Hallucinating Foucault [Paperback]

Patricia Duncker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 27, 1998

No work of fiction has explored the undercurrents of love between a writer and a reader as seductively as "Hallucinating Foucault", a breathtaking literary debut. "One of the best novels of the year".--A.S.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An intricate and self-reflective novel about that most delicate of relationships--meaning the one between writers and readers. The narrator, an anonymous graduate student, sets off on the trail of a French novelist named Paul Michel, who is currently confined to an asylum. Engineering his hero's release, the narrator finds himself enmeshed in bizarre love triangle, of which the three vertices are himself, the novelist, and the late Michel Foucault. Sex, it seems, can be made safe, but the oddball intimacy of reading cannot. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Reading is a solitary act, yet the relationship between reader and writer is eerily intimate, a faraway mind locked in a text reaching out to touch another across a silent chasm. But what happens when an isolated reader is so moved by the writing before him that he feels he must seek out his author and consummate their distant love affair? In her first novel, literary scholar Duncker has crafted a moving, mysterious answer to that question. Her unnamed protagonist is a 22-year-old English university student preparing his thesis on the work of Paul Michel, a brilliant novelist now confined to a French insane asylum. "University libraries are like madhouses, full of people pursuing wraiths, hunches, obsessions," he explains. "The person with whom you spend most of your time is the person you're writing about." Immersing himself in Michel's serene, indifferent prose and searching for clues about the rebellious, uncontrollable man behind the text, the student uncovers Michel's admiration for the transgressive French philosopher Michel Foucault. Urged on by his single-minded girlfriend, the student travels to France, where the tragically insane author and his unseen reader meet for the first time and become inextricably involved in entirely unexpected ways. Blurring the line between the historically real (Foucault) and the invented (Michel), Duncker's writing is oblique and thoughtful, a blend of playful narrative twists and meditations on the act of reading, the nature of fiction and homosexuality and the relationship between love and madness. (Jan.) FYI: Duncker teaches writing, literature and feminist theory at the University of Wales. She was born in the West Indies, educated at Bedales, Oxford and Cambridge, and now divides her time between Wales and France.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 27, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375701850
• ISBN-13: 978-0375701856
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,514,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Writer and Read- Classic(?) Love Story, November 3, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hallucinating Foucault (Paperback)

Many novels can hold a reader but very few, the great rare ones, can keep the reader enthralled, fascinated, and eager for every succeeding page. This is one of those rare, beautiful works that restores faith in the power of the novel, the subtle, beguiling beauty of fiction, and confidence that amid the trash being published, there are wonderful, creative new writers. While Michel Foucault, the great French writer and philosopher, is in the title of this book, it is more about the person reading it than about anyone else. Duncker explains the relationship between the writer and the reader so clearly that she also expresses it through her own creative relationship with the person who is reading her work. Hallucinating Foucault shows how a novel can be written simply and clearly while being deeply felt, philosophical, and astounding all at the same time. A wonderful, gorgeous, meaningful book that lingers in the memory long after the final page is turned and the last pieces of the puzzle- and the puzzle here is much more intriguing than those in most of other novels that rely on puzzles- are fit perfectly in place. The title may be somewhat intimidating but from the very first page, Duncker wraps the Reader in prose that makes her book almost impossible to put down.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Academic Novel for Romantic Post-Structuralists, August 27, 2000

By 

Noreen O'Connor (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hallucinating Foucault (Hardcover)

I sat down to read _Hallucinating Foucault_ one sleepy evening and became to engrossed I could not stop reading until I finished a couple energizing hours later. Duncker makes my brain work. She brilliantly brings forth the human side of late twentieth century post-structural philosophy and post-modern literature, binding the reader into a love triangle that's both solid and ethereal. What does the reader bring to the text? What sort of relationship does the reader have with the writer? What happens if the reader really does go to seek the author--who isn't dead after all--and blends his intellectual dream with "reality"? As a doctoral student, my favorite thing about this book is that the plot has the best possible happy ending--the protag. finishes his diss. and gets a job!! This is better than Byatt's _Possession_ and up there with Winterson's _The Passion_ for me.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing, absorbing, March 31, 1999

By 

Jon Miller-Carrasco - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hallucinating Foucault (Hardcover)

All fiction is allegory: it's just a matter of how much each author is willing to go either into what Hawthorne or O'Connor called "romance," or into any other number of less baldly allegorical avenues with their writings. That was brought home to me in a new way with Halluncinating Foucalt. At first I assumed I was reading, basic, contempory, post-modernist fiction. But within the first 50 pages or so I began to realize that Patricia Duncker's characters and plot were deliberately singular. The anonymous narrator; his hysterically funny, intense paramour (equally anonymous, known only because of her study of Schiller, as "The Germanist"); the insane author Paul Michel, whose life long obsession with Foucault is ostensibly the novel's key: are all very subtly drawn symbols of certain types of people, i.e., readers and writers of fiction or philosophy. As the narrative progresses with inevitability and predictability, the charactors become symbols of those genres of writing themselves. Once I realized this, called myself a hopelessly bourgeois pig-man and looked at it again, many things that had begun to annoy me about the book fell into place -- specifically, the narrator's one-dimensionality and some rather heavy-handed plot moves. (The Germanist's history and ultimate role in the plot to liberate the instutionalized Michel, even still, was a strain on the suspension of disbelief.)

Still, once I could look at the novel as deliberately sidestepping many typical narrative mechanisms, I enjoyed it a great deal. Ms. Duncker has written a mystifying book, no matter how you approach it. Its questions about devotion and loyalty and passion and sanity will, as another reader put it, stayed with me long after I put it down and went on to other, more conventional fiction.