Customer Reviews

The PIGEON EXPORT RACK

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Imagine you are an old man so afraid of life that you have spent most of your years alone, living in a small room and working in an insignificant job as a security guard on the front steps of a bank, your only pleasure somehow derived from the monotony of your daily routine. Then one day a living creature, a pigeon, appears unexpectedly on your doorstep, and it shouldn't be there--it is out of place. And this frightens you like nothing has in many years. You flee your apartment (for good, you think). Because of your agitated state you break your own routines; you begin acting strangely, and your perceptions alter. This sets off a chain reaction of encounters in which you, despite your lifelong precautions to the contrary, begin interacting with a world that seems determined to drive you over the edge.

Suskind's "The Pigeon" is subtly meticulous in depicting its protagonist's complex psychological journey. The story is at once free of sentimentality, raw, honest, and yet life-affirming in the most vital sense. While it is reminiscent of Kafka and--most notably--of Knut Hamson's "Hunger," Suskind's novella also manages to glimpse something just around the corner, something almost out of sight, beyond the valley of despair.

I had to get a copy of The Pigeon used after reading Perfume. I read it in one sitting. It's such a gem. I don't know how many pages go by where the main character is just standing in front of this bank thinking, not doing anything. It's riveting. He eats a meal towards the end of the book and I've never read such tasty descriptions of food. And rain, and peeing in the tub, and ripping your pants in public.
I'm going to have to do some searching to get my Patrick Suskind fix. This is one of the most satisfying books I've ever read. It left me on a high for a couple weeks. It's since worked it's way somewhere deep in me, I won't forget it.

The central achievement of Süskind's novella is the way it articulates the social anxiety of a man whose childhood fear of abandonment has played out as a lifetime of limited scope, controlling routines and self-imposed isolation. That might sound heavy but it isn't - mainly because Süskind wisely chooses the "free indirect" narrative style (mastered by Henry James). The story is told in the third person, but is nevertheless filtered through Jonathan Noel's gaze and consciousness so that external reality exists only as refracted in his mind. The result is that we see the world as he sees it, but without the unreliability that such a point of view entails. Süskind is thereby able to show us precisely what he wants us to see - both the horror and humour of Noel's experience - and to deliver a climax which remains somewhat objective and thereby inspires hope. Other reviewers seem to have found the ending cloying and unrealistic, but I think they're assuming more than Süskind suggests. Noel and his life are not utterly transformed at the end - he has an epiphany, he loses his fear, but it may or may not last.

Reminded me of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven", but this grim tale had a more optimistic resolution. Suskind is no Poe, but he does describe nicely how self imposed isolation can warp one's outlook and reactions to life. Not a pleasant story, but instructive, original, and well written.

Mes excuses à la gente anglaise, je ne puis m'empêcher de faire la critique du Pigeon dans ma langue maternelle. Comme je vais tenter de l'exposer dans la prochaine ligne, j'affirme avec une conviction féroce, ma foi rehaussée d'un amour inouï pour la littérature suskindienne, que ce livre est un chef-d'oeuvre pur et simple. Cette tâche que je m'applique à accomplir est des plus ardues. Il me faut en fait faire preuve d'une objectivité sans faille, et je crois bien devoir m'excuser derechef car je ne suis pas certain d'être à la hauteur.

Je me propose d'expliquer non pas l'histoire du Pigeon, ni sa mise en scène, mais plutôt comment le génie de Patrick Suskind se manifeste à travers cette oeuvre qui peut sembler banale à première vue. En fait, lorsqu'on ne s'y attarde pas trop profondément, l'histoire de Jonathan Noel et de sa rencontre avec un pigeon devant la porte de sa petite chambrette peut nous sembler particulièrement ennuyante et vide. Mais si l'on prend la peine d'analyser la perfection des détails, et le fait que chaque action, chaque description ou chaque événement découle directement de l'ÉVÉNEMENT principal qui bouleverse totalement la vie du peronnage, c'est là qu'on commence à prendre conscience du génie sensationnel de l'auteur. Il y a également cette fascinante facilité avec laquelle Suskind parvient à nous aspirer dans son décor comme un trou noir aspire la lumière. En un instant, nous devenons Jonathan Noel, nous compatissons avec lui. L'auteur parvient admirablement bien à fournir l'archétype parfait du monsieur ordinaire. Nom ordinaire. Chambre ordinaire. Vie ordinaire et taciturne. Métier de vigile dans une banque, quoi de plus ordinaire et taciturne. Aucune vie sentimentale, donc pas moyen de sortir de l'ordinarie sur un plan plus affectif ou artistique. Dès les premières pages qui suivent la venue du pigeon, nous sentons le besoin fulgurant de compatir avec Noel, et nous sentons sa crainte. Quoi qu'on en dise, nous devenons l'espace d'un instant ce petit bonhomme anodin et désabusé de sa routine. Voilà un autre aspect du génie de Suskind! Il nous fait littéralement devenir son personnage, et prend bien son temps pour le décrire de long en large, décrire sa platitude. Il pousse l'archétype à l'extrême.

