Fjords Reviews

HOME | BOOK REVIEWS | Someone's Trying To Find You by Marc Augé
Someone's Trying To Find You by Marc Augé

 

 

Fjords Review, Someone's Trying To Find You - Marc Auge

January 21, 2015

Someone's Trying To Find You
Marc Augé

Seagull Books-University of Chicago Press, 2015
152 pages
ISBN 9780857422439

 

by Charles Ross

 

If a mysterious stranger approached you and said that someone was looking for you, what would you do? Most people would turn and walk away, but in Marc Augé’s novel, protagonist Julian Arnauld is intrigued. Perhaps it’s because he genuinely curious about the stranger’s intentions–a young woman named Claire—or it’s simply because he finds her to be stunningly beautiful and his masculine drive can’t say no to her. Julian doesn’t seem to know which it is either, but he chooses to trust her, and throughout the novel a curious sense of mystery develops.

Claire is a narrative psychologist, which is a real area of study, but the way she goes about her profession is all her own. A client who is interested in reconnecting with an old acquaintance will hire her, then she interviews both the client and the other person and tells them whether or not they should meet. Claire can’t reveal the identity of the person looking for Julian, but he must recount various stories from his past if he wants a chance of finding out whom it could be. Unable to resist the possibilities, Julian agrees to meet with Claire and discuss his life. In some ways, this novel is a mystery story, since Julian is trying to figure out who could possibly want to see him. There’s Julian’s ex-wife, who he hasn’t spoken to in years and couldn’t imagine a reason she’d want to see him. Then there’s another woman who he had a brief, but passionate love affair with in his younger days while in Berlin. She’s the one he’d like to see. At the same time though, there lingers the question of what Claire’s true intentions are, and why she is so interested in 1968?

Marc Augé’s background as an anthropologist made me expect Someone’s Trying to Find You to be interesting in an academic sense, which was certainly the case, but I was surprised by how engrossing the narrative was. The mysteries surrounding Claire and the person looking for Julian made it hard to stop reading, and it helps that both Claire and Julian are so endearing. Claire is young and still fairly innocent, though she’s frustrated with her career. Julian on the other hand is in his sixties and retired from teaching, and he seems rather content with how things have turned out. Much of the novel involves Julian revisiting the past, but the novel doesn’t fall into the cliché of an old man sadly looking back at his failures. Julian does feel slight regret that a brief romance in Berlin never amounted to anything, and that his life has become a bit too routine. That’s why he seems so welcome to Claire’s entrance into his life–she adds something new and exciting, as well as the possibility of revisiting a past love.

A little more than halfway through the book the mystery behind Claire is revealed, and at first I felt that Augé might have pulled the trigger too soon. I wondered what the point of reading on was, since there wasn’t a great deal pulling it forward for a bit afterwards. Quickly though, I realized that the mystery surrounding Claire was yet to be finished, and then characters from Julian’s youth appear to make for a surprising, yet believable, ending.

Someone’s Trying to Find You is more than just a mystery novel. At one point in the book, Claire says about all of our pasts, “Quite often they come to nothing...They don’t have an ending. We feel crippled and hurt by them, because we can’t really manage to shake them off.” The real heart of this story is that Julian is trying to make sense of his own past, “to shake it off” and find meaning in the present. With this novel, Marc Augé poignantly shows what it’s like to be a man nearing the end of his life.

Archives

Hush by Nikki Ummel

Alexis Rhone Fancher’s Erotic: New and Selected Poems

Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

The Death of Sitting Bear by N. Scott Momaday

WHILE YOU WERE GONE BY SYBIL BAKER

MY STUNT DOUBLE BY TRAVIS DENTON

Made by Mary by Laura Catherine Brown

THE RAVENMASTER: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London

Children of the New World By Alexander Weinstein

Canons by Consensus by Joseph Csicsila

And Then by Donald Breckenridge

Dear Everyone by Matt Shears

Magic City Gospel by Ashley M. Jones

Intimacy by Stanley Crawford

Lunch Poems by Deborah Kuan

The Best American Poetry 2016

One with the Tiger by Steven Church

Crosstalk by Connie Willis

The King of White Collar Boxing by David Lawrence

They Were Coming for Him by Berta Vias-Mahou

Verse for the Averse: a Review of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry

That Other Me by Maha Gargash

Simone by Eduardo Lalo

Swimming by Karl Luntt

Ghost/ Landscape by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher

Enchantment Lake by Margi Preus

Bad Light by Carlos Castán

Diaboliques by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly

Staying Alive by Laura Sims

Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo

Fireflies by John Leland

Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans

Tender the Maker by Christina Hutchkins

Little Anodynes by Jon Pineda

Conjuror by Holly Sullivan McClure

The Four Corners of Palermo by Giuseppe Di Piazza

Now You Have Many Legs to Stand On by Ashley-Elizabeth Best

The Darling by Lorraine M. López

How To Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes

Watershed Days: Adventures (A Little Thorny and Familiar) in the Home Range by Thorpe Moeckel

[INSERT] BOY by Danez Smith

Demigods on Speedway by Aurelie Sheehan

Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg

Singing Bones by Kate Schmitt

Knuckleball by Tom Pitts

Wandering Time by Luis Alberto Urrea

Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail by Ralph Hamilton

Domenica Martinello: The Abject in the Interzones

Control Bird Alt Delete by Alexandria Peary

Twelve Clocks by Julie Sophia Paegle

Love You To a Pulp by C.S. DeWildt

Even Though I Don’t Miss You by Chelsea Martin

Women by Chloe Caldwell

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

ESSAY 2:12 A.M. by Kat Meads

Revising The Storm by Geffrey Davis

Quality Snacks by Andy Mozina

Midnight in Siberia by David Greene

Strings Attached by Diane Decillis

Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging by Joshua Dolezal

The New Testament by Jericho Brown

You Don't Know Me by James Nolan

Phoning Home: Essays by Jacob M. Appel

Words We Might One Day Say by Holly Karapetkova

Murder by Danielle Collobert

American Neolithic by Terence Hawkins

Sorrow by Catherine Gammon

The Americans by David Roderick

Put Your Hands In by Chris Hosea

I Think I Am in Friends-Love With You by Yumi Sakugawa

Third Wife by Jiri Klobouk

box of blue horses by Lisa Graley

Review of Hilary Plum’s They Dragged Them Through the Streets

The Sleep of Reason by Morri Creech

The Hush before the Animals Attack by Carol Matos

Regina Derieva, In Memoriam by Frederick Smock

Review of The House Began to Pitch by Kelly Whiddon

Hill William by Scott McClanahan

Seamus Heaney Aloft

The Bounteous World by Frederick Smock

Review of The Tide King by Jen Michalski

Going Down by Chris Campanioni

Review of Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade by Rob Cook

Review of The Day Judge Spencer Learned the Power of Metaphor

Review of The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish

Review of Life Cycle Poems by Dena Rash Guzman

Review of Saint X by Kirk Nesset

Review of Jessica Treadway's Please Come Back to Me

Eve Asks by Christine Redman-Waldeyer