Customer Reviews

Paris Trance

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I read this book not expecting much. It seemed to be an example of someone trying to recreate the books of the lost generation in post-modern dress. I thought it would fail to be something new. I was astounded at how wrong I was. This book has some major faults but they are sandwhiched between large segments of the novel that are amazingly brilliant. This is, perhaps, the best look at the feelings of early love Ive ever read. The book is a deep look at beauty and happiness, asnd the degree to which moments of happiness survive the passage of time. Dyer brilliantly uses a second person narrator who admitedly tells the reader mental thoughts of the characters that he could not know. He has decided that since the main character will not tell his story, he must do it for him and he must fill in the holes. He does so in brilliant fashion. He captures what it is like to be twentysomething and in love, he captures what it is like to be in love in Paris, and he manages to capture the spirit of lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos WITHOUT it feeling like a retelling of modernism. The book is definitively post-modern both in style and message, but still manages to update the tropes founded by The Sun Also Rises. A must read for any fan of post-modernism OR the lost generation. Dyer may well be Britain's most promising young writer. This is a life-affirming novel.

Just as a drunk's jokes fall flat before those who are sober, so drug induced experiences are surreal to those whose awareness has not been chemically altered. Such is often the case in Paris Trance, the seventh novel by English author/journalist Geoff Dyer. One wishes to empathize with the characters, but finds it difficult to relate.

This puzzling rather incohesive tale of misspent youth set in the City of Light covers several years in the lives of four twenty-something expatriates who trade arch remarks, go to many movies (Cassavetes films being a special favorite), are often strung out on Ecstasy, and have non-stop sex.

Luke arrives in Paris from England with the announced intention of writing a book, but he never sets pen to paper. He is lonely, yet neglects to learn French, and wanders aimlessly until he finds work at the Garnier Warehouse overseen by Lazare, who seeks contentment in "whipping himself into a froth of anger and irritation."

It is at the warehouse that Luke meets Alex, a fellow Britisher and film buff with whom he becomes fast friends as "there was an immediate ease and sympathy between them."

"They flourished in each other's company, their intimacy increased as they met more people. Things Alex said in groups were always addressed implicitly to Luke; other people were used as a way of reflecting back something Luke intended primarily for Alex."

Shortly thereafter Luke meets and becomes involved with Nicole, a Belgrade, who came to Paris on a scholarship and now works as a translator. Alex partners with Sahra, an interpreter from Libya. The foursome become inseparable, sharing meals, holidays, and dancing the nights away with drug fueled energy.

In a year or so the two couples go their separate ways - Sahra and Alex stop taking E and "Saying no to E - or anything else for that matter - was like saying no to Luke,"
whose "happiness had begun to have a desperate edge to it."

As abruptly as he had arrived on the scene Luke leaves Paris. He goes first to America, later Mexico, then finally returns to London.

Some eight years later when Alex is in London for a relative's funeral, he again finds Luke. He is living in a dismal flat where, as Alex writes, "As soon as I stepped inside I could feel the loneliness, could smell the life he led..."

Mr. Dyer is a capable, gifted writer. He has a keen ear and exhibits a deft knack for innovative, colorful phrasing. Nonetheless, with Paris Trance he has painted a bleak landscape littered with wasted lives.

