Loving like Hugo (or The Epicure's Lament)

This book by Kate Christensen has enthralled me.

I don't usually like books which threaten, from the blurb, to simply be a study in characterization. I've read enough of those to know that often enough the characterization is, at best , shallow, and the writing is suitably pretentious in order to disguise the fact that the author has absolutely no plot and thus demonstrates an alarming affinity for tragically pedantic first-person perspective.

But this book is different. I picked it up from the shelves, drawn by the title and subsequently, by the picture of the cigarette with a brown filter (just like a Djarum) crushed into a oyster shell, alluding to food and vice, and to me, pleasure and sex. I read the blurb, was panicked by the potential self-indulgent first-person perspective writing, was about to put it back, then flipped through the pages and caught hints of French ('Collaborateurs!'), and I was sold. I just cannot bear to put back a book where French is an intrinsic part of dialogue.

So I brought it home, and caught in a haze of Frozen Snowball last night, I picked it up and started reading. And found myself enthralled.

This book, is gorgeous. The novel's protagonist, Hugo, is a dilettante, an infuriating cad who's dying of a disease which can be cured if only he quit smoking, but which he steadfastly refuses to do. He's diabolically amoral, flagrantly dissolute, loves to cook deeply exciting and occasionally terribly exotic dishes, smokes viciously and continuously throughout even though he only enjoys the first one of the day, and treats women like an inveterate explorer treating unchartered territory. He is a wonderful anti-hero, a wicked, down and dirty mix of blue jazz and rock and roll. I am only 58 pages into this book and already I am enraptured, the language as rich as whipping cream, my literary sensibilities not only seduced, but ravished.

When Hugo commences on his flirtation with his brother's love interest (married to another man), they talk of children, and she says, "But frankly, I don't think anyone over thirty, or thirty-two at the very least should have children. It doesn't seem right, either biologically or psychologically. Babies are boring, and you have to be young to put up with them. I'm just not in that mindset any more. I like what I like, and I don't want to give up any of it for anyone."

So political incorrect in our current "make more babies" climate, but so endearingly selfish and true. It's a loving finger to the notion of the perfect nuclear family which we were all taught to embrace and yearn for in Home Ec. Stuff that.

Hugo himself notes: "It's the natural and inevitable progress of the disease of marriage from cramps and fatigue to tingling and numbness to inevitable pain to amputation of major limbs. That's just the way it always goes, and nothing will ever change that. That's why God invented adultery and stuck it in the Bible as a big no-no, so we could sneak off and indulge ourselves in it with all the guilt in the world. The forbidden has always been the greatest aphrodisiac, and evermore shall be, amen."

The thing which captures my imagination is how Hugo is such a caricature of how men treat women, i.e. how he loves them, but does not fall in love with them. Sometimes I think that life would be that much easier if only we loved men like that, instead of falling hopelessly and irrevocably in love with them like I do. It takes so little, sometimes, to tip you over the edge and into a dagger-sharp world of potential pain and suffering( because as little as it took to fall in love, you, or they, fall out of love). A well-turned phrase, a stray ray of sunshine and some very nice jeans, and everything could go topsy-turvy and there you are again, poised on the edge. Loving the way Hugo does would take some of the color out of your world and make your experiences more shallow, but I can only imagine that it seems safer and sometimes, more fun, because you hold the reins. So you get to be wicked and play all the games you want instead of being a fever grip of emotion, helpless as a fly in a Venus trap.

Not being male and possessing a most unfortunate moral compass of occasionally distressing unswerving-ness, I can only read The Epicure's Lament and live love vicariously through Hugo.