Hi, this is Jenny. I am sending you my intimate photos as I promised. From: rit Subject: I promised.
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The amazing thing about Vernon Subutex is that it precisely predicts the past. It predicts that it will be made into a television series and it was!
It is almost as if its producer did not read through to the end of volume 3. The end is the end for Despentes’s trilogy–as it is the end for any novel: to be turned into a tv series.
…some bits I like–interspersed with the intimate photos as I promised:
Gradually, he came to the realisation that the world is full of people with fantastical beliefs who, on first meeting, may seem completely sane. The enigma that is Vernon gives them free licence to express their bizarre nature. This is how, between the salad and the cheese course, someone can end up telling him about their privileged connection with the vibrations of macrocrystalline quartz. The country is full of fanatics convinced that the dead walk among us, that invisible creatures gambol through the forests and that by exposing oneself to the right sound waves you can restore your magnetic field … Give them an opportunity to expound their theories, and you can find yourself going down some very strange paths. [Like, for the fact of everyone having this opportunity, this one–that leads to the future.]
— Virginie Despentes, Vernon Subutex 3, Trans. Frank Wynne, (London, UK: Maclehose Press, 2020), 15-16.
[Charles: …] and the old bastard would reveal a surprising knowledge of politics, an unexpectedly analytical mind, and a tenderness, wounded but very much alive, for what the future might hold for humanity.
[Véro:] She was whiny and manipulative like a lot of alcoholics late in their career. But she had the same ability to briefly lift the curtain, offering a glimpse of that same intelligence, marked by flashes that illuminated vast swathes of reality before the curtain fell again, as though hurting what was luminous within her was a matter for survival.
— Ibid., 59.
[when it boils down to it we are] all on the side of right. All we really care about is legitimising violence. It must be in a noble cause. Because we’re happy to have blood on our hands as long as we have a clear conscience. That’s the only difference between the sociopath and the militant–the sociopath doesn’t give a shit about being on the side of the just. He kills without the foreplay, without wasting time turning his victim into a monster. Militants, on the other hand, do it by the book: first the propaganda, and only afterwards the massacre.
— Ibid., 124.
It is a very particular group of individuals who have nothing in common and yet instinctively manage to speak as one. … it’s not impossible that one day he will say to his daughter: we created new possibilities. New openings. They are viable. We created a place where you can live differently. [and Peter Pàl Pelbart would say: yes, that’s because you created a plane of consistency. As he said about Minus Theatre.]
— Ibid., 129.
Terror has slipped inside their bodies like a puppeteer’s hand.
— Ibid., 194.
He often thinks of an article he read about dogs. “Learnt Helplessness”. You lock dogs in a cage and you slam them against the floor. Pretty soon, the dogs stop trying to get out to ward off the shock. Or to bite. They just lie on the ground and take it.
— Ibid., 205.
He had that delicate politeness of people who know that evil truly exists.
— Ibid., 293.
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