For all its eccentricity and absurdism, the French poet Laura Vazquez’s debut novel, The Endless Week, grounds itself in the familiar. The quotidian is its object and its adversary. From this Vazquez gleans her speculative material, which could be classified as the hidden life of things and people, a series of micro-inquiries into objects, rooms, body parts, names, terrors and thoughts. Rarely have I read a novel in which so much of what I take for granted – bathrooms, whales, shadows, DMs – is shown to ferry messages from eternity. This is a novel that fabricates its own struts and connectors, a deep (and deeply anxious) inventory of modern subjectivity that feels more contemporary – and less self-satisfied – than any so-called ‘internet novel’ I’ve yet read.
Vazquez was born in Perpignan in 1986, part of the generation (my own) that can remember life before the internet, albeit hazily. She has published some six acclaimed poetry collections. Most recently she wrote an epic poem – running to 400 pages – titled Le Livre du large et du long (2023), almost entirely via the Notes app on her phone, as well as a tragic play, Zero (2023). She has spoken of her passion for Lucretius’s De rerum natura, and her work shares something of that long poem’s abiding fascination with phenomena – animal and vegetable life, the composition of bodies, cosmology, how we live and die. The operations of the world both fascinate and offend her, yielding either ambiguous transcendence or, more often, exquisite revulsion.
The Endless Week is the first of Vazquez’s two novels to appear in English. Ably translated by Alex Niemi, it follows Salim, a poet, and his sister, Sara, as they navigate the mutually reinforcing crises of their home life. There is a grandmother dying of an excruciating illness; a father in the midst of a mental breakdown; a mother who abandoned the family some time before; and the enduring malaise of their own radically online existences. With their grandmother at last approaching her end, the siblings set out with Salim’s friend, Jonathan, to locate their mother and somehow save the family. If these elements sound like the trappings of a realist family drama, rest assured The Endless Week is anything but. The trio’s quest expands and contracts, taking in technology, addiction, anomie, worlds real and virtual, and the troubling inability to distinguish between them. It is an odyssey of the terminally online, rife with paranoiac Google searches and Wikipedia holes, and pitch perfect in its depictions of those painful breaches when we re-emerge into the glare of the actual.
The novel offers a triptych of narrative perspectives. Though there are subtle differentiations – Salim posts found poems, for instance, whereas Sara shares her anarchic spoken-word performances – each occupies a similar register. Salim, Sara and Jonathan are primarily domestic creatures. They spend a great deal of time in their rooms on their phones. Each exists in a hermetic world of private inquiry, launching their shallow investigations with crippling frequency. This is not the fecund curiosity of the autodidact, the doer, the builder, the intellectual striver. In effect they ask questions of the world in lieu of living in it and this both contributes to their debilitation and ensures ever more questions will be asked as surrogate meaning-makers, time-wasters or existential bromides. The internet here exists as a sort of faint perpetual buzzing, a white-noise machine for lost souls.
Their questions are anatomically curious (‘Does the heart determine our appearance?’), sometimes morbidly so (‘Do dead people have erections?’), and often stoner-adjacent (‘Where does the past exist?’). Each is freighted with some potent anxiety, spooling out into page-long circuits of suspicion and concern. Shorter Google queries – ‘Laugh’, ‘Cell’, ‘Old man sobbing’, ‘Animal blood’ – segue into digressive monologues:
He’d thought of the difference between each illness. He’d thought of the differences between each idea. He’d thought of the differences between each person, the varieties of hair, the varieties of skin, the shapes of fingernails, the sizes of eyes, the muscles, the lengths of muscles, the lengths of bones, senses of smell and hearing, vision that changes from one person to the next. We say: Look at this blue object, but we don’t see the same colour, we don’t see the same shape, we don’t see the same object. A colour doesn’t exist. Blue doesn’t exist. It can’t exist.
Answers are beside the point; it is questions alone that give these characters their provisional shape. The search is a kind of mania, a rosary for the brain-rotted, its repetition very nearly without meaning.
