Discovering books and bookstores
Sometime last year, I had the good fortune of staying in the ancient and beautiful neighbourhood of Trastevere in Rome for a short while. At a stone's throw away, in an unassuming alleyway, was a quaint doorway with a rather promising and other-worldly 'Bookshop' signage that nearly hurled itself at me while slowly seeping into the ancient brickwork of the building the shop was housed in. Needless to say, it had its intended effect. The Open Door Bookshop, with an owner who is strict, passionate and lovable in equal measure, not only stocks up on ancient titles, collectible editions and the odd assortment of the usual suspects, it also houses quite a few oddities of the literary world (one has to spend a while in the store with a keen eye, of course).
One such book was this. A 1968 print of The Ubu Plays (Ubu Rex, Ubu Cuckolded and Ubu Enchained) by Alfred Jarry, the father of absurdist/surrealist French theater (in a larger sense, a pioneer in absurdist writing). This is book 9 of 2020 and I, quite frankly, do not know what to say (a rare departure from my usual verbose self).
It has left a strange aftertaste, like finding a piece of clove in a mound of French fries. The plays are truly absurd with a protagonist who is as reviling as it gets. The dialogues are peppered with invented words and curses, child-like debates, petulant behaviour, surreal morbidity and a whole new imaginative form of science called pataphysics. While the first play Ubu Rex (Ubu Roi) has an interesting plot to it filled with usurpation of a throne and fights and revenge and other weird events throughout, the second play Ubu Cuckolded (Ubu Cocu) absolutely whizzed past me like ether no matter how hard I tried to partially digest it. Ubu Enchained (Ubu Enchaine) was a highly interesting immersion in pataphysics with the concepts of freedom and slavery being turned on their heads.
Have you read any absurdist piece of literature?
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Bookshop photo sourced from the cover photo of the official Facebook page of Open Door Bookshop, Rome (https://www.facebook.com/bookshop.rome)