- Gail Cooke

Paris Trance is both a novel and an elegy about romance, destiny, intimacy, and the rise and fall of an intense, short-lived friendship between two couples living an expatriate existence in 1990's Paris. The main character, Luke Barnes, arrives in Paris animated by a half-formed desire to write a novel, or perhaps make a film and live in a world of possibilities where one can move towards the center of one's own life; rapture, intimacy, consuming and discarding each moment. Luke forms a strong, brotherly bond with Alex, another Brit expat for whom Luke becomes one part of a vicariously lived whole. The two men hook up with girlfriends, and far too much time is spent on the humdrum details of each relationship/romance, which seems to slow the novel down considerably. But this problem is more than made up for by the strong focus on the bonds of friendship and intimacy between the two couples, deepend by the shared experience of tripping on ecstasy while being blasted by loud, house music until six o'clock in the morning; "They were still full of chemically engendered expectation but that anticipation was gradually coming to refer to the past, to something that had already taken place. They were wide wake, distracted, glowing." But Luke's quest to reach the peak of happiness, to "move to the center of one's own life" is seen by Sahra, Alex' girlfriend and Luke's friend, as a destructive flaw; "He doesn't really have emotions. Just appetites. At the moment he's as happy as a sandboy because there's so much still to gobble down. But what's he going to be like when he's tried it all ? " The emotional void/greed of Luke is further explored by his desire to hang on to, for a moment longer, a "tantalizing echo" of an experience lived just seconds ago; "And at that moment you glimpse the Eternal Recurrence as a potential fact, as a mechanism, rather than a metaphor. That is the solution contained in the riddle of deja vu. All memories are premonitions, all premonitions are memories". The novel also explores what one might call an expat view of existentialism, of seeing one's destiny not from the perspective of the positive will to achieve, but from that of failing so absolutely that one embraces it as one's true self, true destiny, the triumph of negative possibilities; "By letting things occur as they did he believed he was penetrating more deeply into himself, getting closer to the core. "All of the things he associated with happiness came to be lodged absolutely in his past. "his falling short was a kind of triumph; he was being faithful to some part of himself, to his destiny". One can't help but be reminded of the main character in Albert Camus' The Stranger, and of the "Black winds" of one's negative destiny. Luke never writes his novel, never makes his film, breaks up with Nicole, a woman he loves deeply, and separates himself from everything that makes him happy in an effort to confront his true self, his blighted destiny; "there are all sorts of propensities in people-but there are other kinds of negative potential: the potential for wasting the talents we are given, for blighting our prospects of happiness". Geoff Dyer is as close as Gen-X will get to reading their own version of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paris Trance is an excellent, if extreme, example. This novel is not spectacularly well written, but it does (or should) strike a powerful chord with nearly anyone in late twenties or early thirties who have ever lived to eat up whatever happiness they could grab, and wondered if there was anything worthwhile beyond rapture.

A beautifully written book...! Its minimalist postmodern style exudes poetry. This is a book about the flame of youth and the ashes it turns into when one can't let go of it. Though this book can instantly pull the reader into the freshness and bohemian charm of youth, fibers of melancholy and despair run through it. Paris Trance is a tale of youth, friendship and love which captures well the existential struggle of generation X.

Geoff Dyer's other books are mostly unclassifiable meditations on jazz (But Beautiful), the fascination of war (The Missing of the Somme) and the fear of failure (Out of Sheer Rage). His infrequent novels are pretty good, though. Paris Trance is about falling in love - I actually typed "failling" by mistake, but it was serendipity, because it's also about failing in love. Luke, the hero, is admired by the narrator Alex in much the same way that Fitzgerald's Gatsby is admired by Nick Carraway. (Hmmm, my name is Alex and my brother's name is Nick. Odd that.) What Luke is after, or thinks he's after, is a dream of perfection, and it's only when he achieves it that he lets it go. Drift is the order of Luke's universe. There's a terribly sad episode about half way through when Alex pays Luke a visit in the present (most of the book is a vast, quasi-nostalgic flashback) and speculates to himself about the loneliness of Luke's life; lines from that part have followed me around for months.

Some of the dialogue is uncomfortably Hip; there's some rather too-easy pop-culture riffing, inspired according to Dyer by his admiration for Don DeLillo's way with dialogue. But the book has the same sort of deeper ambiguities as "Gatsby"; Alex writes the book as part of a struggle with himself between his creeping discomfort with his own ordinariness and Luke's tragic appetite for living such grand abstractions as Destiny and Bliss. The sheen of the prose, when describing events like the characters walking through a French field high on acid, has the poignant lustre of remembered happiness. (Dyer's first novel was called The Colour of Memory and is, I think, quite a bit better than this one.)

I don't know if Dyer is a natural novelist and he isn't too sure himself. But Paris Trance is a beautiful book, if it isn't this writer at his best. And it has some wonderful bits: a spoof re-enactment of "Brief Encounter", brilliant accounts of what it's like to go to a pub in a foreign city and a couple of great sex scenes. His non-fiction is maybe more intellectually electric but his fiction is a quieter pleasure.

Five stars, not because I think the book is a flat-out masterpiece but because he's a fantastic writer and I wanted to bring the average up.

While the romp through Paris that is the center of the novel is, indeed, compelling, the central character Luke is difficult to identify with in that he totally lacks compassion. His viewing of his lover, Nicole, is obsessive and borderline clinical. Luke is in Paris ostensibly to write a book about the kind of life he ends up finding: a meandering existence filled with good conversation, ambitious and exploratory sex, and a fair smattering of alcohol and drug abuse. In other words, a riotously good, if not ambitious, time.

