There's a Fine, Fine Line

Hallucinating Foucault was not one that I expected to love. A plot synopsis sounds less than inspiring (young academic writing about the fictional works of an author who is in an insane asylum becomes obsessed and goes to meet said author and has an affair with him), and it honestly took awhile for me to get into this one. However, once I got to the parts in France, I tore through it even though every few seconds I had to pause to process. This is such a forceful, unsparing, brutal, beautiful novel. Loved it. Cried like crazy on an airplane because of it (and may have freaked out my seatmate).

There is so much to unpack in this novel. It touches on such a variety of issues/themes, and weaves them altogether seamlessly and ruthlessly. There was more than one moment that I had to stop because of the force of what had just happened. It's also an intensely tender novel, and so tragically sad.

The two key themes in my opinion were the relationship(s) between writers and readers, and madness/sanity (questioning that dichotomy). Quite a bit could be said about both themes, particularly the first one since it really is the heart of the novel and the issues with which it is interested. That said, you can't separate that theme from the second theme. The narrator is fascinating, since he isn't the most attention-grabbing narrator, and in some ways is a bit of a cipher, but at the same time his journey is the center/focus of the story.

Makes me want to go brush up on my Foucault, since I am a bit rusty (my memories relate to power-knowledge and something with a prison where we police ourselves; rusty, I know).

So many good quotes:

"You ask what I fear most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of my reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that one day, unexpectedly, suddenly, I will lose you... You do not ask me who I have loved most. You know already and that is why you have never asked. I have always loved you."

"Maybe when you care, terribly, painfully, about the shape of the world, and you desire nothing but absolute, radical change, you protect yourself with abstraction, distance. Maybe the remoteness of my texts is the measure of my personal involvement? Maybe that chill you describe is a necessary illusion?"

"This is my first and last letter to you. But I will never abandon you. I will go on being your reader. I will go on remembering you. . . You said that the love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated, can never be proven to exist. That's not true. I came back to find you. And when I had found you I never gave you up. Nor will I do so now .You asked me what I feared most. I never feared losing you. Because I will never let you go. You will always have all my attention, all my love. Je te donne ma parole. I give you my word."