Let's get weird! One of my favourite genres which I didn't know existed until recently is "new weird" which is more or less a revival of the genre "weird fiction", which I also did not know existed. Weird fiction is pretty much a story that has a bit of an eerie/horror atmosphere and a supernatural element to it but it's not really horror in the traditional sense. New weird might also incorporate sci-fi/fantasy elements.
Can I recommend any books? I don’t know. It’s a weird genre. When you see it you know it and so far, on the top of my head, I’ve only seen it in Jeff Vandermeer’s novels (new weird). Why am I talking about this? Because the book I have for you today is part of the weird fiction genre and it’s a doozy!
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| ★★★☆☆ (rating for both) |
“He was perfectly conscious of the absurdity of his behavior, but he was incapable of changing it. This absurdity was an essential part of him. It was probably the most basic element of his personality.”
“Lying in bed with his eyes open, he searched the shadows around him, trying to find some steadying, reassuring objects. But the reality was at least as threatening as the nightmares. Having swallowed up all of the familiar shapes of the furniture, the darkness took on the aspect of some unearthly challenge: within this nothingness something monstrous and unknown was surely being spawned. The room had become a kind of breeding ground for monsters.”
The Book: Let It Rain Red Flags
Let me start by saying that as I am reading the quotes on Goodreads and posting them here I get the feeling that the Romanian translation really did not do justice to Topor’s prose. Either that, or I wasn’t in the right mood for the book.
The book follows Trelkovsky, a Parisian of Polish descent, who is looking for an apartment to rent in a time and age when apartments are hard to find, but luckily he heard about an apartment that just became vacant because the previous tenant committed suicide. I mean… red flag!
Trelkovsky is trying to get the apartment, meets a few neighbours, meets a few people who knew the previous tenant and stuff happens. You know how a book usually goes.
“He had lived so many years in this room that he still could not quite grasp the idea that now it was finished. He would never again see this place which had been the very centre of his life. Others would come into it, destroy the order of things that existed now, transform these four walls into something he would not even recognize, and kill off forever any lingering assumption that a certain Monsieur Trelkovsky had lived here before. Unceremoniously, from one day to the next, he would have vanished.”
The Film: Weakness and Paranoia
The Tenant (1976) is directed by Roman Polanski and it is part of his Apartment trilogy (alongside Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby), although somewhat different compared with the first two (I’ve only seen Rosemary’s Baby, so this is mostly what I read online) because The Tenant leaves us not knowing exactly what to believe. Are there really supernatural elements at the centre of the story or are we just witnessing Trelkovsky descent into madness?
There are many things about the film that I really enjoyed - the music, the set, the decor, the clothes, the architecture. Every shot is stunning. The main theme deals with being a weak person and what that entails - being too shy, too polite, too careful not to bother your neighbours, taken to such extremes that all there’s left is paranoia. Isabell Adjani was gorgeous, and while Polanski himself had great moments in the film, overall I wasn’t sold on his performance.
I also felt like the film was lacking the usual suspense that I did feel at times when reading the book. The atmosphere was just not it.
The Two of Them Together
It follows the book closely and both the author and director have Polish roots and focus on the idea of not really belonging - in the apartment, the city, the country… Surprisingly the only other neighbours who seem to not get along with the majority also have a strange accent. Coincidence?
“When he lifted the cover of one of the trash cans, before emptying the contents of his own pail into it, he was always astonished by its neatness and order. His own trash was the most indecent collection in the entire building. Repugnant and despicable. There was no resemblance between it and the honest, day-to-day trash of the other tenants. That had a solid, respectable appearance, and his did not.”