & you thought only women suffer in love!
It's a book that will divide people – that's the mystery of great art. Did I mention DC is highly rich in humour & learned wit?
This is what Theroux had to say to Steven Moore about the two most controversial chapters in this book:
"SM: Some people found the book hard to read.
AT: That, to make an understatement, is an overstatement. I was particularly surprised so many people missed so many points. It’s supposed to be often funny. Nobody seemed to see that "Why Don’t You — ?" was a chapter about verbs, "The Unholy Litany" about nouns. Someone said there are only 2400 people in the world worth writing for, anyway. I wonder if that’s true. But readers are so lazy."
That was some grammar lesson indeed! Thanks,Theroux Sir.
Anyway, back to Crucifer:
Dr. Crucifer is Darconville's potential self if he didn't watch out. He is also an exemplar of the book's piety as expressed in D, taken to its opposite, fanatic extreme.
Need I say he is also one of fiction's best negative characters - standing shoulder to shoulder with Ahab & Iago.The name is ambiguous though - is it a play on Lucifer? ( That would be too easy.) Or is it a take on the crucified Christ – Dr. Abel Crucifer, more sinned against than sinning?
Yet I can't help wondering why Theroux made him an Egyptian, Coptic Arab – is it cause his exotic background would make his highly controversial views more palatable than say if they were coming from an Upper class, intellectual White American Male! It's true that in the highly paternalistic Arab society; a man's honour means everything & rivers of blood flow to exact an injury upon it - an eye for an eye doesn't seem an anachronism here. I understand Crucifer; heck, at times, I even felt for him!
I think the misogyny charges stick because of Theroux's own admission: "In a 1978 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Theroux called “Darconville’s Cat” a “great misogynist treatise,” and said he’d written it to take revenge on a young woman down in Virginia who dumped him at the altar."
When a writer like Gass says that his writing comes from hate, it's not the hate born of cynicism, rather, the hate of Gass & Theroux comes from disappointed idealism – the frustration that there are no longer ideals worth loving or fighting for - mediocrity has corrupted everything:
"Why do you have such attitudes?” people tell me. “You’re so extreme! You’re so opinionated! This is so savage!” But satire, my point is, is savage. I’m thinking of a remark that Nathanael West made in The Day of the Locust, when he said, “Nothing is sadder than the truly monstrous.”
DC doesn't need a defense - mine or anybody else's – its beauty is its truth - the keatsian line is most apt in this case. As Nabokov said:what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art, and DC is a work of art. Period.
The kind of chaste love it celebrates is something that went out of fashion with my parents' generation. It's heartening that Theroux built his masterpiece on such a premise for what is love worth if not pure, what is its promise if not true?
" DC is a work of erudition. But you don't need erudition to read it."
That is cause it celebrates love & true love is all about the heart - a heart that experiences love and its obverse hate in equal measure & that's okay cause what lovers can't bear; is indifference.
Heathclif would've called Darconville a soul-brother, & Shakespeare would've applauded Theroux for creating a character like Dr. Crucifer - he would've understood.
Darconville's obsessive attempts to woo Isabel back & her cruel rejection of him may have had their genesis in the author's real life but here in this beautiful, tragic, artwork, the coarseness of everyday life has been burnished away by the alchemical writerly craft just as gold's impurity is melted away in the furnace & what you get is pure 24 carat gold:
he wrote down everything he could remember—for victory without blood, he saw, was twice achieved—filling page after page of what had happened to him, not lying, telling the truth, writing to record rather than to imagine, not inventing what never existed by trying to discover the meaning of what had and as he worked, distinguishing between the impulse to impose a meaning ( animus impotentium) and the impulse to interpret ( animus interpretantium), language became the objective of which self-consciousness was the subjective. The bee had fertilized the flower it robbed. Words were all he had left.
And what words they are! I really have no words to describe them so I must stop here cause as Theroux wrote: "Put Not More Inke on thy Paper Than Thou Hast Brains in thy Head."(!)
* * *
A Table Alphabeticall of Thinges Passynge
Theroux had rollicking fun with this format. Here's my pathetic attempt:
A is for Alaric, the knight in black, constant in love and pure
B for the baggage that comes with expectations galore
C for all the catty ladies eyeing the hero, cynosure
D for the academe dunces burping and f**ting evermore!
E for the elegy that is Darconville's Cat
F for the lover's faith that is ripped apart
G for Dr. W.C. Cloogy who is such a gas
H for Hypsipyle Poore persistently making a pass
I for Irony – the Bright Star (turned La Belle Dame Sans Merci)
J for jealousy without which love remains subpar
K for krackling kemistry, so near, yet so far
L is for LOVE; Darconville's swan song
M for the moon-magic-madness
N for a chronic, nocturnal sadness
O for Onanism, creation's terrible core
P for porn being enjoyed by The Clitheroe Kids all in uproar
Q for Quinsyburg, hell's own special place
R is for Rumpopulorum with which DCs world is laced
S for Spellvexit - cat, child, God – My Cat! My Cat!
