Hallucinating Foucault - Patricia Duncker > Reviews > Why I wish Paul Michel existed

Author's product rating:   

Would you listen to it again?	Absolutely
Story	Good
Characters	Outstanding
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?	Not applicable

Advantages:	Fascinating, characters seem real
Disadvantages:	Paul Michel isn't real

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I've heard that after finishing Hallucinating Foucault many people have been convinced Paul Michel is a real writer, and have actually searched for his books. I can see why.

Hallucinating Foucault investigates the relationship between a writer and their readers. Many argue a reader should not be concerned with the personal life of an author, but Patricia Duncker explores the mutual necessity of the relationship. The narrator is a young student at Cambridge, writing a thesis on the French author Paul Michel. He is convinced by his girlfriend that to read his work he must travel to France to find Paul Michel, committed to an asylum years before, "because…if you love someone, you know where they are, what's happened to them. And you put yourself at risk to save them if you can". The book then becomes a passionate love story, exploring some of the central themes of Foucault's work - transgression, sexual ambiguity and madness.

Paul Michel is an "enfant terrible" of the French literary world, a social outcast, rebel and homosexual, consigned to an asylum by schizophrenia. What I find interesting is that although this book explores the theme of sexuality in depth, to me it seems more about gender ambiguity than homosexuality. The student begins the book with a girlfriend, but seems to accept a relationship with Paul Michel very soon after meeting him. There is an instance of mistaken gender in the book, and Paul Michel himself announces that he chose to be homosexual, and that it would probably not have been a choice he would have made if it did not make him further of an outcast. In fact he positively does not want people to have a greater understanding of homosexuality, as it would force him more into the mainstream. His loneliness in the book stems from his inability to live in the same world as others, not through being without people. The characters, apart from Michel, are ambiguous in other ways too. The student is only known as the narrator or "petit" throughout the book, never by name. Other characters also have no name, simply titles such as "The Germanist".

The existence and necessity of love between an author and a reader is explored through not only the relationship of the student and Paul Michel, but also Michel and Foucault. For me this weaving of a real author and fictional one makes it impossible not to believe Michel to be real too. Some of the other characters do become simply caricatures; however this only makes Michel seem all the more tangible and alive.

This is a brilliantly written, very clever book. The passionate, self-destructive relationships of the story are powerfully executed, and Foucault's work is used perfectly. You don't need to have read Foucault to appreciate this book though. My only problem with this book is that I desperately want to read the books Paul Michel has written, he is now more real a person to me than Foucault is.