'No, no ascension, no ether, no big to-do.'

Piano
by Jean Echenoz

After completing Echenoz' short novel Ravel I said I would leave it a bit before reading anything else by him, following the advice of Kevin From Canada who suffers from impatience as much as I do. What has followed in musical terms is more of a tacit than a true break but I had a plan to link the reading of his previous novel Piano, which seemed to be about a concert pianist suffering from anxiety, and Philip Roth's latest The Humbling which has an actor suffering stage-fright as its central character. Finding new authors and delving into their back catalogue can also be a risky business in terms of finding the same satisfaction as that initial experience, and knowing that Ravel was quite different from his previous work meant that I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Piano.

My plan didn't really work out for starters, the recent postal strike has kept me separated from Roth for the moment and having read Piano I'm not sure the two books will share much at all. The concert pianist Maz Delemarc may be suffering from a kind of performance anxiety but that isn't really what the novel is about. When we first meet him however his life is dominated by that fright, alcoholism and the spectre of a never consummated relationship. His companion is Bernie, a man whose basic function is to try and keep Max away from the booze and push him on stage if necessary when the time comes to perform. In the same way that Echenoz announced at the end of the first chapter that Ravel has only 10 years left to live he lets us know as early as the second paragraph here that Max will suffer a violent death in just 22 days. But he is blissfully unaware of this as the days count down and we follow his weaving progress through the streets of Paris, one moment of excitement coming when he thinks he has spotted his lost love Rose on the subway after which a chase ensues.

After the event which has been flagged up from the beginning Max finds himself in a kind of hotel, which feels more like a hospital, but a surreal one which seems to count Dean Martin and Peggy Lee amongst its staff. In this version of limbo Max must wait whilst it is decided whether he will go to 'the urban zone' or 'the park'. I think we all know which one of those is more desirable and I bet you can guess which one Max ends up in although he has great optimism in 'the balance sheet of his life'.

For it seemed to him that he had always behaved rather well. Taking a survey of his existence, he came to the conclusion that he hadn't seriously lapsed in any domain whatsoever. naturally, he had suffered from doubt, alcoholism, and acedia; naturally, ha had occasionally succumbed to laziness, allowed himself a few minor tantrums, or indulged in bouts of pride, but what else could he have done?

One of the conditions for his life after the centre is a total rejection of his previous existence. No more music, no more piano. it isn't until he comes across a locked piano at the Centre that he realises how little he has thought of music, a feeling utterly changed by the appearance of the object itself.

Max had to be content with circling for a moment, not more than two or three times, around the closed piano. Without much conviction, he also tried to lift the instrument's lid, if only to examine its sounding board and wrest plank, caress the strings and run his fingernail over them like a harp, but in vain: locked shut like the rest. During these two or three turns around the piano, the little idea grew in the back of Max's mind.

Despite the very different style of Ravel both books share a similar authorial charm in the way that the writer breaks in every now and then to speed things along to their essence, or sometimes the opposite, to take a moment to digress. These interruptions are often funny and charming, adding to the quirkier feel of this book. There is a distinct oddness certainly once Max reaches the Centre, but looking back I realised that the whole book is infused with that slightly off-kilter feeling. This makes for an enjoyable read, although I'll admit to being more satisfied by the far more accomplished Ravel. I hope that his recently published Running, based on the real life of Czech athlete Emil Zátopek, follows more in that vein.

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'I haven't said anything of what I wanted to say.'

Ravel
by Jean Echenoz

When he reviewed this book as part of his overview of the Impac Award shortlist earlier this year Kevin From Canada mentioned that it was a book that demanded to be read more than once and also how further readings had thrown up entirely new ways of approaching the work. Its small size and a hiatus in my new book acquisitions gave me an opportunity to read it again, something I'm not in the habit of doing, and Kevin is absolutely right - Ravel's nine short chapters over a little more than a hundred pages are more than satisfying on a first read and capable of providing new nuances and even further themes on a second and beyond. I'll focus on a couple of aspects here; the first suggested by Kevin himself - the act of creation by the artist and I'll also look at how the distinctive style of Echenoz' writing is used to create empathy and character without really attempting to enlist or describe either.

Echenoz employs a purely descriptive prose style, obsessing over details, often making lists, focusing our attention on the surface of things. After the first couple of chapters we may feel that we know more about the wardrobe, bathing habits and modes of transport employed by our central character than the man himself. But the cumulative effect of this style is to stealthily communicate everything you need for a fully realised portrait (of a 'real' character of course) so that by the final chapter those lists and details are far less detatched and clinical than they seemed at first. Those final chapters allow you to see and to feel the deteriorating health of Ravel's mind and body, something that has been flagged up as early as the first chapter where Echenoz announces that the man has 'ten years, on the nose, left to live'. Just taking one of the constants in Ravel's life, his ever present Gauloise cigarettes will allow me to demonstrate.