T is for the thunderous rage of Crucifer
U for cheap Isabel's unctuous care
V for Venice & the verdure of Theroux's prose
W is for "Womanity," & The Weerds' josh (who would entitle this non-rhyming alphabetical rhyme, non-rhyming alphabetical rhyme)
X is for Xanadu & all the exotic places in rhapsodical Over the Hills and Far Away
Y for the romantic yearning always holding sway
Z for
* * *
* "All joy worth the name, some say, is in equal love between unequal persons, that the entire disclosure of love, even its necessity, becomes irrelevant when, for instance, equals meet."
Ah but my idea is true as well! Theroux writes: "All aesthetics are created by ethics; and beauty, more often than not, is a bodily image in which morality is archetypally felt to be represented. The less transcendental the beauty is, the less permanent we are usually convinced it will be, in direct proportion, for our faith resides here, that we love what we esteem, a usufruct of heaven beckoning us to the bettermost, and so to preserve in spirit what we’ve captured in nature it often falls out that love and desire are sometimes two unalike, mutually exclusive conditions."
May 16, 2016
[This review is of the Book-on-8-Track version, read by Ryan Reynolds, and available in a single 133-cartridge collection—available only from Ronco!]
Alexander Theroux—espying the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary on a podium—upends it, spilling all 600,000+ words onto the floor like cereal tumbling out of its box. The author then proceeds to arrange each word in their proper, Therouxian order. Unsatisfied, he invents several-thousand more. Still feeling this a tad too quotidian, he paints a museum-quality portrait for the cover. His work done, he absconds out the window—our dashing Icarus—and proceeds to screw the literal daylight out of the Sun. The resulting eclipse comes to us in the form known as Darconville’s Cat.
Listen: nothing I can say here will add to the superhuman efforts that Nathan, MJ & Co. did a few years back. All I can add is my two cents—namely, that this novel is testimony to the idea that another’s beautiful mind can enliven your own. Darconville’s Cat is emphatically not a challenging read, insofar as you are willing to meet the author halfway. This is a book you get lost in and are thankful for it. Its reputation as ‘challenging’ is, in my unasked-for opinion, wholly fallacious and only the byproduct of hobgoblin hiveminds who sting themselves to death at the idea of a book that’s over 700-pages long and doesn’t have the words’ game,’ ‘of’ and/or ‘thrones’ in its title.
You know the abysmal term ‘mindfuck?’ Well this isn’t one. This is your brain having sweet love being made to it all night, a little Teddy Pendergrass on in the background (maybe some Al Jarreau), candles around the bed, and all matter of emollients and waterbed waves slapping in concert with your own percussions. I promise you, lovelies, it is one of the most compulsively readable, touching, witty, inventive, erudite, tragic, and ‘just-fucking-outtasite-man’ novels you’re going to come across. Ever. The running jokes (Elizabeth I and suboptimal female thigh-to-frame proportion) are gifts that keep giving. The first 200-pages will have you in stitches and unguarded for Theroux dropping science on your ass in the form of a 20-page thesis on the ontology of love that rivals some of the greatest philosophers and theologians I’ve ever read. This will then happen in the form of explications on other Big Things throughout the remainder. The results, otherworldly. The mind, blown. My thesaurus, exhausted.
But, as I said, I really don’t have much to add. As a functional illiterate, I really only could judge this book by the cover, so, grain of sand and all that…
Alexander Theroux—espying the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary on a podium—upends it, spilling all 600,000+ words onto the floor like cereal tumbling out of its box. The author then proceeds to arrange each word in their proper, Therouxian order. Unsatisfied, he invents several-thousand more. Still feeling this a tad too quotidian, he paints a museum-quality portrait for the cover. His work done, he absconds out the window—our dashing Icarus—and proceeds to screw the literal daylight out of the Sun. The resulting eclipse comes to us in the form known as Darconville’s Cat.
Listen: nothing I can say here will add to the superhuman efforts that Nathan, MJ & Co. did a few years back. All I can add is my two cents—namely, that this novel is testimony to the idea that another’s beautiful mind can enliven your own. Darconville’s Cat is emphatically not a challenging read, insofar as you are willing to meet the author halfway. This is a book you get lost in and are thankful for it. Its reputation as ‘challenging’ is, in my unasked-for opinion, wholly fallacious and only the byproduct of hobgoblin hiveminds who sting themselves to death at the idea of a book that’s over 700-pages long and doesn’t have the words’ game,’ ‘of’ and/or ‘thrones’ in its title.
