Poetics of Work

The city of Lyon is in chaos in French writer Lefebvre’s turbulent, incisive chronicle of an unemployed poet (after Blue Self-Portrait). The poet—unnamed or identified by gender—occupies their time smoking joints, gorging on bananas, rereading Whitman, and meditating on the lessons of fascist Germany while the city is rocked by riots over unspecified causes (“resistance is an electrical idea, the vocabulary is going blind, the subject is under surveillance”) and the police force runs amok. Mostly the narrator embarks on Platonic dialogues with their father, a hard-drinking cynical pragmatist aspiring to the promise of middle-class comfort while tossing out rejoinders like “What earthly good is poetry when lunatics filled with global hatred are blowing their brains out?” Taking up the challenge, Lefebvre‘s shiftless narrator searches for the place of poetry in a world gone mad, where the “culture sector is a graveyard for the soul’s repose.” The result is a series of lessons (“try not to knock yourselves out in the name of Liberty; take a bath or watch The Simpsons”) and an interior monologue filled with sharp observations, hysterical asides, and a sincere search for personal truth. This is not the kind of novel where things happen, but its bracing contemporary rhythms hold the reader’s attention. Lefebvre succeeds at mapping out an unquiet mind in the midst of crisis. (Feb.)