Running Away (Belgian Literature) by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Running Away (Belgian Literature) Reviews

• 
  MJ Nicholls

  My university Writers' Room has a shelf stuffed with Dalkey Archive books. This was among them.
  
  This novel is similar in tone to
  Monsieur, which I read last month, with its existentially gloomy protagonist ambling around having formal first-person adventures. This one is ostensibly about distance and being absent when our loved ones need us most, winding through a distracting subplot involving drugs and a bike ride before we get to the tender and sexy climax.
  
  The prose is lyrical and perfunctory, though when the narrator starts telling us about his partner Marie's thoughts and actions, when he is nowhere in her vicinity, the narrative position is a little crooked. These things matter, Jean-Philippe.
  
• 
  Damian Murphy

  Toussaint reminds me a little bit of Paul Pope. The latter's graphical style maps out nicely onto the former's prose style - somewhat messy, a little frantic, but incredibly vivid and filled with unexpected details. What Toussaint (or Pope) accomplishes couldn't be done with a more polished, measured prose style. His run-on sentences punctuated with endless commas produce the momentum of cinema at its best.
  
  My views, of course, are only relevant in regard to the translation, and in any case I've yet to read anything other than the first two books in his Cycle of Marie. I'm very curious to read his earlier work.
• 
  Gintarė Lialienė

  Turbūt prasčiausiai išleista iš visų mano gyvenime skaitytų knygų. Kadangi vienas iš mano knygos kokybės kriterijų yra leidykla, tai ši lietuviškai "Odilės" išleista knyga yra didžiulis nusivylimas. Pirmoji tetrologijos knyga "Mylėtis" nuvylė turiniu, o "Pabėgti" ne tik turiniu, bet ir leidinio kokybe. Kūrinys ir vėl nelabai apie ką, prigrūstas mažai ką reiškiančių detalių. Su pirmąja knyga sieja tik pagrindiniai veikėjai. Tiesa, šį kartą gal ir galima apčiuopti šiokių tokių pasakojimo tikslo užuominų, bet klaiki skyryba, neredaguoti sakiniai ir, kyla toks įtarimas, net ne itin kokybiškas vertimas visą kūrinį paverčia grynu šlamštu, dėl kurio leidyklai turėtų būti labai gėda.
• 
  Jonfaith

  Sierra Nevada Celebration was greeted in an informal homecoming party last night. This morning, my reality appeared bound in gauze. The Premier League apppeared removed and neutered: did MUFC really lose at Norwich?
  
  This altered condition is likely ideal to appreciate the mastery displayed in J-P Toussaint's novel. Running Away a prose poem for displacement. It is a lyric for jetlag in the tumultuous world of Shanghai and Beijing. It the crust of not bathing or truly sleeping for days and spanning half the globe. Pained and uncertain, Running Away is beautiful.
• 
  Adam Dalva

  Mysterious and propulsive and sometimes erotic - this book, the second of a series (though I didn't know that when I read it, and it didn't much matter), follows an unnamed narrator through China on a strange trip carried out on behalf of his wife, Marie. The plot, such as it is, is barely there, but the gorgeous moments of description and introspection are memorable. The night-train, the bowling alley, the abandoned hotel will stick with me for a long time. The sequence at the end of the book, I imagine, will have more significance if you've read the first volume ("Making Love"), but the China section works as a standalone novella for lovers of travel literature and people who don't mind loose ends.
• 
  Zygintas

  Pirmas sakinys: Ar kada nors bus baigta su Mari?
  
  Antroji tetralogijos ("Mylėtis", 2002; "Pabėgti", 2005; "Visa tiesa apie Mari", 2009; "Nuoga", 2013) dalis.
  
  Pamiršęs neigiamą pirmosios dalies
  įspūdį, pirmame romano trečdalyje mėgavausi minimalistiniu stiliumi. Skaityti antrąjį trečdalį jau pabodo, o paskutinis net erzino: "Didžiausias romano trūkumas – negyvas, blankus, jokios vidinės motyvacijos, ugnelės neturintis pasakotojas. Kad ir kas vyktų, jam šiame romane tiesiog nuobodu. Šiek tiek atgyja svarstydamas apie Džango ir Li Či intencijas: ar jų poelgiai nesuprantami dėl kultūrinių skirtumų, ar porelė yra piktavaliai, pasakotoją norintys įtraukti į nešvarią istoriją? Neįkvepia ir naratyvą jungianti, keliones ir įvykius motyvuoti turinti pasakotojo ir Mari meilės istorija, grindžiama nuolatiniais prasilenkimais, susitikimais vien tam, kad vėl išsiskirtų ir vėl susitiktų. Meilės linija schematiška, prisodrinta atpažįstamų melodramatiškų topų, sufleruojančių, kad jausmai stipriausi, kai įsimylėjėliai nėra kartu, nes kas gi labiau jaudina, jei ne ilgesys, neįgyvendinamas geismas: "Vėl užmerkiau akis ir viskas susipynė mano mintyse, gyvenimas ir mirtis, saulė ir tamsa, švelnumas ir ašaros, prie smilkinio tebegirdėjau Mari balsą ir savo rankose švelniai spaudžiau Li Či kūną, apglėbęs ją gedulu ir užuojauta, kuri nebuvo jai skirta" (p. 45)." (
  Virginija Cibarauskė)
  
