Compact: (FRE French Literature Series)

Maurice Roche has been called “the most interesting novelist in France” (TriQuarterly), and Compact “one of the classics of our modernity” (Le Figaro). Certainly, Compact is one of the most compellingly original works of fiction of the postwar period. Composed-as if a musical score-of six intertwining narratives (each distinguished by its own voice, tense, and typeface), Compact has lost none of its remarkable freshness or groundbreaking innovation since its first appearance in 1966. But along with its striking originality, Compact is also a work rich in offbeat humor and great humanity. Compact is the story of a blind man living in a city of his own imagining. Confined to his deathbed, he engages in mental walks through the world’s capitals. These sightless excursions explode in a plethora of musical arrangements, sexual encounters, and mysterious funeral rites. Meanwhile, a Japanese collector and his transvestite assistant watch over the blind man in exchange-upon the latter’s death-for his magnificent tattooed skin. As a further ordeal, the protagonist finds himself prey to the whims of a sadistic French girl in the next apartment. A novelistic tour de force, Compact fully bears out La Tribune de Geneve`s judgment of Maurice Roche’s work as “the most important literary upheaval to hit France in the last decade.”

About the Author :
Maurice Roche is lecturer in sociology at the University of Sheffield, and teaches undergraduate modules on the Sociology of the EU, Leisure, Policy and Society, and the Sociology of Popular Culture, as well as postgraduate modules on Global Social Policy and International Childhood Studies. He has authored and contributed to a number of titles, including "Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture" (Routledge, 2000), "Europe and Cosmopolitanism" (Liverpool University Press, 2007) and "The Handbook of Nations and Nationalism "(SAGE, 2006), as well as writing articles for journals such as "Citizenship Studies", "Time and Society" and "Cultural Policy". Mark Polizzotti is the translator of more than thirty books from the French. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The Nation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Review :
A dying, sightless man lies unmoving on a bed, his body glorious with tattoos. This is the paradigm of the self at the center of Roche's avant-garde novel, published in 1966 and acclaimed by French critics as pointng the way for a post- nouveau roman school. "Embodied in one's own body, one closes in on oneself." Yet the man experiences sounds and smells, translating them into imagined journeys to other cities. The visits of women, an inflatable sex doll, and his own touch afford him erotic sensations, sometimes expressed in musical terms. His Japanese doctor hopes eventually to add the man's skin to his wallpaper collection. Roche's textual experiments result in a linguistic montage of double columns of print, black or blank spaces, and scraps of Greek, Hebrew and Cyrillic; typographic tricks include musical notations, Braille in domino shapes, and a mileage scale. With Roche's method deliberately frustrating the narrative flow, Compact is not for everyone, but should please fanciers of the literary underground.