You know the abysmal term ‘mindfuck?’ Well this isn’t one. This is your brain having sweet love being made to it all night, a little Teddy Pendergrass on in the background (maybe some Al Jarreau), candles around the bed, and all matter of emollients and waterbed waves slapping in concert with your own percussions. I promise you, lovelies, it is one of the most compulsively readable, touching, witty, inventive, erudite, tragic, and ‘just-fucking-outtasite-man’ novels you’re going to come across. Ever. The running jokes (Elizabeth I and suboptimal female thigh-to-frame proportion) are gifts that keep giving. The first 200-pages will have you in stitches and unguarded for Theroux dropping science on your ass in the form of a 20-page thesis on the ontology of love that rivals some of the greatest philosophers and theologians I’ve ever read. This will then happen in the form of explications on other Big Things throughout the remainder. The results, otherworldly. The mind, blown. My thesaurus, exhausted.
But, as I said, I really don’t have much to add. As a functional illiterate, I really only could judge this book by the cover, so, grain of sand and all that…
January 14, 2015
"Sorrow is the cause of immortal conceptions."
A must read. Probably one of the best reading experiences I have ever had. The man is a genius. Must read it again, many times.
Reading Alexander Theroux is like reading a reincarnation of Edgar Allan Poe with a vast knowledge of words; I say this because they both have a lot of melancholic issues surrounding their writing, or so it seems from reading Darconville's Cat and Poe's poetry. They both dwell on women, and why not, women are great, and a lot of good sentences/lines of poetry are born from the dwelling on them. Theroux had a good blend(best way to put it?) of admiring a woman and being disgusted by a woman, and the shift is interesting to read.
Crucifer was a very good villian. I enjoyed his interactions with Darconville a lot. While reading these sections, sometimes I felt bad for liking him so much, but he was so clever. The description of his voice was hilarious, and I could almost hear it behind me as a read:
“The voice was a soprano’s, with a little glub-glub sound in the throat like a coffee boiling in a percolator, but there was a piping up higher in his birdlike syrinx, as if in a dry whistle it were fluting through a beak. It had no timbre, not at all what one would expect from such a big man, a hovering, elongated man. And, what, was that an accent? Mere phrasing? A glottal defect?..."
"As Dr. Crucifer continued speaking, the words in the darkness seemed disembodied, hanging in the air.” Now imagine how that sounds with these words from Crucifer himself, “I have imagined us together having tea on a dark afternoon with oatcakes and double Gloucester and then a late stroll on the misty common to give our swordsticks an airing.” Then after the he says this all to Darconville he adds “Alone.”
Theroux's lexicon is amazing; I wish I had an 1/8 of the knowledge he has. From the little that I have read about him personally, I would like to talk to him, even though he would probably only use language that I would just have to sit and nod as if I know what he is talking about.
I have An Adultery and Laura Warholic to read, not sure which to venture into next.
A must read. Probably one of the best reading experiences I have ever had. The man is a genius. Must read it again, many times.
Reading Alexander Theroux is like reading a reincarnation of Edgar Allan Poe with a vast knowledge of words; I say this because they both have a lot of melancholic issues surrounding their writing, or so it seems from reading Darconville's Cat and Poe's poetry. They both dwell on women, and why not, women are great, and a lot of good sentences/lines of poetry are born from the dwelling on them. Theroux had a good blend(best way to put it?) of admiring a woman and being disgusted by a woman, and the shift is interesting to read.
Crucifer was a very good villian. I enjoyed his interactions with Darconville a lot. While reading these sections, sometimes I felt bad for liking him so much, but he was so clever. The description of his voice was hilarious, and I could almost hear it behind me as a read:
“The voice was a soprano’s, with a little glub-glub sound in the throat like a coffee boiling in a percolator, but there was a piping up higher in his birdlike syrinx, as if in a dry whistle it were fluting through a beak. It had no timbre, not at all what one would expect from such a big man, a hovering, elongated man. And, what, was that an accent? Mere phrasing? A glottal defect?..."
"As Dr. Crucifer continued speaking, the words in the darkness seemed disembodied, hanging in the air.” Now imagine how that sounds with these words from Crucifer himself, “I have imagined us together having tea on a dark afternoon with oatcakes and double Gloucester and then a late stroll on the misty common to give our swordsticks an airing.” Then after the he says this all to Darconville he adds “Alone.”
Theroux's lexicon is amazing; I wish I had an 1/8 of the knowledge he has. From the little that I have read about him personally, I would like to talk to him, even though he would probably only use language that I would just have to sit and nod as if I know what he is talking about.
I have An Adultery and Laura Warholic to read, not sure which to venture into next.
July 15, 2017
Astounding.
I can't think of any better word, for Theroux used them all much better in this work of art.
I can't think of any better word, for Theroux used them all much better in this work of art.
