Saturday, September 28, 2019

Review: "Hold Fast Your Crown" by Yannick Haenel


It is highly unlikely that I will read a more interesting and unique book as French writer Yannick Haenel’s novel Hold Fast Your Crown, and that is partly due to its last minute addition to my reading list. I picked it up having read no reviews or heard any press about it and it proceeded to wow me over the course of 332 brisk and enlightening pages. From its rich yet light prose, credit of which goes partly to translator Teresa Lavender Fagan (I don’t talk too much about translators in my reviews and I feel I need to remedy that), its loose structure and the constantly shifting ideas and enigmas that lave the reader guessing like the most hardboiled of mystery or crime thrillers, this is easily the biggest surprise of 2019. The book is told as a flashback with the unnamed (as far as I can tell) narrator recalling a time when he was crazy by introducing us to his obsession of choice, which is massive and most likely unfilmable screenplay about the life of American literary giant Herman Melville. Not a single producer is interested and his pitch about examining the “honeycombed interior of Melville’s head” does nothing to help sway them in his direction. And then Pointel, one of his contacts gives him the number of American film director Michael Cimino, known for winning big with his breakout film The Deer Hunter, losing big with his epic gaffe Heaven’s Gate and then falling off the face of the Earth until his death on 2016. Of course, the narrator thinks that Cimino is not only the best fit to direct his great white whale of a script, but is the only director who can do it justice. He manages to get a meeting with Cimino in New York City, where they share a night on the town, trade in esoteric worldviews and ending with Cimino’s promise to direct the movie. That is the bare synopsis of this scatterbrained enigma of a book. We learn of the narrator’s habit of watching movies in search of a holy deer, finding something close to that in repeat viewings of Cimino’s films and Apocalypse Now (which he watches at least once a day) his relationship with Tot, his neighbor, Sabbat, Tot’s Dalmatian, Pointel and Lena, who might just save him from himself. Thematically, I was reminded of various books, such as those by Herman Koch, whose undercurrent of menace flows through here as well and oddly enough Tim Lucas’s Throat Sprockets in how the book lays out cinematic obsessions that lay outside of respectable society. On the surface this looks like a dark book, evidenced by a grim seen near the end involving Tot and a hunting trip, but by the end I think it is a hopeful one, with a scene at the funeral of Lena’s long suffering and deeply religious sister being the book’s high point. And even if the writer is still crazy by the end, I get the feeling he has some newfound clarity. 
Review: 5/5

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