130519 read in french: i have read this before in translation years (decades...) past, 3rd r-g i think. since then have read some litcrit, more r-g, arguments that this shows his early development past 'un regicide'. also that this is avant-garde treatment of detective crime subgenre: the failed detective, where investigation seems plausible, believable, redemptive etc... but everything ends wrong, crime not solved, criminals never caught, faith in reason derailed etc. in lit, examples include auster's [book:The New York Trilogy|431], durrenmatt's [book:The Pledge|73480]. famous film is 'chinatown'. so, fun literary games. but then i have never been as interested in solutions, detection, resolution etc, as in 'mystery', rather portraits of why the crime and psychology described how...
i enjoy again working on my french. more fun than reading dictionaries... r-g is not yet stylistically 'peak', for me, but part of obsessive mapping of this city, 'the circular boulevard', the intersecting streets, canals, careful reconstruction of crime/detective search, when now, when then, has dual function of r-g avant-garde poetics and detective-fiction presentation of just the facts, madame. perhaps this draws unwary readers into games of detection, but of course who did it is never as important as how the investigation is told. not my fun. but as far as reading it in french, this was good for vocabulary, grammar... but as i was always busy working on words, i may have lost the plot....
i read one assertion that r-g goes further than disrupting faith of the reader in detective, detecting, reason, time, place, as usual 'failed detective', but also subtly/subversively, undermines even the closest reader (lit critics) of the value of embedded 'symbols', of 'signs' in general, pointing to anything, myth, science, art theory etc, outside the work to explain it. eg. why is this called 'les gommes' (the erasers)?... careful with your reading... not my favourite r-g in either french or english but probably essental to read if you read him...
about buried symbols of Oedipal reference,.. i think it is sroltzfus’s criticism that suggests this is actually an example of r-g deliberately misleading close textual readers (critics) by offering an incoherent but plausible ‘mythic resonance’ against r-g’s insistence that there is nothing- absolutely nothing- outside the text giving it ‘meaning’... thus frustrating the literary detective in all those lit-critics... but then who is an author to say what is or is not meaningful in his work: it is there, he wrote it, he has now no more privileged critical insight than anyone else...
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