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Voyage
to the End of the Room by Tibor Fischer Rating: •• (Mildly
Recommended) |
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Home Sweet Home Tibor Fischer’s Voyage to
the End of the Room will likely be the strangest novel I’ve read this
year. At times uproariously funny, at times downright weird, Voyage
introduces readers to Oceane, a successful graphic
designer, who has become a recluse inside her London flat, to which she
brings the rest of the world through various tableaus created in a special
room she’s dedicated to that purpose. In one scene, she is in This is how I became rich: I was at
home at four-thirty on a Friday afternoon. Rich? Rich for many. Comfortable for
some. Comfortably well-off I would say. By most standards. I own a flat
which is more than adequate for one person, a space which, in many cities of
the world (both the rougher and ritzier ones), would be judged excessive. I
have a majestic study. I have two bedrooms, though the second one could be
considered a bedroom only by estate agents, since if you were to put a bed in
it, there really wouldn’t be room for anything else. I have a reasonable
lounge, a respectable kitchen and bathroom, and — here’s a real extravagance — there’s another would-be bathroom,
containing a toilet and a tiny basin. The flat’s split-level and the generous
staircase adds to the sense of expanse. I always
find walking up and down its chunky carpeting soothing. Being at the top of
the house, the light’s always good and the walls are old and solid enough to
limit my neighbours’ sonic invasions, and, as I’m
two storeys up and muffled by trees (thoughtfully
planted a hundred years ago and not yet entirely destroyed by the fumes and
shenanigans of motorists), the din from the road doesn’t reach me either. In
the two weeks of sunshine that pass for summer in this country I have the
luxury of a roof terrace and the chance to give some of my plants an outing. I’ve often wondered why I’m so fond of
plants; at first I thought it was a hankering for nature, the reassurance of
green. Then I began to suspect plants are pets for those who are unsure about
their ability to care for quadrupeds. When a plant expires you have a bout of
guilt, but an aspidistra won’t give you reproachful looks if you don’t take
it out, and you can’t mourn a cactus. And how else can you get oxygen these
days? So, I have a lot of room. Many families
have to make do with less. I have an excess of wardrobe space so all my
clothes can be located at a glance. My disc storage is exemplary, and—here comes the embarrassing part — the small bedroom has become a
shoe-stack, housing a hundred and nineteen pairs of shoes. This, I confess,
is real indulgence, because I’m not a great one for going out and I generally
pad around my flat barefoot. In my defence, I would
like to point out I amassed them over a ten-year period and they are the way
I like to reward myself for good performance. As vices go, fairly harmless. Although my possessions and I enjoy an uncramped lifestyle, our location is not the most
exclusive part of In the beginning I used to phone the police
and it took me quite a while to understand that they didn’t want to hear
about any of this. Either they wouldn’t turn up or they would saunter up
forty minutes after the call, giving the most slothful transgressor plenty of
time to make himself scarce. The solution to this
problem is plain and simple, and it’s interesting that the many ministers,
politicians, civil servants and various layabouts
of various bureaucracies who are well paid to solve these problems don’t. But here’s the clincher. I also own the flat underneath, on the
first floor. Although riot palatial, it’s more than enough for one or two,
should I ever decide to rent it out. It came up for
sale during my first wave of affluence, and property after all is one of the
best investments. No argument over that, as Ethiopian taxi-drivers, Albanian
accordionists, Swedish dotcomers and molled-up Russian aluminium
barons beat a path to There is more. Sickeningly, I also have
money in the bank. High-interest account. Not a lot, but enough for a family
to live on for a year or two, and of course, I’m still earning. Better ways
of investing it exist, but, and I appreciate this sounds terrible, I’m not interested
in money. I love spending it, but I can’t bear racking my brains over
investing it in some clever scheme. Deep down, I simply don’t care. I don’t
enjoy leaving the money in the bank, because principally it rots there, and
like everyone else I hate bankers (I love the old joke: What do you call a
thousand bankers barbecued alive? A good start). These days I don’t spend much apart
from the travel. On the clothes front, I’m ready for anything. Weddings,
funerals, parties, interviews, seductions: I’ve got designer frocks, prepped
and in cellophane. Embarrassingly expensive lingerie is untouched in its