February 7, 2017
And walking out of the little church he felt confirmed in not only the worth of his whispered prayer but in the realization, as well, that Christ had become man and not some bell-shaped Corinthian column with volutes for veins and a mandala of stone foliage for a heart. - pp 158
This beautiful sentence comes early in the novel, and seems curiously at variance with the rest of its content. Does our hero Darconville really make good use of this insight? Other reviews here have noted the extreme misanthropy and misogyny that courses through these pages. The other most notable feature of the book is of course Theroux's defiantly baroque style. These two qualities, arguably, are related, as language becomes a means to escape or heap ridicule on the world.
Style is everything. The plot is threadbare and other than Draconville and Crucifer, characters do not really exist except as pretexts for rhetorical savagery. It may be telling that the title refers to an animal. At least a cat has the advantage of not being a human being.
I like to think I'm a humanist, so all this was not particularly my cup of tea. And yet the writing - my god, at its best Theroux's prose gives off such a heady rush of freedom, this sense of the infinite possibility of words. I wouldn't want to be so small-minded in my humanism as to reject those who don't accept it. Being human can take many strange and wonderful forms. This novel embodies one of the furthermost possibilities of our condition.
January 27, 2021
One of the few novels that lives up to the hype. This is the real deal, folks: not since James Joyce has an author so utterly tamed the English tongue and so convincingly caused it to do his bidding, no matter how acrobatic the task at hand. Neither Pynchon, nor Gass, nor Vollman, nor even my beloved William Gaddis, is quite in the same league as Theroux as regards the use of our mother tongue in this particular novel. Only the Joyce of Ulysseys and the Wake compares. It's a league of two.
Yet, still, something rankles within me regarding this novel. So what? I want to say to the previous paragraph. Is that all there is to a novel, this cornucopia of words both obscure, luscious, and neologically re-born?
This internal struggle then floats my thoughts toward a long-standing conversation I've been having with myself about literature for some years. It began with what I believe I learned in elementary or perhaps High school or maybe even college: to wit, that a novel is divisible into two things, its written style and its content, or the moral of the story that it tells. I was also taught to believe, in the modernist tradition, that the best novels (and perhaps the highest aim of the art of writing itself) is to seamlessly unite style and content into a single, monolithic message. The acme being to use style to produce a kind of content above or adjacent to traditional content, to say something by using a certain style, a register, a technique...
I labored under this delusion for many years when a friend--perhaps the best writer I have know personally in my lifetime, certainly the best poet--claimed that style was something of an illusion, that what was really meant when most people used the word was rather literary form. Indeed, at first, this blew my mind, as form is a far more tangible thing than the vagaries of style--which also varies drastically--let's face it--from sentence to sentence.
Certainly the postmodern writer, I think, dallies more with form than with style (if these words still hold much specific meaning, enough that you get me). That is, Queneau, Perec, Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, Blanchot, and Mathews play obvious games in the way they construct a novel (if we even still want to call them novels), and others, such as Kundera, Vonnegut, and De Lillo, despite each having certain stylistic tendencies--that is, unmistakable voices--I think also show demonstrable signs of shaping narratives in new ways that can only be considered formal as well as stylistic. For me, Darconville's Cat falls into this second category in which style and form blend: this novel presents an interesting mixture of a strong personal linguistic style marked by a dazzling use of the archaic and little-used or newly-coined words, as well as constructing a narrative also choc-full of digressions, litanies, essays, soliloquies, lists, explosions, and many other rhetorical forms. (It's not for nothing that Steven Moore, who sees novels as exercises in narrative and rhetorical forms, is an avowed fan of Theroux.)
Thus, yes, Darconville's Cat is a wild postmodern masterpiece at the formal and stylistic level.
So, what's your gripe, Foust? FFS, you've given if five stars?
Well, it has to be five stars for this novel is so stylistically beyond all competitors! I don't dare cheat it of its due. The fireworks are really, really fantastic and head and shoulders above some very tough competition.
But?
Well, two things. Firstly: despite the ending, which I loved and which does indeed bring the whole of the narrative together and wrap it in the proverbial bow, there were nearly 200 pages near the end that I found difficult to read, insufferable in fact. Sure, the ending put them firmly in context and I cannot go so far as to suggest taking an editing pencil to them, or that Theroux was really in artistic error to have written them in the first place. But, dammit, they were hard to read and I must have written a hundred negative one-star reviews in my head while slogging through them.
Yes, the character speaking this horrid flow of words is clearly the villain of the piece--although, and I think, again, that this is dramatically sound--we don't know but that the character may, eventually, through the very avalanche of words in question, eventually persuade the protagonist to go along with his villainy and thereby become an accomplice, or the actual authoritive voice of the piece as a whole. (I mean, I get it, the character in question is Darconville's Mephistopheles--I'm not named Foust for nothing.) Yes, of course the protagonist calls him mad and doesn't like him. Yes, he's described as a self-castrated eunuch, a freak, a recluse, an abuser of his servant...
