Clarissa's Blog

When Chirbes’s supposedly last novel, Paris-Austerlitz, was published posthumously, I read it and was completely disappointed. I expressed my disappointment here. It made no sense to me that somebody who was capable of producing the masterpieces Crematorium and On the Edge would write something as trivial and clumsy as Paris-Austerlitz. The publisher’s promotional materials claimed that Chirbes had spent 20 years working on this novel, but as you can see from the linked post, I said from the start that that made absolutely no sense to me.

And guess what? My instincts were absolutely correct. Chirbes had written Paris-Austerlitz back in the 1990s. He didn’t publish it then because he didn’t feel like making his homosexuality a big public issue. In his diaries, the novel is mentioned as a text he wrote a long time ago and then put aside. You could see this in the writing. It’s youthful, immature, and nowhere remotely on the level of the writer’s later work.

I feel completely vindicated as a literary critic.

Also, I know that everybody is sick and tired of hearing about Chirbes, but take heart! I have only 150 pages left to go.