packaging. My wardrobe doesn’t get much wear and tear because as I work at
home, my pyjamas and very old tracksuits take the
strain. As for music, I already have more than
I can cope with. My flat isn’t enormous, but I have
thousands of slaves to do my bidding. I have Lithuanian pianists, Korean
violinists, Icelandic tenors, Dutch divas, American harpsichordists,
Senegalese cellists, Balinese drummers, slaves
living and dead, of almost every nation to play music for me. I can make them
play again and again, louder or quieter. The choice every time I want to listen
to some music is almost tiresome. The first stage of choice is easy: up, down
or hanging around. Then it’s a question, if you want to go up or down, how
far up or down you want to go. If you’re glum, is it the sort of glumness
that you want to ornament with another layer of dejection? Or is it a
vexatious misery you want to dispel? Or, if you’re elated, do you want to be
driven into a frenzy? Guessing what sort of music
you want to listen to can be exhausting, but on occasion getting it wrong can
be surprisingly pleasant. Finally, how much music can you listen
to? Working at home means I can listen a lot more than the average officenik, but I have over five hundred discs that
represent fifteen years of collecting, of birthday presents, of Christmas
presents, of I-would-like-to-take-your-clothes-off presents. If you listened
for twelve hours a day, every day, that would be six weeks without
repetition; and a lot of music, usually the more rewarding, requires half a
dozen plays before you begin to get a grip on it. The great pieces you can
listen to dozens of times, naturally, with the enjoyment growing and changing
all the while. I’ve concluded it would be profligate to buy any more since I
have every field covered, two or three discs to accompany every emotional
permutation, though I will doubtless succumb to some new release promising
more. And a great piece by a great composer
is an almost undrainable pleasure. I have
twenty-five different recordings of a double piano concerto; though it was
with the purchase of the twenty-fifth that I worried I might be fiddling with
my sanity. There’s something slightly embarrassing
about liking a great composer. Of course you do. It looks so obvious, so
lazy, so dull. There’s always this tension in your
tastes; no one wants to fit in with the crowd, to bellow herdishly.
This desire is contrasted with the desire to evangelise
for a new discovery; we want others to share our pleasure, but only to a
certain point. I can’t imagine anyone, even those who go for the most obscure
and awful music, enjoying something and not wanting to share it with someone.
We might not want to share our food or our money, but we do want to share our
judgement. We want to be considered of good judgement, knowledgeable. We want others to think we have
more fun. But we need meeting-places of the mind. A Kilimanjaro of the spirit
that we’ve all visited so we can say of other things: it’s shorter, or
taller, or the same height as Kilimanjaro. Apart from the music, I have my huge
film library, and, from the dish, hundreds of television channels. And while
their controllers do their best to keep anything intelligent out, they fail
periodically. So although my wealth is modest, I defy any dictator, any
potentate, anyone richer than me to have better home entertainment. Even
those with unspendable fortunes only have one
mind, one mouth, two ears, two eyes and one pleasure station. There’s only so
much fun you can take. A hundred years ago not even someone with their own
country or a shocking fortune could have had it this good, even fifty years ago it was magnates
only, and by now the crackheads have more
entertainment than they know what to do with. Richness descends not when you have a
choice of yachts, but when you have abundance and freedom. Oh, and you are
likely to retain them. I could go out and buy new furniture, new clothes or
jet off to any part of the world and loaf for a month in a suite with a
mammoth minibar and a barn-sized bathroom. The financial distance between scraping
along and galore is, cruelly enough, quite small if you’re single. If you
want to raise eight children, that’s another matter, but once you can escape
the gravity of rent and credit-card payments, things go your way. Few
pleasures are greater than knowing you can close your door, ignore the world
and create your own. Moreover, my becoming as-good-as rich wasn’t the result of any astuteness or hard work on my
part. It was a byproduct of my wanting to take some flamenco classes. Dance is very much like a cult, you get
sucked in further and further, and you pay more and more and you rarely get a
chance to make any money out of it. At sixteen, I tormented my father for
some extra cash to take up flamenco in addition to the innumerable dance
classes I was already attending. Knowing he’d yield, he made a stipulation: ‘Owww, you have to sign up for something useful as well.’