Buuuuuuuuut, he is allowed to speak effusively, dramatically, dazzlingly, hyperbollically, and seamingly endlessly against 51% of the human race (women) for nigh on 200 pages. I found it irritating, then sickening, then infuriating, and finally it exhausted me so much that I began to avoid reading for a while until I got over the hump, so to speak. Sure, it pays off, dramatically by the novel's end--yet at a fraction of the vitriol it would also have paid off just as well, I think, and I might never have suspected that perhaps the point of writing this novel was largely to malign the female of the species. Certainly a consideration of the whole of the plot says no, but the gleeful and dense enthusiasm of those many, many pages dedicated to rhetorically decimating the fairer sex raise the suspicion.
My other niggling niggle is that the formal pyrotechnics which make Darconville's Cat delightful are, ultimately, mostly unoriginal. The voice certainly is unique--the style, if you will. But the digressions, the formal rhetorical games, speeches, litanies, lists, et al., all seemed to me to have precedents in Joyce, Sterne, Melville, Rabelais particularly, and perhaps Cervantes. Do I love these authors far more than I could ever love my distracted, politically confused, and under-educated parents? Indeed. This is a list of my favorite authors, formerly speaking, for exactly the things that Theroux here imitates. Thus I am in awe, and perhaps even somewhat jealous, that he has done them the homage that I doubt my own meager authorial powers could do them. Yet, it feels like homage alone and is thus a looking backward rather than a forging ahead into the history of literature.
Still, at all costs, you must read this novel. While I can't say there's nothing like it since it draws on so many precedents, there's also nothing at all like it.
Yet, still, something rankles within me regarding this novel. So what? I want to say to the previous paragraph. Is that all there is to a novel, this cornucopia of words both obscure, luscious, and neologically re-born?
This internal struggle then floats my thoughts toward a long-standing conversation I've been having with myself about literature for some years. It began with what I believe I learned in elementary or perhaps High school or maybe even college: to wit, that a novel is divisible into two things, its written style and its content, or the moral of the story that it tells. I was also taught to believe, in the modernist tradition, that the best novels (and perhaps the highest aim of the art of writing itself) is to seamlessly unite style and content into a single, monolithic message. The acme being to use style to produce a kind of content above or adjacent to traditional content, to say something by using a certain style, a register, a technique...
I labored under this delusion for many years when a friend--perhaps the best writer I have know personally in my lifetime, certainly the best poet--claimed that style was something of an illusion, that what was really meant when most people used the word was rather literary form. Indeed, at first, this blew my mind, as form is a far more tangible thing than the vagaries of style--which also varies drastically--let's face it--from sentence to sentence.
Certainly the postmodern writer, I think, dallies more with form than with style (if these words still hold much specific meaning, enough that you get me). That is, Queneau, Perec, Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, Blanchot, and Mathews play obvious games in the way they construct a novel (if we even still want to call them novels), and others, such as Kundera, Vonnegut, and De Lillo, despite each having certain stylistic tendencies--that is, unmistakable voices--I think also show demonstrable signs of shaping narratives in new ways that can only be considered formal as well as stylistic. For me, Darconville's Cat falls into this second category in which style and form blend: this novel presents an interesting mixture of a strong personal linguistic style marked by a dazzling use of the archaic and little-used or newly-coined words, as well as constructing a narrative also choc-full of digressions, litanies, essays, soliloquies, lists, explosions, and many other rhetorical forms. (It's not for nothing that Steven Moore, who sees novels as exercises in narrative and rhetorical forms, is an avowed fan of Theroux.)
Thus, yes, Darconville's Cat is a wild postmodern masterpiece at the formal and stylistic level.
So, what's your gripe, Foust? FFS, you've given if five stars?
Well, it has to be five stars for this novel is so stylistically beyond all competitors! I don't dare cheat it of its due. The fireworks are really, really fantastic and head and shoulders above some very tough competition.
But?
Well, two things. Firstly: despite the ending, which I loved and which does indeed bring the whole of the narrative together and wrap it in the proverbial bow, there were nearly 200 pages near the end that I found difficult to read, insufferable in fact. Sure, the ending put them firmly in context and I cannot go so far as to suggest taking an editing pencil to them, or that Theroux was really in artistic error to have written them in the first place. But, dammit, they were hard to read and I must have written a hundred negative one-star reviews in my head while slogging through them.
Yes, the character speaking this horrid flow of words is clearly the villain of the piece--although, and I think, again, that this is dramatically sound--we don't know but that the character may, eventually, through the very avalanche of words in question, eventually persuade the protagonist to go along with his villainy and thereby become an accomplice, or the actual authoritive voice of the piece as a whole. (I mean, I get it, the character in question is Darconville's Mephistopheles--I'm not named Foust for nothing.) Yes, of course the protagonist calls him mad and doesn't like him. Yes, he's described as a self-castrated eunuch, a freak, a recluse, an abuser of his servant...
