Book Review: Look by Romain Villet

The image shows the front cover of Look by French author and musician Romain Villet which was published by Gallimard in February 2014. It has been reviewed in French on the vues interieures blog.

When Romain Villet discussed his work at Blind Creations, he made the point that it is difficult to talk in English about a book written in French. This made sense to me because since reading Look (in French) last year, I have been struggling to write about it in English here. This is because Look is not only written in the French language; it is also about the French language. French is not merely the medium through which the narrator - Lucien - expresses himself, it is also the subject of much of what he says. Lucien is a blind musician and avid reader who eschews visual description. Instead he recounts his life in Paris, his love affair with the elusive Sophie and their trek in the Atlas mountains through a mixture of clever word play, erudite literary references, poetic fragments and obscure allusions to musical scores. Whilst I found the novel by turns funny, moving and beautiful, I also found it frustratingly dense: there are so many intellectual references in it that I'm sure that I, like Sophie, don't properly understand everything the narrator is saying.

But as I listened to Villet discussing his work during the conference, I realised that this is the novel's point. A little like Herve Guibert's Des Aveugles [translated as Blindsight], Look uses deliberately difficult references to oblige the reader to question her relationship with the world. Just as Lucien often feels excluded from the sighted world in which he is forced to operate, so we feel excluded from his world of musical and literary references. And so we are forced to discover a wonderfully non-visual way of being in the world which is as rich, absorbing and stimulating as anything I've ever read.

As well as being a meditation on how blindness might create a different kind of writing, Look is also about how blind people read differently. (And as such it reminds me of my own way of reading in detail.) I particularly like the way the narrator describes how the digital revolution has changed his reading habits. Before text-to-speech software made some books accessible to blind people via the internet, Lucien would read Braille books borrowed from specialist libraries. Apart from never being able to own the books he loves, Lucien resents the fact that he can never annotate this reading matter with comments, underlinings or marginalia. He can neither personalise nor re-read but must commit every sentence to memory as if he would never encounter it again:

C’était, au fil des pages, la nécessité de se forger dans l’instant des souvenirs impérissables, c’était vivre chaque ligne avec l’intensité d’un adieu.

It turns out that Villet feels much the same. In a fascinating radio documentary (also in French), 'Victor et Moi' (available here), he demonstrates how his portable reader has changed his relationship with books. It feels particularly fitting that in the documentary he visits several places which provide accessible books, including the Association Valentin Hauy, where Blind Spot started.

Look is an important book - which deserves to be more widely known - because as well as these meditations on writing and reading blind, it offers a realistic, humorous and intimate portrait of life as a blind person. Lucien is wonderfully at ease with his blindness; he shares my belief that blindness is neither a drama nor a tragedy; it is just a (slightly inconvenient) way of being in the world. One example of his dry humour is his point that because blind people take longer to do certain things (like peel carrots), they should be given a third extra time in life as they are for their exams:

S’il y avait une justice, pour leur rendre le temps que leur volent leurs yeux, les aveugles auraient droit dans l’existence, comme pour passer les examens, à un tiers-temps supplémentaire.

But until Look is translated into English - an almost impossible task but one which I'd love to have a go at - its celebratory view of blindness will remain the preserve of the Francophone reader. Such readers will appreciate Lucien's thoughts on the intranslatability of blindness, a sentiment which the book's very existence ironically undermines:

Car la cécité est moins un enseignement dont j’aurais à tirer des conclusions, qu’une expérience indicible, intime, singulière, intraduisible dirais-je au risque d’enfoncer le clou, sinon en décrivant dans le détail ses manifestations. Il faudra, un jour, dépasser la noblesse du gâchis, il faudra raconter par-delà les brouillons invisibles, s’en donner la peine, s’en faire un devoir.

Outdoor Shakespeare or the Unexpected Drawbacks of Technology

One of the lovely things about living in Oxford in the summer is the quirky British traditional of outdoor Shakespeare. Every year, several theatre companies put on productions of Shakespeare's plays in various unusual settings across the city. Yesterday my husband and I were lucky enough to enjoy Creation theatre's thrilling production of Macbeth in the hugely atmospheric grounds of Lady Margaret Hall.

I was first introduced to the phenomenon of outdoor Shakespeare around 20 years ago when I was a student in Cambridge. I remember loving the inventive way in which the plays were staged to make best use of their unique settings, and enjoying the immediacy and intimacy of the productions. But I also remember being frustrated by the acoustic challenges often posed by outdoor spaces. Sudden gusts of wind or bursts of heavy traffic noise would easily drown out a couplet or two, thus making Shakespeare's already complicated language even harder to understand.

Things have clearly moved on since my student days. Once we were seated at our cabaret-style table, I was pleased to hear the reassuringly loud music being efficiently broadcast by a powerful sound system. And as the play began, it became apparent that auditory issues are a thing of the past: I could hear all the actors perfectly - indeed perhaps even more clearly than in the traditional theatre  - thanks to their powerful radio mics.

Unfortunately, this technological improvement brought with it an unexpected problem for me. When several people are on stage at once, I rely on the direction their voices are coming from to identify who is speaking. But because everyone's lines were being relayed to the audience via the sound system, I had no way of using the actors' voices to situate them on stage. And because Shakespeare - unlike Racine - does not routinely use auditory clues or verbal prompts in his verse, I often found it hard to tell not only who was talking but also who they were talking to.

 Worse still, the play's inventive staging, which created a gripping and engaging narrative, also meant that the actors made use not only of the space directly in front of the audience, but also places to the sides or even behind us. Without being able to use their voices to follow their movements, I completely lost track of the whereabouts of the actors on several occasions. I had to surreptitiously look in the vague direction that my husband's head was pointing in order to pretend to be watching the play, whilst in fact most of the time I was really only listening to it.

A similar thing happened when I was on holiday last year. During a visit to Pompeii, our guide provided us with WhisperSystem headsets through which she was able to describe the exhibits to us without disturbing other tour groups. At first I was enchanted with this kind of personal audio description which worked brilliantly when the guide was close enough to describe what I was actually in front of. But when I wandered away from her in a large open area, her insistent cries of 'I'm over here!' were of absolutely no use to me because I couldn't see her waving arms and had no way of using the direction of her voice to pinpoint her.

I certainly hope to be going to more outdoor Shakespeare again soon. But this particular technological advance means that it will never again be the experience it was when I was a student. Next time I'll go with the knowledge that I won't be able to use my sense of hearing to follow the play. I might catch some of its action in my blurry vision but mostly I'll sit back and enjoy Shakespeare's language, treating the whole performance as a lavish and enthralling open-air radio play.