Their unnamed father is not nearly as online, though just as sapped of purpose and vitality. (His only use of the internet appears to be sending his children lists of ‘things to remember’. Example: ‘Death will deliver you from all the people who annoy you.’) He obsessively cleans their home, as if a spotless kitchen might grant the family access to some longed-for purity. Vazquez can sometimes play him off as a sad clown with his impotent hectoring and unpredictable habits. But he is to my mind the most tragic character in the novel, a man abandoned by his wife, terrified by his children’s inability to cope or function and steeling himself to lose his mother. His harrowing moments of private desperation stand out amid the novel’s otherwise solipsistic meditations: ‘Sometimes, the father was silent. That was all. Sometimes, the father would try to turn himself off like a light bulb. He turned off the bulb. He tried to turn himself off along with the bulb. Sometimes, the father could understand what it meant to be a corpse.’
Vazquez writes in short, declarative sentences that quickly pile up into surprising structures. It is a prose style that easily mingles humour and horror, the whole of it marbled with subtle but utterly convincing melancholy. Her writing is difficult to quote because its effect is always cumulative and tied to a madcap sense of pace. Individual sentences may lack beauty or profundity but only because they are waypoints, the breadcrumbs of some larger assemblage of meaning or perception. They possess the brisk, energized, granular observation of Adderall-heightened attention. (Jonathan pops pills throughout the novel, at one point suffering a horrific panic attack.) It can at times give The Endless Week a cartoonish surface, an impossible elasticity governing the characters’ thoughts and actions. But such distortion is inseparable from the experience of their daily lives. The text’s absurdist qualities – think Beckett’s virtuosic stalling or the vaudevillian pessimism of Barthelme – throw the grounded agony of its characters into ever starker relief.
When the trio at last sets out, it is hardly in the manner of a grand quest. Rather, they meander through a nameless city, sit on stoops and fountain ledges, have aberrant conversations with transients and neighbours, take photos, write poems and ask their phones various questions. The format is episodic and haphazard, divided into sections with titles like ‘999 SHATTERED BOWLS’ and ‘YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH.’ These sequences are interspersed with scenes from the family home (where the father frets and cleans) or the hospital where the grandmother’s nurses discuss death, pain and dreams.
Given the amount of time spent inside the cloister of the phone, these IRL social interactions offer welcome effervescence, each interlude fringed with its own particular danger or menace. Salim, Sara and Jonathan meet an older man who claims to have invented rap and another who sees lassos in the sky. They discuss the miraculous with Jonathan’s highly agitated roommate. Later, an alcoholic woman insults Salim’s poetry. In each instance, the visceral confrontation of life moves to the fore, an untameable, unanswerable energy that pointedly contrasts with the benumbed glow of the screen. In these exchanges, the trio does not have time to search, question, digress or pontificate. They are pressed against the hot surface of the world. Such confrontation braces even when it doesn’t clarify.
Their quest, such as it is, ends in failure. Salim finds his mother on a farm through which he and Jonathan wander amid the nightmarish ambience of industrial agriculture. The meeting is tense and dreamlike, perhaps existing only in Salim’s mind. ‘You can’t really know your parents’, his mother tells him. ‘When you arrive, they’ve already lived, they’ve already changed. You get here too late, you can’t meet them where they are.’ After being summarily dismissed, the pair leave with a crying calf they discover in one of the farm’s stalls. They kill it, mercifully, by feeding it Jonathan’s pills one at a time: ‘Its mouth was sweet and burning hot. Salim said: Look, it’s like he’s swallowing all the suffering. It’s like he’s swallowing all the suffering in the world.’
The Endless Week is about that suffering: its free distribution among platforms that profit from its existence; its addictive reinforcement; the deranging passivity it induces. But the novel’s infrequent moments of impetuosity – when the trio dares to touch, or remember, or create or hope – serve as tender and humane rejoinders. Vazquez has created a unique and enduring novel. Something hard and real and tangible glitters amid the vapour of text and image she describes. It’s there in the resigned words of Salim and Sara’s father, a half-joke, the human wince within an emoji grin: ‘We know that people disappear. That’s all.’
Read on: Terry Eagleton, ‘Political Beckett?’, NLR 40.