Reviews for The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern French Eccentric

The average rating for The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern French Eccentric based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-15 00:00:00 Stanley Mar Very mixed feelings about this book. Schulman's interpretations of examples ranging from Verne and Huysman to Echenoz, Tati, and Queaneau were convincing and often enlightening, particular his argument that whereas earlier eccentrics (ie, 19th century) were marked by their willful, resistant lack of control, modern eccentrics'like Toussaint's character Monsieur, or Tati's M. Hulot'are marked by their insistence on taking control of time and space rather than being overrun by them. On the other hand, the argument is made so ahistorically that it the longer it went on the more its interpretative bubble felt artificial. There's no engagement of culture, politics, economics, etc. beyond the pages or frames of his examples, not even to consider the relationships between these characters and archetypal figures like the flaneur, or between these stories and the derivée, or the politics of 1968, and so on. This was particularly frustrating in terms of gender, a factor Schulman acknowledges ignoring completely but excuses because he's adhering to 19th century definitions of the eccentric and asking how they've persisted or adapted a century later, and those 19th century definitions were only ever about men. Which may be true, but repeating that earlier omission only exacerbates the problem rather than avoiding it. So I was left distracted by wondering if these types of eccentricity are even available to female characters, as the character of the flaneur wasn't available a century earlier, which led me to wonder about any number of other omissions acknowledged and otherwise. Which is not to say any book is responsible for covering everything a reader might ask for, but in this case the admitted avoidance of significant complications undercut the whole project a bit, at least for me.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-08-11 00:00:00 Lorraine Mathews Very good as an introduction to such a complex subject. Cover most topics.