Shelfies #14: Patrick Garratt

The amount of books we have in the house is pretty stupid at this point, so I chose this shelf because it represents a closing period in my life and the beginning of yet another voyage into uncertainty. Almost every book here relates to my university education in France, where I’ve lived since 2010. I write fiction, but I’m also an old entertainment journalist. I’m one of the cofounders of a British videogames site called VG247.com, which was sold in 2018 (or 2017: it’s all a bit of a blur now).

After the sale, I first went to Strasbourg University to start learning French, and then moved to Montpellier in the south where I achieved a C2 language level and went on to get a first for a literature degree. I’ve just finished a humanities and artistic creation masters (also a first), meaning I’ve now come to the end of six-and-a-half years in the French university system. I was never educated beyond ‘A’ level in the UK, so really this shelf represents a major transition in my life on many levels. All these books were bought by me, for me, and they all mean something, but I’ll pick a few that have particular personal value.

Zola’s Nana (1879), the story of a Parisian concubine, Anna Coupeau, and the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, was the first major French literature canon novel I read by my own volition in the first year of my degree in Montpellier. It wasn’t that Nana changed my life so much as giving confirmation it had already changed. After trying to free myself for many years from the company I’d created, I was reading French literature, in French, in a French university. Nana began to explain to me the inexorable link between literature and politics and was, coupled with my first researches on the Commune de Paris of 1871, the start of a reflection on authority, fascism and anarchism that lasted to the end of the masters I finished this year.

Homage to Catalonia (1938) by George Orwell exemplifies this theme. I read it in the first year of the masters at Nîmes University, 60km from my home in Montpellier. Homage to Catalonia is the most famous literary account of both anarchism in practice and “classic” anti-fascism. Orwell arrived in revolutionary Barcelona with his new wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy (she’s never named in the book), in December 1936 and immediately enlisted in the POUM, an anti-Stalinist, antifascist militia. He was sent to the frontline west of Barcelona, near Belchite in the Aragon region, and fought against Franco’s troops. This book is dear to me. I was reading a bunch of theory at the time, but this was anarchism in action. It also put me on the path to a book whose title references Orwell’s account, Hommage au Rojava: Les combattants internationalistes témoignent (2020) (Homage to Rojava: internationalist fighters bear witness – that’s my translation, as it’s unfortunately only available in French), which gives first-hand accounts from the Kurdish wars against ISIS and Erdoğan in the 2010s. This actually did change my life, and both these titles were integral in forming the first novel I wrote in French, La Commune de Montpellier.

This shelf is just as much about literature than politics, so I’m going to round-off with Gérard Genette’s Figures III (1972). Genette was a Parisian narratologist, famed for a series of five essays on literary mechanics in relation to Proust’s La Recherche. In this third tome, Genette pioneered the theoretical triangle that links story, narrative and narration, allowing him to explain nested narratives, how the narrator situates itself in terms of the diegesis and concepts such as the metalepsis. I read this for a seminar on Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, taught by a modern literature specialist named Christine Pouzoulet, and it led onto Modern Fiction, A Room of One’s Own, and all the rest by Woolf, Proust, Joyce, Beckett… I dunno. Genette’s writing is just timeless to me. I can still see myself unpicking his French in the amber university library, the rain pounding outside, oblivious to the world. Figures III is the base of understanding fiction as a general theme, not only modernism. And I’m pretty generous with my books, but I’d never give this to anyone.

It already seems so long ago. I finished the masters in June and passed the souténance with the novel I wrote in the second year, and now I’m trying to get it published while putting together a games writing portfolio and researching games narrative design, making videos, podcasting, reconnecting with people I haven’t spoken to for nearly a decade and preparing for to potentially start a doctorate next year. I’ll write another novel soon.

Looking back at these books is accompanied by an unpleasant sort of personal telescoping. It forces me to consider the person I was before, and what was, on occasion, an excruciating transition. I’m 51 years old and I honestly have no idea what’s next. But, as narrative theory tells us, there’s no story, or progress, without uncertainty, conflict and risk. The books on this shelf are a reminder that I’d always lived in a state of permanent revolution, and I’ve no intention of stopping here. If not, what would I write about?

Patrick Garratt is a writer, French-English translator and audiovisuel creative. He is the author of Deg (2016, Urbane Publications) and the cofounder of British videogames website VG247.com. His film work has recently been featured on France 3. He lives in Montpellier, France, with his family.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. If you are interested in sharing a shelfie, please let us know.