Shawn Huelle

impromptu, strange, and highly flawed book review

Western by Christine Montalbetti, and translated by Betsy Wing, is lovely, there's no real doubt about that, but, and I kind of hate to admit this (I guess because I am still trying to wean myself from years-ingrained reading habits), I think I was kind of bored with it even just a few pages in. Interminable digressions into minutiae are wonderful (yes they are), but when paired with something which manages to to approximate on the level of the sentence (nearly on the level of the word, too) the same digressiveness the reader finds in the content, then those two digressivenesses become both macro- and micro-digressive (at the same time, and thus creating a kind of möbius-strip of reading), and ultimately deny the reader any sense of narrative progress. Wait, what?! Who the hell am I to complain about a lack of narrative progress? That seems at least as ridiculous (if not much, much more) as complaining about too much (heady) vocabulary.

So if it isn't möbius-reading, exactly, which bothers me about the book (which, by the way, is otherwise lovely), then is it perhaps the fact that Montalbetti has eviscerated the once robust genre of the Western? Can't be that, I love the evisceration of genre. Let's keep doing that. Is it maybe the fact that the author is French, which somehow stands in direct opposition to the idea of the Western? Certainly not, and who better to eviscerate a genre than the very person who "shouldn't" be doing it? (And what the hell is that, anyway, the idea that the Frenchness stands in direct opposition to the Western? Karl May, a German who didn't visit the U.S. until after he was hugely successful and famous, wrote several best-selling books about a Native American. And if Germanness doesn't stand in direct opposition to the Western, then Frenchness (which doesn't stand in direct (maybe oblique?) opposition to Germanness) doesn't/can't either.)

It concerns me to think that all kinds of book reviews (especially for major publications) have been written after reading fewer pages than I've read of Western.

My initial reaction to my inability to explain why I don't want to keep reading Montalbetti's book is to keep reading Montalbetti's book in the hopes I'll figure out why I don't want to keep reading it. But that (even if the preceding hasn't) really, finally proves me to be a silly person. The thing is this: I understand how the book is working. I have read it performing its major task more than thrice at this point, and I should be able to articulate what it is about the book which is making me want to stop reading it, but I can't. I just can't quite get at it.

In the end, it is a beautifully written/translated book, and I enjoyed reading it when I was reading it, but I never really wanted to pick it back up after I put it down.