François Emmanuel invites the reader to journey to an uncanny place where our private longings and fears spill over into daily life; where lovers have each other investigated from a distance, or are brought together suddenly through shared dreams and fantasies. Like the artist who tries to paint fog and ends up by disappearing inside it...

François Emmanuel, Invitation to a Voyage, Trans. by Justin Vicari, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012.


In this collection of thematically related stories, celebrated Belgian author François Emmanuel shows his indebtedness to the great poetic iconoclasts of the French language—not least Charles Baudelaire, after whose famous poem this book was named. Here, Emmanuel invites the reader to journey to an uncanny place where our private longings and fears spill over into daily life; where lovers have each other investigated from a distance, or are brought together suddenly through shared dreams and fantasies. Like the artist who tries to paint fog and ends up by disappearing inside it, all of Emmanuel’s characters allow themselves to be consumed by their gentle manias, always hoping to attain some measure of victory over their own isolation.

In Francois Emmanuel’s new collection Invitation to a Voyage, the prose is elegant and refined, the subject matter heady yet accessible, and the execution nearly flawless.

By their nature, reviews of collections often prove difficult if only because the strain of narrative is fragmented by the shifting of stories and the trajectory is less a linear journey than a series of points that, when taken together, serve to become something greater than their individual selves. Good collections are rare, as they have slowly become either proving grounds for young authors or tired compiling of the random works of older ones, and as the collection, in the American market, continues to be seen as a less viable option for publisher and writer alike, traditional collections are being replaced by novels in serial vignette form.

Still, from time to time a book arrives that eschews the common notion of the collection and its viability as a continuing art form. Francois Emmanuel’s Invitation to a Voyage (L’invitation au voyage) is one of these. While short, Emmanuel’s collection is dense, yet reads as though the reader is caught in the hazy limbo between sleep and consciousness, a place where neither the world of dreams nor the world of reality dominates but where the two melt together to strengthen the best qualities of the other.

The Belgian Emmanuel is a writer in love with language, and it is clear that the choice of poet Justin Vicari as translator was a wise one. The lyricism of Romance languages rarely crosses into Germanic ones, and this proves especially true for those like Baudelaire and Apollinaire, whom Emmanuel’s prose will at times recall—the book’s title is a not-so-subtle homage to Baudelaire’s poem of the same name—but Invitation retains a freshness and crispness and cadence in English that leaves one wondering how truly marvelous the original French must be.

Invitation to a Voyage is a very continental book, and those who have, for the past two years, been following Dalkey Archive Press’s Best European series would be well served to acquaint themselves with Emmanuel. Invitationis a book in which the destination is superfluous, where the intention is not to arrive a specific endpoint but to become sidetracked during the journey, to loop back over terrain already traversed if only to discover how distant hills might differ in appearance in dawn and dusk. Emmanuel’s work falls somewhere between the circumlocutive elegance of W.G. Sebald and a Jamesean stream of consciousness that produces six stories that exist almost entirely between the lines of what is written, as though Emmanuel is giving his readership the outline of a form while slyly winking as he simultaneous offers them the tools to paint alongside his watchful eye.

The notion of longing, of distance and of the unspoken is paramount in these stories, and it is as though Emmanuel, a psychiatrist by trade, is using his prose to further examine the human psyche, to trace out through his fictions questions that science, in its cut and dry fashion, is ill-equipped to answer; and what he seems to crave, more than anything else, is the answer to how much, how well and how deeply can we ever know ourselves and, especially how might we construct the image of another as all we are ever truly offered are the dots of a pointillist image, a Bonnard that from one angle is a ship yet from another is no more than a scattered series of colored dots forming and reforming over and over again our minds.

In Invitation to a Voyage we have impressionistic writing done exceedingly well, as Emmanuel manages both to ground his reader in a palpable reality even as he continually spirals away from it. No matter how esoteric he might become, Emmanuel never loses himself in solipsistic narrative, and though he might flirt with it at times, the beauty and power of his prose supersedes what in a lesser writer would be navel gazing. And it would not be too much to say that Invitation, in its way, is a narrative version of Monet’s series Le Cathedrale de Rouen, for though the subject might often appear the same, it is the subtle change brought about by the shifting angle of shadow and glow of light that enables the same façade to be rendered so eloquently and so differently over and over again without ever becoming stale or redundant.