  Leisiu sau paspekuliuoti, kad Jean-Philippe Toussaint istoriją apie Mari (Marie Madelaine Marguerite de Montalte) suskaidė į keturias dalis, nes visą sudėjus į vieną (o ji tilptų į normalių nedidelį romaną) būtų dnf (danafig/do not finish). O dabar kas kelis metus, trečdaliu mėgaudamasis, trečdalį keikdamas taip ir perskaitysiu visą
  M. M. M. M..
  
  "Pabėgti" vertinimas keliais žodžiais: profesionalaus grafomano stilingas pasakojimas be istorijos.
  
  P. S. Verta perskaityti visą Virginijos Cibarauskės apžvalgą
  "Trumpi prancūzų romanai apie vienatvę".
• 
  Lee

  I think this is one of those tedious psychological novels that Borges was warning about. Well, let's count some commas.

  Eyes closed and standing still, I was listening to Marie's voice coming from thousands of kilometers away, her voice which I could hear despite the countless lands that separated us, despite the steppes and immeasurable other plains, despite the expanse of the night and its gradation of colors spread across the surface of the earth, despite the mauve light of a Siberian dusk and the first orange streaks left by a sun setting on the cities of Eastern Europe, I was listening to Marie speaking faintly in the early evening sunlight of Paris, her frail voice reaching me, sounding more or less the same as ever, in the late night of the train, literally transporting me, as thoughts, dreams, and books can do, when, releasing the mind from the body, the body remains still and the mind travels, swelling and expanding, while gradually, behind our closed eyes, images are born, and other memories, feelings, and states of being surge into view, pains and buried emotions are reawakened, as well as fears and joys and a multitude of sensations - of coldness, of heat, of being loved, of confusion - while blood pounds in our temples, our heartbeats accelerate, and we feel ourselves shaken, as if a fissure had cracked the sea of tears frozen in each of us.

  Right, I count 28 commas in that sentence. I wonder if it's the most in a sentence of this book, or not.
  
  This is what I was thinking as I finished the book. Not exactly gripping, then.
• 
  Lukáš Palán

  Už jsem asi nějakej přeToussaintovanej. Utíkat dost lže už v názvu, protože teda moc neutíká. Čte se to tak pomalu, že jsem kvůli tomu málem přišel pozdě i do práce.
  
  Tedy, ono to není žádný Hledání ztracenýho času, ale po předchozích svižných tusántovkách jsem byl připraven na jednoduchou jízdu a místo ní se z ničeho nic dostavilo tak barvité popisování všeho okolo, že jsem jednu chvíli myslel, že se z toho sám změním v přídavný jméno.
  
  Kniha je vzhledem k autorovým obvyklým tématům, které jsou nic, nic, nic a zhola nic, trochu nezvyklá - obsahuje totiž děj! Zatímco v předchozích knihách se hrdina jezdí do Itálie a Anglie nudit, v této knize dojede až do Pečingu v Číně, kde jede vlakem a pak i na motorce! Pak se vrátí letadlem zpátky a jde na pohřeb, kam dojede na lodi. WTF!!! Toussaint do toho tedy pořádně praštil!! Škoda jen, že jeho přebarvitý, extrémně vláčný styl trochu pohřbívá sílu, kterou tato novela skrývá.
  
  
• 
  Sax

  I dug the Chinese atmospherics, but this novel was too ambiguous, inert and long-winded for me to truly enjoy. I wanted to chop the scene where Marie was running through the Louvre by two-thirds, and about halfway through the motorcycle chase, I was like, "OK, babes, when are we arriving at our destination?" The interminable sentences, comma after comma, were exhausting, not evocative.
  
  Still, like I said, it had some strong, sensuous moments rooted in place, so I wasn't completely repelled.
  