Luke develops a relationship with a coworker, Alex, who at times narrates the story and who, nearly always, idealizes and idolizes Luke for the qualities that he later finds to be his friends downfall. When Alex is not our narrator, the POV shifts to third person omniscient which actually suits the story better. It is far easier to watch the story unfold without the over the top narrative tone of Alex's recapping and rationalizing Luke's behavior. And frankly, there is no need for those sweeping moments of exposition because Dyer has done his job creating a lush world of characters with powerful inner lives as well as intriguing experiences. His fault, here, is in not allowing the characters to breathe and move freely but instead he ties them up a little too neatly.

The book is good, though. It was easy to read and made me want to read faster and more deeply to grasp the points I know the author is making even in the smallest details. And there is an image of a woman in a park holding a sign that breaks my heart utterly and completely...an image that, in its total and complete simplicity, sums up entirely what it means to be alone. And that is worth 4 stars.

I thought this book was terrific. I'm not a big fan of romantic novels, but this one got me going for a week or so. It has a plot that for some may not make too much sense, the writing itself is very straight forward and quite real...you can almost feel those characters to be a part of you.

What I loved most about this book is the language the author uses, his examples....how he describes the scenes of love, sex...it's very raw, ugly in a way, but real and beautiful at the same time.

If you want to read a story about how people in Europe feel about sex, love, relationships, the importance of work...happiness you can read this book, because it will give you a very close point of view...

Definitely recommended, very different from what so called "New York Bestsellers" are trying to sell you...enjoy it and I hope you do as much as I did. I spent every free moment I had to read this book.

Luke moves to Paris and, with his new love and another expatriate couple from whom they become inseparable, wanders the Eleventh Arrondissement, where clubs, cafes, banter, and drugs occupy the "City of Lights". In Paris Trance, novelist Geoff Dyer writes of Luke's dream of happiness (and its aftermath) with a definitive and authentic intensity. This is a work of eroticism, romance, youth, humor, and originality that can be highly recommended to anyone who has a taste for the expatriate novels of the pre-war 1920s and 30s, and post-war 1950s and 60s eras.

The narrator offers a soporific remembrance, a dream of drugged out days of liesure, and captures the adult desires of intimate relationships and their aches and arcs. Dyer's appropriation of the literary stallions (Hemingway, in this case) is a device that is interesting though uncertainly motivated. The gesture seems to want to inject residual life into the work. By the end, one waits for a climax that is barely audible.

Writers are surely as good as their best work, and "Out of Sheer Rage" is Dyer's very best, but "Paris Trance" will intrigue people who want to follow the fascinating ups and downs of this ambitious writer's work. This is not just a throw away novel about drugs and sex for disaffected Americans in Paris. This is Dyer "jazzing" in fiction, taking the themes and variations of other writers and improvising on them himself to see what he comes up with, just as he "jazzed" on Thomas Bernhard's comic style in "Out of Sheer Rage." Hemingway is easy to recognize here as a literary source for Dyer, but I think it helps to recognize too that this is a modern riff on "Women In Love" by D.H Lawrence. Luke is the novel's Gerald Crich,disconnected from his own heart,attracted to violence as expression,a hungry, starving man. Alex is something like Rupert, able to have "friendship" in love with a woman, and forced to abandon Luke to a spiritual death.

Dyer also uses some of Milan Kundera's theory of fiction as it appears in "Unbearable Lightness of Being" -- this explains the "climax" of the novel being told in the middle, fates revealed in the midst of the story. If you've read "Out of Sheer Rage" you know Dyer is definitely up on his Kundera readings, his novel's shape parallels "Unbearable Lightness" and the seeming lack of dramatic climax may be more palatable for you here.

I'd agree with reviewers who say this is not a successful novel,at times achingly bad. There's not enough genuine character and feeling, the dialogue never rises above a tiring banter level, and the novel is not helped any by seemingly passive editing -- but Dyer is truly a writer at work, exploring theories of fiction in practice as well as telling stories. Not many young modern novelists are working with such clear ideologies. I found Dyer's book "But beautiful", on jazz, quite illuminating too in terms of Dyer's writing styles and techniques. Everything he writes seems to pay homage to other writers, as jazz musicians absorb and reinvent known themes.This is not copying, but experiencing, from the inside out, to ignite the self.

Too bad "Paris Trance" isn't compelling enough on its own terms to stand with Dyer's better works, but he is fearless, and always thinking, even if his characters and story here fail. I saw the novel through to the end because this writer's process from book to book interests me: if you're not into that, this book may bore you. The good news is, this writer at his best, is truly terrific. There'll be other books.