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the complete review - fiction

Anthology of Apparitions

by
Simon Liberati

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B- : modestly effective portrait of a dissolute and lost generation

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "It's probably as well that I mention Paul Buck and Catherine Petit now, since they've done something I have never seen before in a commercially published work of literature: produced a translation that, word for word, paragraph for paragraph, is actually worse than you might expect from a semi-competent A-level student in a tricky unseen exam.(...) In fairness, you sometimes find yourself wanting to read the book proper rather than the gibber of its translation - which stands testament to M Liberati's skill in the face of astonishing adversity. I wish somebody would retranslate Anthology of Apparitions soon. Then I expect I could write a proper review." - Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "This is a novel packed with angry assertions, making it feel, on occasion, like an embittered sermon. But oddly, this approach works. Even when Claude's claims are patently untrue (everyone is out to exploit the young, for instance), his narrative is endearing in its wounded subjectivity. The book is patient and analytical, deconstructing a character who is paradoxically both lazy and obsessively thoughtful, and it must be read slowly to be appreciated. While this is a brutal and self-consciously referential work, it is also fascinating, well written and rewardingly different from the countless novels about people you think you recognise or, worse, think you are. Anthology of Apparitions is a valuable and at times tender examination of an unenviable, alien soul." - Simon Baker, New Statesman
  
  
• "It’s very French, in a surreal, self-absorbed type way." - Lucy Beresford, The Spectator
  
  
• "Altogether too knowing and self-conscious, Liberati can neither relinquish control of his creation nor trust in his reader to extract significance from longwinded passages and gossipy dialogue. (...) When Marina disappears, she is not much missed, least of all by her brother. And therein is the key to the novel's failure. At its core is a vacuum: of love, regret, redemption, or any of the things that make us human. This truly is an anthology of apparitions, a tableau of half-formed, nocturnal phantoms, and although Liberati's cast of wretched characters might spook a sensitive soul briefly, it is hard to believe in, or care for, these insubstantial creations." - Claudia Pugh-Thomas, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Simon Liberati's Anthology of Apparitions focusses on the generation that came of age in Paris in the late-1970s. The central character is Claude, and he's first introduced in the present, when he's in his forties -- unemployed, the electricity in his small apartment shut off, barely getting by, but still with a certain carefree (and lost) air of his youth. Sitting in a café, he meets a ghost from the past, a fleeting figure who, though he last saw her a quarter of a century earlier, hasn't aged a bit. "I heard your sister is dead", she says, but he's distracted by a phone call and by the time he turns back to her she's gone.
       Claude's sister disappeared in the summer of 1987, and much of the book revisits their youth and the paths they chose (or couldn't get off), as Claude hasn't really moved on since that time.
       Their early childhood spent in the aftermath of 1968, they were ruined by the aimless freedoms and permissive culture of the 70s:

Anyway, 'crazy' will remain one of the most flattering attributes of their generation.

     These kind of people didn't own a television either and in the evening their father read aloud to his children. Before Chateaubriand he had read them Tolstoy's War and Peace, and several novels by Dickens.

Introduced by her mother to LSD and alcohol at the age of nine, knowing all the nightclubs in Paris, Mégève and Saint-Tropez, little Sophie was a kind of phenomenon (as Claude's mother used to say).

At sixteen, he still imagined, like the other children, that meeting someone was going to shield him from the precariousness of life.

Our aim is not to tell him, or her, stories, but to conjure up apparitions. This book also contains, in a minor way, the vindication of youth considered as the loss of innocence, in other words, the gradual awareness of its own exchange value, of beauty as it incites to disinterest, idleness and contempt for all merit, and, more generally, of weakness, grace and the lack of appetite of those who are aware they are desired.

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Links:

• Pushkin Press publicity page

• CritiquesLibres.com (French)
• Le Figaro (French)
• Independent on Sunday
• Lire (French)
• New Statesman

• Gilbert Adair's The Holy Innocents
• Lolita Pille's Paris 75016
• See Index of French literature
• Other books from Pushkin Press under review

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About the Author:

       French author Simon Liberati was born in 1960.

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© 2006-2009 the complete review

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