Chandani LokugéMy Van Gogh

Abstract

Blue. When Kvist encounters a tramp named Hermann Gobb-Rillen, who had authored a novel entitled The Erasers, it becomes clear that Alain Robbe-Grillet is one of those ghosts, too, and that he has in a sense furnished a map for Kvist’s wanderings. In short, if Martiny is patently concerned with incendiary politics and natural cataclysm , he is also interested in how the human mind comes to terms with those phenomena , whose dimensions beggar the imagination , and it is that feature of his novel which seems especially opportune right now. Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Chandani Lokugé My Van Gogh Melbourne. Arden. 2019. 161 pages. CHANDANI LOKUGÉ’s new novel, My Van Gogh, winds its way from Australia to France with the lilt of an ancient pilgrim song. The novel, which traces the journey of a young Australian man, Shannon, to France in search of his lost mother’s roots, is rich in sensual detail and recounted with highly evocative, poetic storytelling. An erstwhile art student, Shannon is on a quest to walk in the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh, who mirrors Shannon’s desperate need to come to terms with his own struggle with chronic depression and, in so doing, to arrive at a capacity for healing the lifelong wound of rejection and abandonment caused by his mother’s sudden and unexplained departure. The novel reads like a somewhat melancholy revisioning of the medieval pilgrim’s morality tales, where several characters interact and share their stories and histories over the course of a pilgrimage; these interactions create a relational foundation on which new lives, and new directions, can be built and explored. This conceit, applied to a more contemporary context, allows Lokugé to explore what is fast emerging as one of the most significant issues of the postmillenial generations, that of mental health, as growing numbers of youth find themselves fundamentally alienated and unable to form thriving relationships among peers or family. The novel is also a testament to the capacity of the creative genius to shape chaos into healing form. Shannon finds direction and succor through his sketches and poems, while his companion, Lilou, finds ways to balance the darkness of her traumatic past, which she paints into watercolors of wounded seagulls against the soaring music of Ralph Vaughan William’s “The Lark Ascending.” With her unflinchingly human portrayal of loss and recuperation , Lokugé’s characters show us the capacity of the human psyche to explore trauma through art and to renew itself, like the pilgrimage heals through walking, in the process of containing the sublime within the beautiful. Aparna Halpé Toronto, Canada Matéi Visniec Mr. K Released Trans. Jozefina Komporaly. London. Seagull Books. 2020. 273 pages. THE PREMISE OF MR. K RELEASED, written in prerevolutionary, self-imposed exile and published twenty years postfactum , is simple: condemned to prison for an unspecified crime, Kosef J is unable to understand why he is being released or what to do with his liberty. As the protagonist’s name points to that of Kafka’s central character in The Trial, Visniec owns this heritage and evidently writes in a tradition of “freedom” (or “prison”) literature, just as Kafka himself called Dostoevsky “a blood relative.” Essentially, the book is a reinterpretation or “negative” of Kafka’s novella. This information is elaborated upon in the author’s original preface, not included in this English text, though the autobiographical dimension of the author not being able to adapt to Western freedom gives the book a more interesting dimension. Such parentage sets the tone for a philosophical novel, driven by the protagonist’s sense of cognitive dissonance, and succeeds in doing so honorably. Visniec capitalizes on Kafka’s dramatic flair. Though Mr. K Released is one of his several novels, the RomanianFrench writer is also a poet and most prolifically a playwright, and this shows. Farcical dialogue and cinematic jumps recall the dreamlike irony of a Fellini film, where, indeed, a single male protagonist always finds himself psychologically trapped. The corporeality and fast pace account for its reading like stage direction, and the prose is deliberately expository in the manner of a script. Characters are simple but candid, building strata of...