Et donc, comme je le disais, à première vue c'est un récit fastidieux. Ne vous laissez pas tenter par ce piège que Suskind vous tend, car en vérité l'auteur à un certain moment vous pose la question suivante : "êtes-vous un vrai lecteur?" Si à cet instant précis vous fermez le livre avec une exclamation de dégoût, c'est que vous venez de répondre négativement à son interrogation. Par contre, si vous poursuivez un tant soit peu votre lecture, c'est un oui catégorique que vous venez de lancer, et bien fait pour vous, car vous pénétrez dans l'insondable bonheur que vous réserve l'histoire de la dégénérescence d'un homme tout petit, tout simple, tout frêle, et presque aussi fragile que la vie en elle-même.

Le caractère symbolique des oeuvres de Suskind est phénoménal. Qu'y a-t-il de plus anodin qu'un pigeon? Qu'y a-t-il de plus anodin qu'un monsieur anodin? À présent, mélangez le pigeon anodin et le personnage anodin, dans ce qu'on pourrait appeler une espèce d'expérience de chimie événementielle. Paradoxe pur. L'anodin s'embourbe, se perd dans un vortex infini créé par le bris de la routine. Tout à coup, le pigeon n'est plus anodin du tout : il est déclencheur de bouleversements inconcevables. Tout à coup, le personnage n'est plus anodin du tout : il est victime du pigeon. Il peut vous sembler étrange qu'un oiseau puisse développer un pouvoir aussi énorme sur un être humain. Pourtant, lorsque cet être est suffisamment hypnotisé par une routine terre-à-terre et sans fin, et qu'en somme il n'a pas de vie - si l'on considère la vie comme étant constituée d'événements - l'homme ne devient qu'un ver, que le pigeon peut dominer.

Si fragile, la vie d'un ver... Mais à bien y penser, dans la société actuelle, chaque pion ayant sa place sur l'échiquier du capitalisme, chaque numéro ayant son train-train imperturbable, ne sommes-nous pas tous des vers? Je vous souhaite, à tous, de trouver votre pigeon. Car bien qu'il puisse bouleverser votre vie, il ne peut que la rendre meilleure.

The Pigeon of Patrick Süskind, is a Pocket book that I had to read in college. This book will "plunge" the reader in the banal life of this security guard which wake up one day to make a completely banal meeting with a pigeon. This banal meeting will change its life.
Patrick Süskind will make you feel the fear and the confusion of the main character. The life of this character is very banal, but the author make us feel this banal life and even appreciate it which is absolutely incredible. When, for example, the main character eats for supper, a simple bread with some sardines, the reader appreciate the simplicity of this security guard's life. The reader appreciate the simplicity simply because Patrick Süskind managed to make it interesting with a banal life and banal adventures. It took banal things to make an interesting book out of it. I will not say more and wish you a good reading.

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The book caught me by surprise especially the finishing. I waited so long for an end of a suspense, only to find out there is actually not too much suspense after all. Very ordinary life of a very ordinary man, bit by bit--swimming through his daily stream of mundane concerns, his habits, and for some reasons, the whole story seems to me to be a black and white film. Give it a go. Words are well written.

As other reviewers have pointed out it is less than a fully developed novel but a bit more than a short story. For one thing there is only a single character--Jonathan Noel. There is hardly any dialogue, and almost no interaction between Jonathan and any other human. Even the pigeon of the title makes only a cameo appearance. This is a tale of Jonathan's mind, spirit, emotions, and imagination. Jonathan, a committed recluse, goes through a kind of nervous breakdown one morning due to the presence of a pigeon sitting in the hall outside his meager room. Although we are drawn into Jonathan's world and his psychological distress is real for the reader, I find it odd and unbelievable that his nervous breakdown occurs and runs its course in the span of little more than twenty-four hours.

My sense is that The Pigeon is a novel about more than just a lonely man's mind. It is about the Holocaust and the damage that it did and is doing as it's effects ripple down the decades. The story begins, in a flashback, where Jonathan suddenly loses first his mother then his father to the Gestapo, and is then shipped off with his sister to strange relatives. His desolate life is a result of the psychological damage from these childhood events. Seeing the story as metaphor for the damage to Germany and Europe in general engendered by the Holocaust is not too far-fetched. Another deep and disturbing (and lengthy, truly a novel) about the personal damage done to Holocaust survivors is The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates. Damage to minds and hearts ripples from the center of such cataclysmic events and continues to ripple. This is the underlying text of The Pigeon.

I read the original German edition. I only checked the translation by John E. Woods sporadically, but it appears to be excellent. Süskind writes simple, clear, direct German. For those who enjoy reading German, or want to tune-up their German, I recommend reading Die Taube.

Located in contemporary Paris, "The Pigeon" is the story of an incident. A dull Frenchman discovers one day the unexpected presence of a pigeon in front of the small roomm he inhabits. This minuscule and seemingly irrelevant event adopts terrifying proportions in the mind of the man, becoming a grotesque nightmare.

As a master of allusion and obsession, Suskind reveals once more, in this parable of everyday life, his gift for building a metaphor of the existential background of humans. It shows that our life usually holds to rutines so fragile, that a simple disturbance may force us to rethink everything from the start. It is a short book, but an intriguing and absurd tale. The absurd, seems to say Suskind, is present in the most simple things that happen every day.

If this tour de force were a short story, part of a collection, I'd have liked it better. It's too light-weight to take seriously as a separate publication. Jonathan Noel, the main character, is a timid and tidy man who has lived in the same 11 x 7 room for thirty years. One morning he opens the door to his room and finds a pigeon sitting there. This leads to total disruption in his predictable life, his personal unraveling, and his decision to live elsewhere for a few days. If you can identify with this, you are a better person than I!