Monsieur Ambivalence--a new book from IF SF Publishing
I once said to a writer, "a real writer wouldn't write."
It was one of those things you say that you know has real truth in it but you really don't know why you said it and aren't really sure where or what the truth of it is.
I still see the truth in what I said, and I'm a writer, but I still can't tell you why it's true. I'll have to leave the truth of it to some other writer or reader.
William Gaddis, a writer is there ever was one, wrote this wonderful passage in The Recognitions, speaking of the way most writers and readers interact and getting very close to the truth of what I'd said. It's on pg. 113 of The Dalkey Archive edition, second printing, 2013: "...That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is...it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know...as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds..."
As a publisher, I'm glad writer's write. I'd be lost without them.
I'm glad to announce a new book from IF SF Publishing, Monsieur Ambivalence, a post literate fable by Thomas Fuller, the first novel from our very small press.
I'd like you to read it, though I have to warn you there's very little plot. What plot there is is this: an American man lives in a stone house in a village in the middle of France--France profounde, the French call it--trying to sit alone in a room by himself without disquiet for one hour, as instructed by the 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who famously claimed that man's inability to do so was the cause of all mankind's ills, and to do so while enduring the interruptions of his French neighbors and a highly intelligent female companion.
Despite the temptations of the French countryside--the beauty, the wine, the characters in the village with whom he becomes intimate etc. etc--our hero, Monsieur Ambivalence, soldiers on in his quest.
Having read the book now at least 10 times, I can see now that Monsieur Ambivalence's problem with time is the plot--our narrator's ambivalence toward the very notion of the typical beginning-middle-end kind of story story and how such a story could ever possibly be rendered with any meaning that might have meaning in either the writer's or the reader's life since this isn't the way life happens.
This hadn't occured to me until very recently, long after having committed to publishing the book, even after having read the book over and over, several times from beginning-to-end but more often than not just dipping into it here and there as a reader can with any really worthwhile book: that our narrator is both the writer and the reader of the book, and the arc of the story, if I may use the word arc, is actually the writer himself investigating that notion I'd posed some time ago that "a real writer wouldn't write."
Monsieur Ambivalence is really a very beautiful book, if I may say so and I may. It's an x-ray of a man's soul, in which the writer and the reader are both placed in the exact middle of the world and forced to look at one another and can't stop either laughing or crying, just thinking about how they're using their time.
I'm Monsieur Ambivalence. I sit in the late mornings on the terrace where it is just cool enough to sit at the table under the Stella Artois umbrella and read Pascal and write in the yellow notebook. There really is no one in the world other than me. I live like this in France, day after day, I hold my ambivalence in both hands and bounce it like it's a rubber ball. The days carom away off cobblestones that can't be trusted to bring the ball right back to me. (pps. 108 & 109.)