The Review of Contemporary Fiction
On the Ceiling by Eric ChevillardBrian Evenson
Eric Chevillard. On the Ceiling. Trans. Jordan Stump. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2000. 136 pp. Paper: $15.00.
“[I]t is by fully trusting in appearances that one begins to reshape the world,” declares one of the characters in Eric Chevillard’s On the Ceiling. Chevillard’s eccentric writing style puts a lot of weight in appearances, postulating reality as a potentially flexible space in which the laws of gravity, etiquette, even the form of the body, are all subject to change. The narrator of On the Ceiling wears a chair upside down on his head, imaginatively reinventing both “chairness” and his relationship to the world at large. Initially On the Ceiling reads like a philosophical parody, but Chevillard renders the odd ideas of his characters with enough respect that their situation swells and blossoms into their own world. Thus, in execution, the novel goes well beyond any notion of parody. Intriguingly, after speaking of his chair for almost eighty pages, the narrator abruptly abandons the chair to live on the ceiling of his girlfriend’s apartment, using one way of life as a stepping-stone into another.
To read Chevillard is to engage with the texture of his prose, to lose oneself in long sentences and paragraphs, to move from confusion to lucidity and back again, to leap from one idea to another. Chevillard is one of the few contemporary French writers to pick up language where Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable left off, one of the few writers to offer a convincing post-Beckettian periodic prose line. Jordan Stump’s admirable translation preserves Chevillard’s complex sentence structures and syntax, preserving the odd feeling Chevillard’s original French. Part philosophical esquisse, part satire, On the Ceiling is an intriguing book, well worth reading, and unique. [Brian Evenson]