Buuuuuuuuut, he is allowed to speak effusively, dramatically, dazzlingly, hyperbollically, and seamingly endlessly against 51% of the human race (women) for nigh on 200 pages. I found it irritating, then sickening, then infuriating, and finally it exhausted me so much that I began to avoid reading for a while until I got over the hump, so to speak. Sure, it pays off, dramatically by the novel's end--yet at a fraction of the vitriol it would also have paid off just as well, I think, and I might never have suspected that perhaps the point of writing this novel was largely to malign the female of the species. Certainly a consideration of the whole of the plot says no, but the gleeful and dense enthusiasm of those many, many pages dedicated to rhetorically decimating the fairer sex raise the suspicion.
My other niggling niggle is that the formal pyrotechnics which make Darconville's Cat delightful are, ultimately, mostly unoriginal. The voice certainly is unique--the style, if you will. But the digressions, the formal rhetorical games, speeches, litanies, lists, et al., all seemed to me to have precedents in Joyce, Sterne, Melville, Rabelais particularly, and perhaps Cervantes. Do I love these authors far more than I could ever love my distracted, politically confused, and under-educated parents? Indeed. This is a list of my favorite authors, formerly speaking, for exactly the things that Theroux here imitates. Thus I am in awe, and perhaps even somewhat jealous, that he has done them the homage that I doubt my own meager authorial powers could do them. Yet, it feels like homage alone and is thus a looking backward rather than a forging ahead into the history of literature.
Still, at all costs, you must read this novel. While I can't say there's nothing like it since it draws on so many precedents, there's also nothing at all like it.
June 20, 2011
I strongly suspect that Professor Theroux somewhere along the way made a Faustian trade with Mephistopheles and was willing to part with the love of his life in exchange for writing the perfect great American novel right at the get-go. Of the latter I can certainly vouche. The former could not have been accomplished without some deep seated experience. After all, this is a novel about love and hate. But it also concerns poles of every variety. As Nietzsche pointed out in "The Birth of Tragedy," the interplay of Appollo and Dionysius give birth to tragedy and fortunately for us in this case also to comedy. "The Trojan Horse has foaled." For in this Proustian synthesis of Theroux, genius clearly resides. Saul Bellow once wrote that fewer than 20,000 people had the intellectual wherewithal to really understand his novels. I suspect that in the case of Theroux the number is roughly half. Hence, booksellers consider this work an "overlooked masterpiece." The vocabulary is fairly daunting --the longest word in the world can be found within this magnum opus. But the pure wit and the rare sagacity and the beauty of the language is absolute paradise: this is one of only a half-dozen novels that I envy to the point that I wish I had written it. This is a novelist's novel. "You will either build a bridge or build a wall." In some cases the rich syntax rivals Proust in length and in other cases it's simply pithy wit. Theroux captures the dialect of the South deftly in his Blue Ridge Faux Eden and then revels in his own element East of Eden in the Hahvid Yahd. There are many places where I just laughed my head off. His primary cast -- Darconville, Isabel and Crucifer -- are memorable and the vitriolic diatribes of the wicked Crucifer must have been good fun to write. Crucifer out-Mephistos Mephistopheles as a worthy arch-demon as purely Satanic as any demon of Milton, Faust or Dante. This Crucifer is Biblical and leads Darconville on a tragi-comic chase through the labyrinth of his soul with an ending that is both original and intriguing in its wisdom. Thus Theroux prophesized his own manuscript going into a tin box to be confiscated by a Philistine doctor to offset his fees. This book takes a while to read properly -- I would advise you not to rush it. The writing is exquisite -- really it's as good as it gets in our day and age -- so just be sure to savour it. I also recommend that you buy this book as an investment: someday soon this genius will be "discovered" as an overnight success a mere 30 years in the making and his first editions will be worth great fortunes. "Darconville's Cat" is a pure joy to read -- it is, honestly, simply perfect.
Read
July 8, 2019Discussed this book here: https://youtu.be/jezYAXCvM08
July 28, 2016
I'll be processing this book for a long time. It's beautiful and ugly and it's a chaotic mess of a narrative that somehow seems perfectly organized. It's love and hate. The form perfectly encapsulates those dichotomies that live within everything. To say I loved this book would be a lie, but it's possibly the best book I've read since I first read Gravity's Rainbow or Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. This is GAN material and I can only hope that, with time, Theroux will be read with the care and dedication of his predecessors.
This review adds nothing to the beautifully thought out pieces already written about the book featured on this site, but I do want to add one thing that struck me about this book: It is written in such an amazing way that is basically outside of influence. It's post-modern as if modernism never happened. It lives in a bubble of its own world, which makes it worth reading alone.
This review adds nothing to the beautifully thought out pieces already written about the book featured on this site, but I do want to add one thing that struck me about this book: It is written in such an amazing way that is basically outside of influence. It's post-modern as if modernism never happened. It lives in a bubble of its own world, which makes it worth reading alone.