On his way towards an exhausting tour of America (whose route is 'as disconcerting as a fly's through the air') we see him on the deck of the ocean-liner France (which has already been described in luxurious detail)

The wind has come up suddenly, clamping his clothes against his skin, denying their existence and function, attacking the surface of his body head-on, so that the man feels naked and must try repeatedly to light a cigarette, since the matches haven't time to catch fire. He finally succeeds but then it's the Gauloise, which, as in the mountains (brief memory of the sanatorium), no longer tastes right: the wind is taking advantage of the smoke to slip alongside it into Ravel's lungs, now chilling his body from the inside, assailing him from all directions, taking his breath away, mussing his hair, sending cigarette ash into his eyes and onto his clothes -- he's over-matched, best beat a retreat.

Simple descriptive writing that manages to create a character whose mortality couldn't be more evident. Those cigarettes are a crutch for Ravel in some of his more stressed moments, including his encounter with the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein who has commissioned a piece from him. When Wittgenstein makes no attempt to hide his disappointment with the finished piece Ravel attempts to conceal his own by 'fiddling with a Gauloise, rolling it between his fingers quite a while before placing it between his lips, smoking it silently for as long as that takes. Wittgenstein then coldly slips the score into his left pocket before taking his leave'. Agonising. Nearer the end of the book those cigarettes again are used as one illustration of his decline and Echenoz once again uses a list, but this time it is charged with the emotional involvement of the reader.

Although he no longer recognizes many people, he notices everything. He can see that his movements miss their targets, that he grasps the knife by its blade, that he raises the lighted end of his cigarette to his lips only to correct himself immediately every time. No, he then murmurs to himself, not like that. He's well aware that one doesn't cut one's nails that way, or put on glasses like that, and although he gets them on anyway to try to read Le Populaire, the muscles of his eyes won't even let him follow the print anymore. He observes all that clearly, the subject of his collapse as well as its attentive spectator, buried alive in a body that no longer responds to his intelligence, watching a stranger live inside him.

That breakdown of mind has a huge bearing on creativity of course. Where does the music come from? That's far too big and general a question to even begin to answer here but for Ravel the process actually requires a long period of thought before beginning on a piece. 'Inspiration does not exist...composition takes place only at the keys' and the work featured in the book has often been commissioned keeping the idea of untrammelled creative expression a further step away. Bolero, which is one piece that is focused on, is one such commission, from the dancer Ida Rubinstein. It begins casually enough, 'Ravel lingers a moment at the piano, playing a phrase over and over on the keyboard with one finger. Don't you think this theme has something insistent about it? he asks Samazeuilh. Then off he goes to swim.' Pressure grows from the publisher to provide rehearsal dates for the as yet unfinished work, 'All right, they want to rehearse, they're really anxious to rehearse, well then fine, they'll rehearse. Rehearse: Middle French rehercier, to repeat. They'll get their fill and more, de la répétition.' As he thinks of automatons and machinery, a factory he likes to look at nearby, his own false teeth clacking like castanets, the piece comes together 'something based on the assembly line.' Anyone who has heard it will know that insistent theme that is repeated without change throughout the piece, the different instruments of the orchestra managing to make the same tune sound somehow different each time, the volume and intensity increasing as it builds to a climax which is almost like exhaustive collapse. A piece of music born first from a request, hustled into a structure by impatience and made by machinery; a piece Ravel thinks contains no music and will have no success becomes his masterpiece, something that troubles him from then on. Where does he go from there? His creativity seems to stall in the face of such popular acclaim and it is shortly after this that Ravel begins to lose contact with his own gift, his own music.

It is the most touching aspect of the book, this slow process of negation, which his long suffering companion Hélène notices first, Ravel 'revealing, from time to time a kind of absence before his own music.' That process of thought which would precede any of his writing becomes frozen and when pressed to describe the sensation he can only suggest that 'it's as if his ideas, whatever they are, always remain trapped in his brain.' It is some kind of magic trick to write a book which is so short but that reveals something new each time you read it and which employs a prose style devoid of authorial emotion that somehow manages to create emotion on the page and in the heart of the reader.Thank you to Kevin for pointing it out and as a mark of respect I shall follow his advice and not go diving straight into Echenoz' previous novel Piano until I have had the time to fully appreciate what I so enjoyed about Ravel. A little like listening to a piece of favourite music there is something about the silence which follows the final note which isn't like silence at all.

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