Once again Dalkey Archive Press has managed to find a gem from abroad and undertake the effort to exhibit it here; Emmanuel’s prose is elegant and refined, his subject matter heady yet accessible, his execution nearly flawless, and his Invitation to a Voyage is one that should be accepted quickly and readily by those who enjoy literature that seeks not to explain but to question and examine the life that exists around and within them. - Adam Gallari

When you’re trying to read a book from every country in a year, you realise how conservative the big UK publishers are. Sure, they have one or two big-name non-British/American writers on their lists — the Achebes, Rushdies and Roys — but if you’re looking for books from beyond the post-colonial sphere, you’re going to have to turn to the small presses.
These come in all sorts of packages: some are based at universities, others span several offices around the world. Still others operate out of back rooms, garages and garden sheds, getting by purely on the dedication of the one or two people who run them, often while juggling full-time jobs.
The size of these presses means that they tend to be fleeter of foot than their lumbering commercial cousins and better able to develop distinctive lists. They might focus on literature from particular regions, on certain topics, or by specific sorts of writers. Or they might champion a particular ethos or style of writing.
Dalkey Archive Press is one of these. According to its website, places ‘a heavy emphasis upon fiction that belongs to the experimental tradition of Sterne, Joyce, Rabelais, Flann O’Brien, Beckett, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes’.
Given these criteria, it’s easy to understand what attracted the Dalkey Archive team to Belgian writer Francois Emmanuel. Filled with rich images and startling perspectives, his collection of short stories Invitation to a Voyage recalls the modernist tradition, diffracting the everyday through a prism of strangeness to show it to the reader afresh.
Subterfuge and hidden motives are the lifeblood of many of the pieces. We see the private detective hired to investigate a classical violinist with whom he gradually falls in and out of love and the informer (or is he a madman?) sent to infiltrate a literary organisation (or is it an asylum?) and report back to a shadowy ‘organization’.
Sometimes the deception may be self-delusion, through which a character must break in order to achieve peace (unsurprising, perhaps, coming from a writer who is also a psychotherapist). The most powerful example of this is in the final story, ‘On Horseback upon the Frozen Sea’, a chilling retelling of the Bluebeard tale in which the narrator recounts the strange disintegration of a female friend after she rents a country house with a mysterious locked room.
Emmanuel is adept at sketching complex situations using only a few details. The description of the woman’s landlord in the garden ‘cutting, snipping, clipping, scarifying’, for example, tells us all we need to know about the unnamed fears giving her sleepless nights.
On occasion, though, these details can become too diffuse, making the narrative hard to follow and generating an effect similar to the frustration that the private detective’s commissioner describes in ‘Love and Distance: A Fragmentary Report’: ‘one believes one is looking through a wider and wider lens, but one sees only the lens, the irisations, the dust motes on its surface’. This is not helped by the breathless punctuation, which leaves the early stories hopping with commas (the opening eight-page piece has only one full stop) and makes it hard to resume the thread if you have to look up from the book for anything. Perhaps this is deliberate, but it is a risky strategy because it threatens to derail the largely very enjoyable flow of the stories.
Interestingly, for all their linguistic experimentation, the universe of the works has a strangely old-fashioned feel. Emmanuel first published this collection in 2003, so it would be unfair to expect it to reflect the full force of the digital era. Nevertheless, the world he presents seems immune to the shifts in thought and interaction that the information superhighway had already instigated by then. Reading the collection, you could almost be back in the worlds of Joyce and Djuna Barnes.
No doubt I’ll read more Dalkey Archive books this year, so it will be interesting to see how some of their more recent titles compare. In the meantime though, old-fashioned or not, the world of Francois Emmanuel lingers in my mind. - Ann Morgan
https://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/2012/03/04/belgium-pressing-issues/