  Oh, the translation gave too much play to the word "minuscule." It was "minuscule this" and "minuscule that." Just sayin'.
• 
  Justin Evans

  A three part review of Toussaint's 'Marie' novels, excluding the first one, 'Making Love,' which is out of print and would have cost me over eighty dollars second hand--here's hoping the current copyright owners will let Dalkey bring it out and keep it in print.
  
  Running Away was a very pleasant surprise; a bit like a Javier Marias novel with most of the thinking taken out. It's all spectacular scenes in wonderfully interesting writing, and ever so slightly silly--the narrator is always out of his depth, and there's nothing he can do about that fact. The book is also perfectly structured; if nothing else, Toussaint's work here will do prospective writers as much or more good than a semester at an MFA. My only complaint--and this will echo through the other volumes--is that when Marie is present, the book becomes less interesting. It's hard to avoid in this one: we start with a near-love scene on a train, move onto the best chase scene I've ever read, and then... well, then Marie is just kind of there, being supposedly irresistable, but actually falling prey to the all-too-common 'Anna Karenina' syndrome, in which the supporting female character is far more interesting and alluring than the 'sexy,' 'mysterious' lead.
  
  The Truth About Marie has scenes as wonderful as RA's, but with the special bonus of actually including Marie and making her ever-so-slightly interesting, provided you can nget interested in a woman who is really sad because her horse has died. I'm sure it's very sad when your horse dies; but really, if you own a horse, and hang out with people who own racehorses, my sympathy levels start pretty low. But the Marias comparison holds here, too: great, silly, but affecting and funny and spectacular scenes, but done much more efficiently (for better and worse).
  
  Naked was, after all that, a bit of a let-down. There are no wonderful scenes here, really; the opening gambits are far too silly and, unfortunately, actually feature Marie, who is... just not interesting. Anna Karenina rules this book, and without the spectacle or intelligence of the second and third books in the series, I can't help thinking that Toussaint just wanted to wrap it up and move on. Alternatively, he wanted to write something beautiful and romantic, but there's more love and tension in any given page of RA's train romance than in this entire book.
• 
  Helin Puksand

  Eelmisel nädalal oli Tartus festival Prima Vista, mille üks külaline oli Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Käisin kirjanikuga kohtumas ja loomulikult inspireeris see kohtumine ka tema raamatuid lugema. Alustuseks lugesin siis "Põgenemist".
  Toussaint on kirjutan just sellise stiiliga, nagu mulle meeldib: taas kulgeb lugu rahulikult, dialoogid praktiliselt puuduvad. Samas on jutustamisviis tõesti selline, et lugu hakkab me silme ees filmina jooksma. Laused on kohati kuni pool lehekülge pikad, kuid neid lugeda pole sugugi keeruline.
  Loo sisu on lühidalt järgmine: peategelane läheb äriasjus Hiina, kus ta ei saa kuigi kaua olla, kuna saab teate, et Marie isa on ootamatult surnud, ja nii pöördubki ta tagasi Euroopasse.
  Soovitan lugeda! :)
  ***
  Näitena autori stiilist toon siia ühe lause:
  Olin mingis hõljuvas olekus, ja jäingi pikaks ajaks sellesse ebamäärasesse seisundisse, mida kogeme reisi ajal, vahepealses olekus, kus liikuv keha näib korrapäraselt nihkuvat ühest geograafilisest punktist teise - just nagu nool, mida olin Pekingist tagasi sõites lennuki videoekraanil jälginud ja mis kujutas rohe-sinisel mägisel ja stiliseeritud ilmakaardil lennumasina järkjärgulist kulgemisteed -, kus aga vaim, suutmata kaasa teha seda aeglast ja ühtlast üleminekut, on mõttes veel paigas, kust ta lahkus, ja samal ajal mõttes juba seal, kuhu ta suundub. (lk 85)
• 
  Nadia Costa

  2.5
  #2 de la quadralogie sur Marie [après le Faire l'Amour]
  Une écriture qui déambule entre l'introspection et la relation intime qui peut s'établir avec autrui.
  Le récit est contemplatif et semble dire poétiquement sur la redemption et ses possibilités. Un livre qui m'a plu moyennement et ceci peut-être parceque sous l'influence des changements exceptionellement rapides des temps qui courent, je cherche le bouquin qui s'adaptera a ses temps (p.s: je l'ai d'ailleurs trouvé)
• 
  Mark

  If I was to do this sort of thing, I might award this novel by Belgian author Jean-Philippe Toussaint my Book of the Year. In so doing, I’d explain, on behalf of the Institute’s Accolades Committee, how a book originally published in France in 2004 and released in its English translation in 2009, could somehow be eligible to receive so important a distinction in 2010 which, incidentally, if I was to do this other sort of thing, would be on a very short list of nominees for the greatest year there ever was. At least in my lifetime. Two thousand ten.
  
