Edition: U.S. / Global

Books in Brief: FICTION;Perfecting the Art of Psychosis

Published: April 14, 1996

In his clever and incisive novel, NAMING THE JUNGLE (New Press, $18.95), the French writer Antoine Volodine follows the remembered and invented lives of Fabian Golpiez, a man "rich in cowardice," as he struggles to get by in the post-revolutionary society of Puesto Libertad, a prototypical Latin American city surrounded by jungle and mystery. Since his survival strategy involves feigning mental illness, Fabian must undergo a unique therapy at the not-too-gentle hands of Dr. Gonalves, a combination shaman and psychiatrist who practices in the requisitioned office of a "disappeared" dentist. Sitting in the dental chair, surrounded by drills and other implements of the trade, the patient spins out tales that are part memory and part contrivance, all designed to maintain his status as "a psychotic with severe and intractable disabilities." It is not easy work, for the doctor demands quality stories: "These standard hallucinations! Vibrating canoes, anacondas! Old hat! Rivers fermenting beneath their cargo of leaves. . . . Always the same junk! Sexual symbolism for half-wits!" Obediently, Fabian digs deeper, inventing and reinventing himself, winding his way through love affairs, shootouts and voyages of exploration and discovery until finally, traveling upriver toward the source of his imaginings, he appears to invent Dr. Gonalves himself. In Linda Coverdale's spirited translation, "Naming the Jungle" (which is the first of Mr. Volodine's books to be published in English) emphasizes the uncertainties of the characters and their jumbled lives by placing them in an especially well-defined world. The therapy Fabian goes through to maintain his supposed craziness involves establishing an Indian identity by naming the plants and creatures of the jungle. Only the people remain hard to pin down. But that uncertainty, that refusal to locate themselves, Mr. Volodine suggests, is precisely what makes them worth caring about. James Polk