Lorna Scott Fox

Some time in 1970 or 1971, I was picking boring books at random off my employer’s shelf – I was an au pair in Barcelona – when I opened a novel that had me laughing, and transfixed, by the bottom of the first page. My ignorance meant that I was one of the few people to discover One Hundred Years of Solitude without all that baggage of pleasures foretold. I was excited, and on learning that this was not simply one book, but part of the Latin American boom, I decided to study these works at university. Two authors gradually displaced the overripe, over-imitated Márquez from the top of my list: Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa. The first constructed a dream of Buenos Aires and Paris, balancing paper-thin speculations in a bubble of eternal studenthood. The second couldn’t have been more different. A pungent brutality steeped the many voices in sexualised politics; and there was a cruel numbness that seemed the condition, somehow, of being Peruvian – I’ve been afraid of visiting that country ever since.’

Modern artist as con-man: Salvador Dalí. The phoniness of Dalí’s work from the late Thirties until his death in 1989 coincided with the period of his greatest notoriety and wealth. He threw political and aesthetic principle to the dogs, becoming a born-again supporter of Franco and a fervent monarchist in order to ensure his security after the defeat of the Spanish Republic, and spent the rest of his life as a salon jester of cosmic pretensions.

Jeff Koons didn’t know how right he nearly was when he told a reporter from El País that his monumental flower sculpture Puppy had an ‘untamed’, ‘belligerent’ quality. The next day, Monday 13 October, a florist’s van pulled up outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and two men proceeded to unload a delivery of shrubs as if to stick them onto the giant dog looming over the esplanade. It so happened that Koons, though failing to produce the works for the Jeff Koons Room inside, had kept to schedule with Puppy and no more greenery had been required since Saturday. For this reason a member of the autonomous Basque police, the Ertzaintza, checked the numberplate of the van – and found it to be false. When he asked for identification, he was shot in the back (and died the next day). Three men fled; one was caught later with the help of passers-by, while 12 anti-tank grenades and a remote-control device were found in the pots.’‘

‘Dares to be intellectual,’ breathed the Guardian’s review of Patricia Duncker’s first novel, Hallucinating Foucault. But co-opting the defenceless Michel Foucault into a romanticised fantasy about the Reader does not guarantee a novel’s intellectuality. The story of the timid Cambridge student who falls in love with the subject of his thesis – French writer Paul Michel, a malign blend of Dany Cohn-Bendit and Guy Hocquenghem – and carries him off from an asylum, struck me above all as daring to be improbable. Not because this couldn’t happen, nor because of any objection to the post-psychological and post-realist, but because the most artificial kinds of writing usually aim at coherence on some non-psychological, non-realist level, whether emotional, formal or imaginative. Or even intellectual. But here some notions are launched only to stagnate in repetition, while the rest are noisily hammered into shape for our entertainment. Foucault, for instance, stars as Michel’s imaginary interlocutor and ideal reader, antagonist and alter ego; his death may have precipitated Michel’s breakdown. But this promising idea is continually restated rather than developed, and has no significance beyond itself.’

I wonder how many culture-pilgrims have journeyed to Martinique since Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992, to see whether a shanty town of that name really exists. The novel may be a lush documentary or it may be a historical romance: we can’t be sure. In any case, it is likely to change the way we think about the lives and circumstances of millions of people living on the periphery of large cities in underdeveloped parts of the world. With its mangrove-like proliferations and sinuous shapes and rules, the quartier of Texaco is the urban embodiment of black memory. That memory, dislocated and improvised, does not include Africa. The story begins with chaos in the belly of a slave ship, continues with the slave cabins scattered around the Grand-Case, the first incarnation of City – or l’En-ville – to which Texaco later appends itself, and goes on to trace the faltering attempt, after Abolition, to create a separate society in the hills. It culminates in the mass gravitation back to the edge of l’En-ville, an orderly ‘Western’ centre which, Chamoiseau says, is only given meaning by its turbulent margins. And these, in turn, need l’En-ville ‘like having a breadfruit tree by the hutch’.’