A provocative novel by the most influential living French writer, Recollections of the Golden Triangle is a tour de force: a literary thriller constructed of wildly diverse elements—fantasy and dream, erotic invention, and the stuff of popular fiction and movies taken to its farthest limits.
Intellectual decadence at its best--a labyrinth of guilty pleasures A book that reads, alternately, like a detective novel, an erotic snuff fantasy, a bizarre sexual mythology or a dream embodying aspects of all three, *Recollections of the Golden Triangle* is a sensual literary feast in virtually every sense. Lucid and yet lavishly written ((at least in this excellent translation)), with echoes of Sade by way of Lautremont, *Recollections* lingers lovingly over the most deliciously perverse images, mixing the sacred and the profane with a dark eroticism of the sort that has always throbbed through the seminal vesicles of B-movies, an art form often much closer to the real well-springs of life than the prettied-up picture presented by high culture.
It's maddeningly difficult to summarize this novel--which is partly what makes it so fascinating. It's a lot like viewing a complex and evocative painting--or, better yet, an enigmatic film: non-linear, evasive, shifting viewpoints, time-frames, even the identities of its principle characters, as if the story were being told on several levels at once, which, of course, it is. But to provide you with the barest skeletal outline: young women are disappearing and being found murdered in various locations throughout the ruins of a city by the sea sometime in what seems the future. A detective seeks to solve these crimes--which may or may not be the work of a secret society practicing human sacrifice--at the same time that he seems to be confessing to the crimes in question, or explaining them, or dreaming them.
Among much that is remarkable about this novel is that it holds together, delicate as the fabric of a dream, even though it seems to be created out of nothing at all, nothing, that is, that is stated with any assurance by the narrator or experienced by any of the various characters. What is most stunning about this text, however, is its hyper-visual nature--the arresting tableaux of pseudo-religious eroticism that seems a kind of psychic compression of the sexual elements in myths and fairytales as retold in contemporary detective novels, horror films, and newspaper accounts of the sex crimes of serial killers. It's as if the cumulative force of all these stories we tell to channel our sexual violence into acceptable social forms of behavior have been driven into a wall, leaving the contemporary man amongst the lurid fragments of a stained glass window he can no longer put together in any meaningful way. That stained glass window, by the way, representative of his own consciousness.
*Recollections* is the attempt to construct a new myth--and at the same time illustrative of the utter impossibility of doing so ever again. Still the readers most lasting impression of *Recollections* is of wandering through the underground maze oft-referred to as an element in the text itself, a kind of secret museum of perversity where around any bend one is apt to stumble upon a shocking--albeit mesmerizing and titillating--exhibit of guilty pleasure. It is this labyrinth that ultimately holds the text together...and one soon suspects, our consciousness as well.
Btw...for a short course in everything wrong with American publishing--not to mention the utter absence of real literary, intellectual, and critical culture in this country--check out the Publishers Weekly review of *Recollections* on this page. The only value I've ever derived from Publishers Weekly is to immediately seek out any book that offends and or outrages their delicate sensibilities. Their review here being a case in point.
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