The narrator then recalls the catastrophe that takes place in The Apocryphe, which leads to him/her taking up the temporary post of the resident DJ in that club.Īnd so began what seemed to me a new life, but what seemed to all those who knew me the beginning of a resigned and aimless wandering. One such nightclub, The Apocryphe, becomes a regular haunt. They start meeting regularly and ironically these discussions take place in clubs and cabarets. Not surprisingly, the narrator starts drifting.Ī priest tries to be a sounding board to the narrator and help provide some direction.
It doesn’t help that debates and the classes in general lack intellectual rigour. It is revealed to us that the narrator is an intelligent student looking to major in theology but somewhere along the line is gripped by an infinite sense of boredom. It begins with the unnamed narrator reminiscing about the time when he or she met the dancer A*** in a cabaret in Paris. Throughout the novel, the gender of both the narrator and A*** is never revealed.Ī glimpse into the plot then. Basically, this is not just a love story but a genderless love story. Sphinx, in very simple terms, is a love story between the narrator (who is never named) and A***, who is a dancer from America. So where is the Oulipian constraint in Sphinx?
He wrote his book ‘La Disparition’ (which I have not read) by not using words containing the letter E in the entire text.Īnne Garreta chooses to do something similar making this the first novel by a female member of the Oulipo. The most illustrative example is the author Georges Perec. This is what the writers from the ‘Oulipian’ movement chose to do. But how about writing a novel by deliberately imposing a constraint and then writing within its confines? Not that simple. Indeed, it is all very well to write any kind of novel. It is not just the story but the way that it is told that makes the novel stand out. The blurb has billed Sphinx as a love story that delves into the nightclubs and cabarets of afterhours Paris.
0 kommentar(er)