We understood each other well enough for me to know he had in mind something
that might give me a chance of earning a living. I kept my side of the
bargain, but I left it late. By the time I got to enrol
at the local college all the worthwhile courses, like the one in computer
graphics that I had been honestly keen on, were full; even worse, all the
tempting courses were full. There was only one course that was presentable
and that had vacancies: slightly harder maths. I
desperately hunted for slightly easier maths but it
didn’t exist. So it looked as though my career in graphics was finished in
its intentional stage and I gritted my teeth to find out what the maths were slightly harder than. I didn’t find out, because the slightly
harder maths tutor sold his car, bought a pneumatic
drill and started digging a hole in his basement in an attempt to reach the
earth’s core in order to prove some theory. So the computer graphics tutor
took over, and the course became slightly harder maths
meets computer graphics and sits quietly in the corner, though this was at a
time when courses in computer graphics consisted of little more than
switching on the computer. But my father was right. When I finally had to knock dancing on
the head years later, I evolved into a designer, largely because I could
switch on a computer and draw. If I were trying to get into the business now
with those qualifications, I wouldn’t even get an interview as a
receptionist. So I suppose my contribution to my
fortune was not failing as a designer. I had a reputation and a phone and
that’s why I became rich. It was Friday afternoon and I was locking the door
on my way out to buy some peppermint tea when the phone rang. I could have
gone off and left it to the answering machine, but I picked up the phone and
was offered the job. I didn’t want the job. It was one of
those we-need-it-yesterday things you get offered a lot as a freelance. They
needed one more character for a computer game. My weekend would have become a
sleepless hell, and I wasn’t in the mood. My prospective employer, an
embittered Japanese project manager, didn’t want to give me the job either.
He complained venomously about how he had been let down at the last minute by
a designer who had decided he wanted to be a ladyboy
in Bangkok; how the hundreds of other experienced, well-qualified designers
he knew in Japan were busy, on holiday, suffering spiritual crises, having
skiing accidents, giving birth or had become contestants on game shows. He
seethed as he listed the countries he had scoured for help: As he enumerated the implausible events
that had prevented hundreds of talented designers from taking up his offer,
I could smell his bad sweat, the rancid tobacco on his clothes (it took me a
while to twig what a long day he must have had because they’re nine hours
ahead in Tokyo); he was very angry with me, indeed he hated me, and I sensed
he wanted an apology from me for all his toiling. Despite his clear and
immediate need for a designer, he still chewed over my CV with me before,
with incredibly bad grace, offering me the job. I didn’t want it. But as a freelance
you can’t bring yourself to say no. You are in a constant terror that no one
will ever talk to you again let alone employ you. The word ‘no’ cannot pass
your lips. Uttering that word would bring career calamity; it would incur the
wrath of the payment gods. However, I wanted this job to vanish. So what I said was: ‘You’ll have to
talk to my lawyer.’ I went off to get my tea, confident that I’d hear no more
about the job, since I didn’t have a lawyer. On top of which, the lawyer I
didn’t have would undoubtedly have gone off for the weekend; or even if he
hadn’t, he would have forgotten about me. I hadn’t forgotten about him. I was
getting my coat at a party when this lawyer had walked up to me and said, ‘I specialise in intellectual property and I’d like to shag
your brains out.’ A lame line, but well delivered, and it wasn’t accompanied
by a slimy leer as if it had been delivered by, say, a human-resources
manager. It wasn’t one of these offensive propositions where the pleasure lay
in being offensive. He was drunk and I was in the mood. He had given me his
card afterwards, but I had never taken up his offer of representation because
I hadn’t needed to and because, as any woman knows, favours
are rarely executed after the event. Funnily enough, I had ripped up and put
his card in the bin that morning. I hate clutter and unnecessary things (the
shoes are essential for my peace of mind) and I like everything in its place,
and I really had no place for a card from a married intellectual-property
lawyer. But it would be a suitable way of dodging the work: I rescued the
card from the bin and read out the number. I was confident that that was
that. Afterwards, I learned that the lawyer
had been locking his office door when the phone rang and had only gone back
in because he had been expecting a call from a Syrian lacrosse player. He not
only remembered me but by the time I had returned from the shops he had
ferociously cut me a deal which gave me a shedload
of money and, more significantly, a percentage of the royalties. ‘I love it
when you can hear them sobbing at the other end of the phone.’ I was furious
with him, but I couldn’t say so. I had four hours’ sleep that weekend,
finished the job by Monday afternoon and the rest is a stream of steady
payments. It’s odd that they paid me, because it would have been easy for
them not to. Collecting money from companies two
streets away is hard enough. I’ve never met anyone who’s played the
game. I’ve never even seen the game on sale here (mind you, I haven’t looked
very hard), but it was, judging by the cheques that
have been forwarded to me, successful in So my only tip for becoming rich is not
to try. That
excerpt sets the scene for the rest of the action in Voyage.
Join the trip, laugh a little, and wonder what the heck is going on. Steve
Hopkins, April 23, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the May 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Voyage
to the End of the Room.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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