Read a Flemish novel recently? For sheer unconventional, thought-provoking oddness, you couldn't do better than Daniël Robberechts's Arriving in Avignon. But don't call it a novel, though you'll probably find it in the fiction section of your local bookstore. It's sort of autobiographical, but not a memoir. Not a book of philosophy, either, although Robberechts's contention that the moment you write about life you falsify it is the most compelling aspect of the book. It's not a history, either, although it chronicles the nightmarish succession of corrupt popes when the papacy moved from Rome to Avignon. Nor is it a guidebook or travel writing, although the author names all the once-walled town's major streets and gates, as well as the train and bus timetables.
What is it, then? Robberechts calls it "a record," and refuses to tailor his work to fit into any genre. Taken for what it is, this is the longest 140-page book you'll read this year, fascinating, daring and boring all at the same time. Ostensibly it records the travels of a shy, horny young man who at age 18 runs away from boarding school hoping for an adventure, an experience that will change him. Between the ages of 18 and 24 he makes nearly 20 visits to Avignon, visiting the surrounding villages; listing all the people he sees; watching attractive women on trains and in cafes, waiting for them to make the first move, too inhibited to admit his helpless, embarrassed desires.
Robberechts's genreless "report" is a troubling, troublesome book, leaping back and forth in time, searching for a plot in real life. The narrative unfolds through blocks of prose without paragraphs, in which chapter numbers may occur mid-sentence and memory is always unreliable. This maddening, experimental book falls somewhere between the existentialism of Samuel Beckett (can anyone ever really know Avignon?) and the scientific detachment of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The book is haunted by a searing loneliness, as the young traveler describes all the people he sees and can't connect with, though the reader knows from flash forwards that he will ultimately marry the nameless blonde girl who fascinates him from the beginning, whom he calls Beatrice.
Dante isn't the only one referenced. Rodin, Rilke and the Marquis de Sade, Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, Petrarch, the Knights Templar and a procession of those corrupt popes are all included in Robberechts's exploration of the once-papal city, not to mention the constant wars, the torturing of heretics and the devastation of the Black Death.
"We live badly, we live unsatisfactorily," says Robberechts. Life is "the raw material with which we have to make do.... Is art no longer anything but the servant of life?... the more words one writes down... the greater the chance of one's being wrong, the smaller the probability that what has been written tallies with some reality."
No matter how thoroughly Robberechts explores Avignon, he's convinced he can't quite seem to arrive there. Being trapped in Robberechts's mind is scary and upsetting (he took his own life in 1992) and you'll be relieved when you finally arrive at the ending--if it's possible to ever arrive anywhere at all. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: An unconventional, maddening and thought-provoking book about a young man's search for connection, filled with history, popes, artists, train timetables and existentialism.