PENGUIN The Pigeon

In France during the Second World War we meet young Jonathan Noel who is enjoying his walk home in the rain only to find when he gets there that his mother has disappeared; a few days later his father also disappears - like his mother, never to re-appear. Jonathan and his sister are taken to stay with their uncle on his farm where they grow up and where Jonathan does everything his uncle tells him, including marrying a woman of his uncle's choice. When his wife runs off with another man, Jonathan decides the time has come for him to make his own decisions and he moves to Paris, where he finds a room in an apartment block and where he lives alone, keeping everyone at arms' length, quite happily for the next few decades (we learn all of this within the first few pages of the book). One morning, after carrying out the same unalterable routine he has followed since his arrival in Paris, Jonathan is shocked to find a pigeon sitting outside the door of his room. Stunned, he needs to lie on his bed to recover (is he having a heart attack he asks himself or, perhaps, a stroke?) but once he is feeling a little restored he packs a suitcase and plans to stay at an hotel in order to escape the dreadful presence of his uninvited guest. Why is Jonathan so frightened of this pigeon and why does the prospect of returning to his room and finding the bird still in the hallway so terrifying to a fully-grown man? As the day passes, Jonathan's mind races; he thinks back to certain parts of his past life and of what has happened to him over the years and finally decides that his life is about to end. But does it?An unusual little novel that looks, albeit very briefly, at how losing one's parents and one's stability in life can affect an individual and how that trauma can impact on one's mental health far into the future. This is the sort of story that is best read in one single sitting in order to enter into the mind of Jonathan and to try to understand his angst and why he behaves the way he does. Although this is a rather poignant tale, and the part of the story where Jonathan splashes his way home to his apartment in the rain is worryingly reminiscent of his return to his family home forty years before, there is, thankfully, hope here too.4 Stars.

Süskind, Patrick. The Pigeon (translated from the German Die Taube by John E Woods)The story of Jonathan Noel’s encounter with a pigeon in his Paris flat is extraordinary and banal in equal measures. The account is told by an omniscient narrator whose viewpoint and diction merge obliquely into those of Jonathan himself. Thus he despairs of the concierge, Madame Rocard: ‘She’s just a concierge and her job is just to sweep the halls and the stairway and to clean the shared toilet once a week, but not to rout pigeons. By this afternoon at the latest she’ll be drunk on vermouth and have forgotten the entire affair.’ But for the most part the narrator sticks to the ‘facts’, the main one being Jonathan’s immaculate devotion to order and time-keeping, which the stray pigeon has utterly desecrated.The tale is compressed into 24 hours and 100 pages, as compressed as is the hero himself into a bunkhouse that admits minimal light and comfort, for Jonathan is an aesthete devoted to his work as a security guard positioned on the bank’s staircase, a post he has occupied for 30 years. To say that he is a lonely repressed old man would be an understatement. Boiling within is anger, rage at pedestrians, and at ‘those good-for-nothing young, stupid waiters, who loitered among the tables and chairs, the louts babbling and grinning and smirking … And then the drivers! Stupid monkeys in their stinking tin crates … Do you have to use the last bit of breathable air, suck it into your motors and burn it up and blow it back, mixed with poison and soot and hot fumes, into the noses of respectable citizens?’ Jonathan has visions of shooting them all, even shooting up ‘the whole dreary, loud, stinking world.’ But, the narrator informs us ‘He was nor a man of action. He was a man of resignation.’The interior monologues of Jonathan Noel’s Paris nightmare encompass terror at failing to be on duty when his boss arrives, meetings with a clochard whom he envies and a seamstress whom he unavailingly begs to sew up a rip in his trousers. All of this angst and anxiety is released by the pigeon which haunts the passage and drives him into hotel accommodation. The reader is drawn into each catastrophe in the life of this shy, conventional little man who bears within him the seeds of a potential murderer.

Very strange story. Its not a big book either, about 100 pages and i found it so bizarre its about a man scared of a pigeon because it puts him off his routine in his quiet way of life. Perhaps i missed the subtleties of it, its seems to be about loneliness and an old man who is so set in his ways the most little thing sets him off, namely, a pigeon in his hallway.

Although I got a book with a different cover, it was still 'The Pigeon' by Patrick Süskind. The book got delivered earlier than expected and I am very pleased with it. I haven't started to read it but I am very excited to because 'The Perfume' is my favourite book from all the books I have ever read.

Created a bundle as a gift, all good