  Running Away is a frenetic ride from Paris to Shanghai to Beijing to, finally, the island of Elba. The motivations and developments governing each step of the journey are often as cloudy and mysterious as the nameless narrator himself, driven from one page to the next by pure emotion and “dream-like pleasure, distant and hazy” (p. 54). The entire novel zips by in that same haze, the kind of jet-lagged confusion that makes a traveler look back on the last twenty-fours of transit — connections, disconnections, meetings, and meals — as if it happened to someone else, or to a younger you a lifetime ago. The narrator becomes that someone else, and even if we’ve never had similar experiences in our past from which to draw vague recollections (I’ve never been to China, so apart from the cities in Elba bearing sharp similarities to small towns along the Italian coast, I’m in uncharted territory), the emotions are all recognizable. We’ve all felt confusion mingled with fear, sadness drawn from loss, and, most significantly, passion sparked by spontaneity.
  
  
  So this is where the novel took me on my own hazy time travel. A college history class on twentieth century Europe and a teaching assistant who was majoring in Chinese studies… who had spent a few summers there, was learning the language despite the obvious handicap his WASPy-looking upbringing must have created for him. I don’t remember exactly what he was talking about that day, nor do I want to search around for any kind of clarification or verification. I want his comments on the Chinese notion of “love” to live in my mind the way I remember them, vague and half-formed. Under constant construction.
  
  He said (and, again, what he actually said is lost to time and since altered by my own imagination, so these are as much my words as his… maybe even more mine at this point) that the Chinese had something like seventeen different terms for love, compared to, for example, the three different terms in Greek and our measly one. One of the terms loosely translates as “love for someone you see on a train but know will never see again.”
  
  That’s the only part of that class I still remember. That, and, I suppose, the thoroughly unispiring heft of an eighty dollar paperback textbook.
  
  Our narrator in this novel, sent on an unspecified but seemingly illicit errand to Shanghai by Marie (his wife? lover?) meets Li Qi and, in the middle of the night, on a train speeding across the Chinese countryside en route to Beijing, the two have a moment of stolen passion. The rendezvous moves to a locked bathroom until interrupted by a phone call:
  
  …I was listening to Marie speaking faintly in the early evening sunlight of Paris, her frail voice reaching me, sounding more or less the same as ever, in the late night of the train, literally transporting me, as thoughts, dreams, and books can do, when, releasing the mind from the body, the body remains still and the mind travels, swelling and expanding, while gradually, behind our closed eyes, images are born, and other memories, feelings, and states of being surge into view, pains and buried emotions are reawakened… and we feel ourselves shaken, as if a fissure had cracked the sea of tears frozen in each of us. (p. 44)
  
  The news from Paris ignites the narrative: a motorcycle chase through Beijing, a bowling outing, airports and ferries, stone churches and stone paths, and the salty Mediterranean. The passion and longing, the (love), is fragmentary, just like every landscape and every construct our hero rushes through. The broken window on the train “whose absence had been so poorly repaired by a fluttering sheet of plastic held by a single strand of tape” (p. 34) and the visqueen-coated hotel “with beams, girders, and scaffolding rails piled here and there” (p. 55) are reminders of the constant construction of the human experience. Indeed, the only setting that displays completion is the summer home of Marie’s late father, “the old stone house… fixed up for her… an ancient garden pavilion that he’d restored, doing most of the work himself, the stonework, as well as the woodwork” (p. 116), a reflection of a life well-lived.
  
  It’s a wild ride, this book. Vague and half-formed, like my memories of Chinese in translation. It even features a woman for whom the narrator may feel that fleeting, impossible love. And it begs the question: how much of our life, our constantly under-construction assemblage of emotions and reactions, do we recognize — from a train or otherwise — as being as impermanent as passion on a train.
• 
  Mike

  Biting broken nails.
• 
  Jenny

  3,5
  
  Strange little book. I kept expecting a road map, some explanation as to why I was dropped into the life of a jetlagged guy on his journey through Shanghai and Peking, some clue as to who was Marie, some clue at all really - until I stopped expecting anything all together and just went along for the ride. No less confused than the protagonist probably, which at least meant that I wasn't alone.
  And voilà: that's when I started to quite enjoy it.
  