January 6, 2017
"There lies not a grain of sand between the loved and the detested." p. 634
That about sums it up.
That about sums it up.
November 11, 2015
Here's my thesis on Darconville's Cat:
https://www.academia.edu/18164223/_Do...
"Do Your Worst": Maximalism and Intertextuality in Alexander Theroux's Darconvilles Cat.
Besides the main text which tries to sort the Cat into the tradition of Maximalism, Encyclopedism and the Menippean Satire, I hope that the appendices will be of use to some. The first appendix features an around 80% annotated bibliography of the Misogynist's Library, the second an almost complete breakdown of women (and four men!) in the Unholy Litany.
Original review below:
*************************************
After 9 1/2 long months, I finally finished Darconville's Cat today. Not because it was bad, but because it was that good.
There is no other book since Ulysses which had me under it's spell as this book. It is, more or less, the perfect book. There are several reasons for this:
1. The language.
This is most likely the first thing one will notice about the Cat. Theroux is logorrheic and verbose to the highest degree. At the same time, this is what makes the book so precise. It's pure bliss for a non-native speaker to be thrown into such an enormous amount of new words. I must have looked up more than a thousand words, most of them filling a small notebook I used exclusively for this novel.
2. The form.
Theroux plays with a number of forms and literary traditions: Sonnets, lists, travelogues, diaries, litanies,... Some of the chapters serve both as reading guides as well as a form of mental logbook - a game of what the reader already knows and make sense of. An example for this is the car trip Darconville is on (LVIII: Over the Hills and Far Away): he lists up hundreds of places, real and invented. Three chapters dealing with Dr. Crucifer are similar: LXVII. The Misogynist's Library (nine pages of books dealing with misogyny), LXXXII. The Unholy Litany (names and allusions to hundreds of women, complete with the formulaic repetition "libera nos, Domine") and XCIII. "Why don't you-?" (just as many ways of torturing Darconville's ex-lover, Isabel Rawsthorne). These four chapters alone amount to days and days of research, even in 2014.
3. The characters.
I loved most of the characters. They embody certain stereotypes through their names, as well as their linguistic idiosyncrasies. President Greatracks and Dr. Dodypol were my favourites among the minor characters. Dr. Crucifer on the other hand is, well, one creepy fuck. His speeches were both the most complex passages in the novel, as well as some of the best; while other passages bored me to sleep. All in all, Theroux manages to evoke some brilliant characters.
I would not advise to read this novel if you want a good story. The Cat is extremely boring and cliched in that aspect. Treat it as a cerebral and exceptionally well-crafted piece of writing instead. It's a shame that almost no one knows about this novel, but that can be changed. I really need to reread this in a couple of years.
https://www.academia.edu/18164223/_Do...
"Do Your Worst": Maximalism and Intertextuality in Alexander Theroux's Darconvilles Cat.
Besides the main text which tries to sort the Cat into the tradition of Maximalism, Encyclopedism and the Menippean Satire, I hope that the appendices will be of use to some. The first appendix features an around 80% annotated bibliography of the Misogynist's Library, the second an almost complete breakdown of women (and four men!) in the Unholy Litany.
Original review below:
*************************************
After 9 1/2 long months, I finally finished Darconville's Cat today. Not because it was bad, but because it was that good.
There is no other book since Ulysses which had me under it's spell as this book. It is, more or less, the perfect book. There are several reasons for this:
1. The language.
This is most likely the first thing one will notice about the Cat. Theroux is logorrheic and verbose to the highest degree. At the same time, this is what makes the book so precise. It's pure bliss for a non-native speaker to be thrown into such an enormous amount of new words. I must have looked up more than a thousand words, most of them filling a small notebook I used exclusively for this novel.
2. The form.
Theroux plays with a number of forms and literary traditions: Sonnets, lists, travelogues, diaries, litanies,... Some of the chapters serve both as reading guides as well as a form of mental logbook - a game of what the reader already knows and make sense of. An example for this is the car trip Darconville is on (LVIII: Over the Hills and Far Away): he lists up hundreds of places, real and invented. Three chapters dealing with Dr. Crucifer are similar: LXVII. The Misogynist's Library (nine pages of books dealing with misogyny), LXXXII. The Unholy Litany (names and allusions to hundreds of women, complete with the formulaic repetition "libera nos, Domine") and XCIII. "Why don't you-?" (just as many ways of torturing Darconville's ex-lover, Isabel Rawsthorne). These four chapters alone amount to days and days of research, even in 2014.
3. The characters.
I loved most of the characters. They embody certain stereotypes through their names, as well as their linguistic idiosyncrasies. President Greatracks and Dr. Dodypol were my favourites among the minor characters. Dr. Crucifer on the other hand is, well, one creepy fuck. His speeches were both the most complex passages in the novel, as well as some of the best; while other passages bored me to sleep. All in all, Theroux manages to evoke some brilliant characters.
