How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read Read Online Free PDF Page B

manifestly ill at ease during the broadcast:
    Dochin, for his part, seemed more and more to be falling asleep, completely out of it. He seemed to be having trouble following. Before the cameras, he seemed hesitant, uncomfortable, almost never completing the few sentences he managed to say. 3
    It turns out Dochin has an excellent reason to appear, in the narrator’s words, “more than at sea” 4 on the subject of his own book. He has been dispossessed of the book that he has supposedly cowritten by Gastinel, who is as physically imposing as his companion is slender, and who has forced his own name onto the cover with Dochin’s.
    Originally approached by the writer Dochin as a possible publisher, Gastinel read the manuscript and immediately became convinced he had a huge success on his hands; he became determined to put his own name on the book as coauthor, despite not having written a word. To force Dochin to consent, Gastinel decided to blackmail him. With this goal in mind, he seduced a girl at a dance, then took her to his country house along with Dochin, whom he got drunk. After raping the young woman and running her over with his car, he filmed Dochin bending over her corpse, on which he had discreetly planted the writer’s ID.
    Based on a tape closely guarded by Gastinel, Dochin is thus under constant threat of being accused of a murder he didn’t commit, but which he allowed to happen without intervening. He finds himself forced to abide by the wishes of his blackmailer, who has, in exchange for his silence, appropriated the right to be credited as coauthor of the book and to pocket half the royalties.

    Though neither laying claim to another writer’s manuscript nor committing a murder seems to pose much of a moral problem to Gastinel, he is nonetheless uncomfortable at the thought of speaking about the book to a large audience. He has therefore exacted a pledge from the program’s host not to mention the contents of the book, a promise of which Gastinel reminds him as soon as the questions get specific enough to present a threat:
    “Don’t forget the little deal we made before the program. Dochin and I do not in any way want to give away the plot of our novel. So, if you don’t mind, let’s talk about the authors instead. At bottom, I think that’s what your viewers are interested in anyway.” 5
    Gastinel’s behavior is even more surprising in that he is quite eloquent on the subject of the duo’s follow-up book, the as yet unwritten sequel to La Java brune , to the point of publicly recounting several of its episodes. What is clearly out of the question, at least in the presence of Dochin, is for Gastinel to speak about Dochin’s work.
    As it turns out, Gastinel’s discretion is completely justified. That he prefers not to speak about the book is not due to not having read it, like many other characters we have encountered; it is because Dochin, who is nevertheless the book’s author, has not read it. In effect, Siniac’s novel constructs an unlikely situation in which one supposed coauthor is speaking about a book he has read without having written it, while the other is speaking about a book he has written but hasn’t read.
    To truly understand the situation in which the two characters find themselves during this first scene, the reader must know that Dochin is not the victim of just one trap— Gastinel’s blackmail to appropriate royalties—but of two, the second of which is revealed only in the novel’s final pages and which illuminates it retrospectively. Whereas the first trap explains Dochin’s strange attitude, only in discovering the second one do we come to understand Gastinel’s.
    While he was working on the manuscript of Java brune , Dochin, who at the time had no permanent address, was taken in by Céline Ferdinaud, the madam of a seedy hotel. Having barely begun to read the text, Céline was overcome with enthusiasm and urged Dochin to complete and publish it. She even offered