Customer Reviews

Hallucinating Foucault Pb

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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.

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.

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.

This is one of the most intriguing books I have ever read. It explores the underrated relationship between reader and writer by setting up a story in which a PhD student makes a journey to investigate fictional French novelist, Paul Michel, who is institutionalized for insanity. The relationship they have is a little strange, but it makes the book a little more thought-provoking.

This book does not owe its success to an action-packed plot but to the deep complexities and philosophies it explores. At times, the passion that the main character has for Michel is slightly disturbing, but it only strengthens and furthers theme. I thought this book was fascinating and profound without being difficult to read.

Patricia Duncker, Hallucinating Foucault (Ecco, 1996)

Duncker's first novel gives us the story of the narrator, who remains anonymous throughout, a graduate student doing a dissertation on Paul Michel, a novelist who wrote flawless, detached prose, but lived a life of extremity. Michael stopped writing, and disappeared, in 1984. Nine years later, the graduate student, embroiled in an exceptionally odd relationship with another graduate student doing a dissertation on Schiller, heads to France to find out what really happened to Paul Michel, and whether he's still alive.

The book's main flaw is its first section, before the narrator heads off to France, which is pedestrian. There's a great deal of setup, much of which seems quite extraneous. Once our narrator gets to Paris, however, things start moving along considerably. Which is rather odd, considering much of the second part of the story is simply the narrator reading letters.

Odd, but symptomatic of the book as a whole; it's almost as if Duncker wanted to get any real action, any motion, out of the way before she really dove into the meat of her subject, much of which is discourse on the nature of literature, love, obsession, the relationship between the reader and the writer, and ultimately what one has to do for one's life to be productive (whatever the rest of the world thinks of it). There are long stretches where one forgets one is reading a novel; this could well be social/literary theory (and were more social/literary theorists to write in such a readable manner, they'd sell more books). There is a moment towards the very end where the reader is jerked back into the function of reader, where the novelness of the novel takes over again, and that jerking is a wonderfully calculated move; it adds a great deal of surprise to an already-surprising revelation at book's end.

This was quite a well-done little book, and I'll definitely be reading the fiction she's published since this came out. *** ½

A beautifully refreshing and creative work of art. Duncker challenges the status quo using fictitious characters struggling with real issues and societal constraints on love, creativity, and uniqueness. Duncker points out that insanity is perceived as anything that strays outside of societal norms. She also manages to make it very clear that stepping outside of societal norms is necessary to portray a more complete view of what is . . . its the diverse thought, experiences and perceptions of the whole of society that gets us closer to the truth of our collective reality. I thoroughly enjoyed the way the reader/writer relationship is portrayed in the novel. I finished this book believing that any writer worth the ink in his typewriter should hold the relationship with his reader in the highest regard and adoration. In doing so, the reader makes the writer accountable for producing work that will strengthen and glorify the relationship; forcing the writer to write from the heart and soul . . . .the center of any successful relationship.

Duncker avoids every wornout cliché about the feminist novel, and still, here it is. A real pageturner with a nicely constructed plot where the intelligent reader forefeels the final clash of the fates of all the protagonists, and still, down to the last paragraphs, some enigmas want unravelling.

In a relatively short span, the author succeeds in painting a sparkling image of such wideranging subcultures as the Cambridge and Sorbonne Universities, the gay movement in France and its monumental spiritual leader Michel Foucault, the leisurely rich in the South of France and the closed institutions for the mentally disturbed. At the same time, the novel explores the boundaries of what in French Structuralist thought would be the doomed quest for the definition of individuality.

What does it mean to be a gay intellectual, outside of all institutions?
Michel Foucault in real life externalised this problem by analysing the power and the empowerment of the institutions.
In the novel, Foucault's counter-image is swallowed by the same. And the reader is lead on a breathtaking, passionate search for love and life, balancing on the tight rope between the two extremes.

I read the book in its Dutch translation, and still it retains a bold freshness of language and a clarity of expression which is hardly ever found in the French feminist literature of Cixous or Wittig. I avidly browsed the catalogue of Amazon Books, only to be disappointed that this is a debut!

Stefaan Van Ryssen

Gent, Belgium.

Patricia Duncker's HALLUCINATING FOUCAULT explores the relationship between scholar and subject matter, reader and writer, mentor and protégé - and the madness that connects them all. The narrator is a male graduate student at Cambridge studying the novels of (fictitious) French "wild boy" Paul Michel and his enigmatic literary relationship to the philosopher Foucault. When the narrator's girlfriend pushes him to locate the institutionalized Paul Michel, he begins to unravel the mystery of his subject with a growing and inescapable obsession.

The psychological twists of this novel are astoundingly powerful. Duncker writes with a delicate authority that never loses it momentum. Her characterizations are deft, and, in the case of Paul Michel, delightfully cryptic. She melds the substance of philosophy and scholarship with a moving love story that transcends both gender and sanity. To her credit, Duncker never overburdens her story with her themes but instead allows the story itself to carry their weight.

I highly recommend this novel for readers of literary fiction. You don't need to know anything about Foucault or scholarship to appreciate Duncker's exploration of madness, love, and the written word.

This is a magnificent little book that may put one in mind of Byatt's *Possession.* Tightly plotted, HF is a marvelous piece of evidence for the proposition that (a) it's still possible to create unforgettable characters and to use them to drive a plot; and (b) that there's still room for literary fiction that isn't postmodernistically compromised, jargon-filled, reader-unfriendly, or simply precious/pretentious. There's a great story here that's chock full of Duncker's own reflections on art, history, sexuality, love. OK, it's easy enough to "reflect" on such topics; everyone has opinions. The difference is that Duncker is a fine writer and that what she has to say is intelligent and intriguing. That's enough to put her into the category of those few writers who might just manage to save English fiction from a slow, wasting death.

A beautifully refreshing and creative work of art. Duncker challenges the status quo using fictitious characters struggling with real issues and societal constraints on love, creativity, and uniqueness. Duncker points out that insanity is perceived as anything that strays outside of societal norms. She also manages to make it very clear that stepping outside of societal norms is necessary to portray a more complete view of what is . . . its the diverse thought, experiences and perceptions of the whole of society that gets us closer to the truth of our collective reality. I thoroughly enjoyed the way the reader/writer relationship is portrayed in the novel. I finished this book believing that any writer worth the ink in his typewriter should hold the relationship with his reader in the highest regard and adoration. In doing so, the reader makes the writer accountable for producing work that will strengthen and glorify the relationship; forcing the writer to write from the heart and soul . . . .the center of any successful relationship.