• 
  Marina Sofia

  An adrenaline-filled journey through jetlag, conflicting emotions, confusions and being out of one's depths in a foreign land. The narrator is in China at the behest of his girlfriend, Marie, the love of his life. Escorted by a shadowy figure, nearly seduced by a Chinese girl (their scene in the train lavatory shows how easy it is to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous), mixed up in some unsavoury stuff and chased by dealers and/or police, speeding on a motorcycle through the busy streets of Beijing in smelly bowling shoes. Zany, funny, yet also lyrical and infuriating by turns.
• 
  Andy

  Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Running Away is my favorite of the three of his I've read (the other two being Monsieur and Making Love to which Running Away serves as a prequel). The smooth, cool, understated prose is perfect for conveying the enigmas encountered by the narrator throughout the story. The title is particularly apt here with all the images of hurtling and fleeing thrown at the reader. A very fun read!
• 
  Clotilde

  Très étrange comme bouquin, je ne comprends pas très bien où l'auteur veut en venir
  
  Really weird book, I don't get what the author meant with this book
• 
  Elena Papadopol

  Foarte fluida si cinematica - mi-a placut destul de mult :).
  
  "O ascultam pe Marie in tacere, inchisesem ochii, si-i auzeam vocea trecandu-mi de la ureche spre creier, unde o simteam cum se propaga si traieste in mintea mea."
  
  "[...] in noaptea din acest tren, acea voce slaba a lui Marie care ma transpunea literalmente, asa cum o pot face gandurile, visul si lectura, cand, disociind trupul de minte, trupul ramane imobil si mintea calatoreste, se dilata si se intinde, si cand, incet, in spatele ochilor nostri inchisi, se nasc imagini si se ivesc amintiri, sentimente si stari nervoase, se reaprind dureri, emotii uitate, frici, placeri, senzatii, de frig, de cald, de a fi iubit, de a nu sti, intr-un aflux regulat de sange in tample, o accelerare regulata a batailor inimii, si o zguduire, ca o fisura, in marea de lacrimi secate ce a inghetat in noi."
  
  "[...] (si am simtit atunci acea placere atat de aparte de a sti ca existi in mintea cuiva, ca te misti si chiar duci in ea o existenta nebanuita)."
• 
  Ville Verkkapuro

  The history of how I found this book goes like this: I have been in a very deep Wong Kar-Wai phase for the longest time and have been wanting to write like Wong Kar-Wai makes movies. I've been trying to get my hands on novels that resemble the world and style of Wong Kar-Wai and stumbled upon this on some late night googling. The premise is pretty obviously that of a Hong Kong cinema: it starts in Shanghai, with a guy who is a bit lost. From then on I'm not absolutely sure what I got, but I enjoyed it very, very much. Beautiful scenery and a world with much detail. You could almost smell this book. Some wild events that I didn't quite understand, but that kept this small novel in a very good pace.
  This book was not a masterpiece, but it had a burning heart.
• 
  David

  Running away is actually about immobility. Toussaint's prose shines when there's nothing much going on and is clunky and cumbersome when things start to happen. Each of the book's three parts can be divided into a long period of thoughtful static then a chaotically frenetic burst of activity (Marie's run through the Louvre, the car chase, the swim). The main character remains immobile throughout, like flotsam in a current. Running away is strangely about staying motionless while the world spins around you.
  
  Interested enough to read more Toussaint.
• 
  Aaron Nelson

  While the prose is certainly enthralling at times, such as during the car chase (that may not be an actual car chase) and especially during the final scene in the ocean, the story itself seemed to drag at times. Often—despite the beauty of it—I found myself wondering why we were getting such detailed descriptions of seemingly random details. Also, this book is not for those who have trouble following long winded sentences. There are sentences within that last more than a page.
• 
  Jake Goretzki

  I don't quite know why I love his stuff as much as I do. He talks about seeking to generate 'novelistic energy' - whatever that is. What it means is that his writing has an amazing immediacy and clarity, and rather like the hyperfocus of Knausgaard, he makes getting a train ticket in a station in Shanghai compelling. But he's lyrical too - the scenes in Elba, the churches, the hotels and the swimming are just gorgeous. All so vivid.
  
• 
  Edita

  Priešingai nei ,,Mylėtis", ši knyga manęs nesužavėjo. Mintį supratau, baigus paskutinį puslapį ji tampa ryški kaip dienos šviesa. Jei skaitytum be pirmosios dalies (,,Mylėtis") visiškai nesuprastum apie ką knyga.