I would not advise to read this novel if you want a good story. The Cat is extremely boring and cliched in that aspect. Treat it as a cerebral and exceptionally well-crafted piece of writing instead. It's a shame that almost no one knows about this novel, but that can be changed. I really need to reread this in a couple of years.
September 23, 2018
I admit it: there are some works of literature of which I feel unworthy, works so supremely erudite, Pantagruelian novels of encyclopedic scope, so dense with allusion and idiosyncratic language that I could never gain entrance to their secrets. There are not many such books – it is a rare author up to the task of writing one, and few enthusiastic publishers. “Someone said there are only 2400 people in the world worth writing for, anyway. I wonder if that’s true,” Theroux said in one of his interviews (1).
Is it not a miracle, then, that DARCONVILLE'S CAT got written at all, let alone published (though it sold a dismal 15,000 copies when released in 1981, despite having been praised by Anthony Burgess as one of the greatest books of the century). But it has garnered over the years a devoted and impassioned following, and now hardcover copies of the out-of-print novel can run into the hundreds of dollars on the used book market. I was lucky to locate my copy for something less than that, sans dust cover (unfortunately); it is a withdrawn book from the Drake Memorial Library, State University of New York, Brockport. By the looks of the library markings, it was checked out all of three times from 1985 to 2002. Such is the state of readership.
Who would enjoy DARCONVILLE'S CAT? Logophiles, wordmongers, librocubicularists, logomaniacs, bibliophiles, antiquarians, philologists, mythologists. That is: Any lover of words, of great prose, exotic prose; readers eager to be challenged. DARCONVILLE'S CAT is a challenging novel, not necessarily a difficult one. It is, when all allusions and linguistic pyrotechnics are set to the side, the story of the rise and fall of a love affair between college professor Alaric Darconville and one of his students, Isabel Rawsthorne. Deeper yet, it is a meditation on the twin emotions Love and Hate. It is a tale of revenge. And if the reader chooses to plumb the true depths of this novel and follow the allusions, track down the oftentimes exotic and archaic language, work through some of the historical and mythological references, he will discover a novel unlike any he is likely to encounter again.
DARCONVILLE'S CAT is a deserted island book. A lifeboat book. A book to clutch as you're fleeing your burning house.
Alaric Darconville is a professor of English and a writer, not surprisingly, just like Theroux, working on his own novel. At one point, Darconville, in his diary, writes: “Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs. Dodypol. “It depends,” says I, “how much you used the dictionary before you read it.” [330]
Without detailing plot and character, these are my impressions, a small fraction of the beauty, depth, and genius of DARCONVILLE'S CAT. I won't lie – you'll have to put some time and work in on this one. “Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” – P.J. O'Rourke
(1) A Conversation with Alexander Theroux By Steven Moore, From “The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Spring 1991, Vol. 11.1
Is it not a miracle, then, that DARCONVILLE'S CAT got written at all, let alone published (though it sold a dismal 15,000 copies when released in 1981, despite having been praised by Anthony Burgess as one of the greatest books of the century). But it has garnered over the years a devoted and impassioned following, and now hardcover copies of the out-of-print novel can run into the hundreds of dollars on the used book market. I was lucky to locate my copy for something less than that, sans dust cover (unfortunately); it is a withdrawn book from the Drake Memorial Library, State University of New York, Brockport. By the looks of the library markings, it was checked out all of three times from 1985 to 2002. Such is the state of readership.
Who would enjoy DARCONVILLE'S CAT? Logophiles, wordmongers, librocubicularists, logomaniacs, bibliophiles, antiquarians, philologists, mythologists. That is: Any lover of words, of great prose, exotic prose; readers eager to be challenged. DARCONVILLE'S CAT is a challenging novel, not necessarily a difficult one. It is, when all allusions and linguistic pyrotechnics are set to the side, the story of the rise and fall of a love affair between college professor Alaric Darconville and one of his students, Isabel Rawsthorne. Deeper yet, it is a meditation on the twin emotions Love and Hate. It is a tale of revenge. And if the reader chooses to plumb the true depths of this novel and follow the allusions, track down the oftentimes exotic and archaic language, work through some of the historical and mythological references, he will discover a novel unlike any he is likely to encounter again.
DARCONVILLE'S CAT is a deserted island book. A lifeboat book. A book to clutch as you're fleeing your burning house.
Alaric Darconville is a professor of English and a writer, not surprisingly, just like Theroux, working on his own novel. At one point, Darconville, in his diary, writes: “Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs. Dodypol. “It depends,” says I, “how much you used the dictionary before you read it.” [330]
Without detailing plot and character, these are my impressions, a small fraction of the beauty, depth, and genius of DARCONVILLE'S CAT. I won't lie – you'll have to put some time and work in on this one. “Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” – P.J. O'Rourke
(1) A Conversation with Alexander Theroux By Steven Moore, From “The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Spring 1991, Vol. 11.1
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