Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Reticence **** David Orr, Beautiful & Pointless ***1/2

Here's proof that I'm a cliché of an over-educated elitist: A month ago, on our way to see a jazz quartet at the opera house, I bought two short books while browsing at a bookstore: an experimental novel from the Belgian literature series (Reticence) and a guide to modern poetry (Beautiful & Pointless). The show was excellent, and I enjoyed both books, which I read over the Memorial Day weekend.

The unnamed narrator of Reticence travels to a small Mediterranean village with his toddler son. It's off-season, so not many people are there. For reasons he can't explain, he doesn't feel like visiting his friend Biaggi who lives in the village. Instead, he wanders the town, visits the beach and the port, and wonders why he hasn't met Biaggi since the village is so small. He concludes that Biaggi must be avoiding him and spying on him. Then he sees a dead cat floating in the harbor and he's sure Biaggi is behind it...

Reticence is all atmosphere: the overcast weather, the secluded town, the lighthouse on the island sweeping its beam across the harbor. The narrator describes recurring events in a way that seems mysterious, and almost as if time is running backwards. It is full of lovely imagery. The dead cat reminded me of Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos, which also has a narrator interpreting random events as pointing to a larger meaning, and also features a dead cat. The story in Reticence wraps up without coming to much of a conclusion, leading me to a review that uses the title of the next book: beautiful and pointless.

My favorite thing in Beautiful & Pointless is Orr's characterization of reading poetry as being like traveling to a foreign country:

It's not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium. ... Consider the way you'd be thinking about Belgium if you were planning a trip there. You might try to learn a few useful phrases, or read a little Belgian history, or thumb through a guidebook in search of museums, restaurants, flea markets, or promising-sounding bars. The important thing is that you'd know you were going to be confused, or at least occasionally at a loss, and you'd accept that confusion as part of the experience.

Orr has a pleasant and clever writing style. Most of the points he makes apply equally to other specialized art forms (like jazz or experimental novels) as they do to poetry, but that doesn't make them less true. He gives a surprising amount of attention to the business of being a poet, of creating art that very few people outside of your mostly academic circle pay any attention to. It's an enjoyable little book, but frankly didn't make me feel like reading more poetry.

On the other hand, I probably will read other books by Jean-Philippe Toussaint.