Ingrid Caven: A Novel

by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, translated by Michael Pye

City Lights, 254 pp., $12.95 (paper)

Ingrid Caven‘s is a world where cameramen hold stature as priests, and make-up artists are called “Minister”; where Andy Warhol, “the old, powered vampire,” and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “the most famous and troublesome moviemaker in Europe,” trade antique Bohemian dolls against 1920s earthenware Mickey Mouses, “plus a very, very big cookie jar.” It’s a world where Italian cops give spontaneous and impassioned roadside impersonations of Elvis, where the importance of JFK’s assassination is as it relates to the history of the pillbox hat (Jackie Kennedy was wearing one then), and where, at practically all times, “The situation is desperate, but not serious.”

And it’s a world psychologically damaged, and perpetually haunted, by the horrors of the 20th century, especially the Holocaust. It’s a world where personal identity (and indeed, survival) demands constant self-invention, a world where image and essence have become almost interchangeable.

Ingrid Caven is based loosely – very loosely – on the Seventies German film actress and cabaret singer of the same name, a woman who was once married to Fassbinder, and who was also the lover and muse of the legendary fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. The first novel by Jean-Jacques Schuhl – a self-described Parisian dandy who now lives with Caven – in almost 25 years, Ingrid Caven went on to win, in 2000, France’s top literary prize, the Goncourt.

Schuhl has described his reason for writing again after such a long break as an act of spontaneity – a trait which, for better and for worse, is reflected everywhere in his writing. The result is a postmodern, essentially stream-of-consciousness narrative (with heavy debts to various French literary theorists, especially Jean Baudrillard), which incorporates overheard conversations, newspaper headlines, interviews, sociological reflections, passages from screenplays, black humor, and nursery rhymes in an endless blur of thought and sensation.

Part gossip column, part psychoanalysis session, part heat-of-the-moment journal entry, Schuhl’s hypnotically rambling novel is characterized by an almost obsessive attraction to the odd detail, the misplaced thought or image that somehow manages to contain the whole, or the tone of the whole. Apparently incapable of holding a thought for more than a few sentences, Schuhl indulges his restlessly flickering narrative eyes and creates a text that is heady and sensual, at times fussy and pretentious, intensely self-absorbed, and very, very French.

This article appears in July 9 • 2004.

A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands.

SUPPORT US