Reading time: 5 minutes

Image: Book cover of *Farewell, Monsieur Gaston* by Iva Sasheva

In every city you inevitably stumble upon those magical bookstores where time stands still and the books actually speak to you. Exactly that happened to me in the Elephant Bookstore in Sofia, Bulgaria. Pavel, the owner, and I quickly engaged in a conversation through a mutual love for Richard Cheese’s lounge rendition of Down With The Sickness (originally by the metalband Disturbed) which played when I entered the store and immediately put a big smile on my face.

After an engaging and fun conversation, my eyes were drawn to a book where strange beings on both sides of the cover filled my organism with a vague sense of familiarity. Then, through the blurb it spoke to me, ending with the sentence: “We run our own show, monsieur, I had always expected it. We are the actors, the text, the mise en scène, and the audience at once.” Never had a book convinced me more to pick it up and dive into it, head first.

Every day we change seamlessly from one role into another in an endless flow of alternating characters. We move effortlessly from parent to spouse, from offspring to classmate, from friend to employee, from manager to musician. Every role requires its own distinct way of thinking and acting (or: persona), and often also its own particular garments.

Now, which one of them is the real you?

The mystical question: who am I? lies at the heart of the Nikolai Grozni’s brilliant novel Farewell, Monsieur Gaston, which, by virtue of being categorically a Dionysian Mystery, plays out in the realms outside of our rational consciousness, where Nature’s spontaneity and irrationality rule. We are invited to take our seats in an ancient Greek amphitheatre, where the chorus leader, with all the sarcasm and fiendish trickery of a circus ringmaster, together with his chorus of Thracian Bacchants, take us by the hand into a mystery which is neither comedy nor tragedy, neither here nor there, neither in the past nor in the future, neither real nor unreal.

The story takes off in a grotesquely violent and sunless realm. It tracks the journey of an ill-fated Hero robbed of his most valuable possession: his self. Inhibited by a sinister and odd group of beings, he learns about the four rules of the realm which he must memorize and obey, lest havoc will be unleashed upon him.

Illustration: Iva Sasheva. Image: author.

His quest, then, is to find out who he is, and essentially Farewell, Monsieur Gaston is Grozni’s version of The Hero’s Journey as we know it so well from the realm of mythology. According to the classical pianist Christopher O’Riley, the novel is: “Part Greek tragedy, part invocation of Greek mythology, part Grand Guignol of endless nightmare,[1] part Jungian individuation, part live Tarot divination. It's a book of constant fascination and fantasy, of velocipedes and passageways and rooftop plunges to escape man-eating birds; an infinite Masque of horror-filled pageantry and betrayal, where reality and persona are never assured. The byzantine bizarre imagery is abetted (though never superceded) by illustrations from Iva Sasheva. The dreamlike and poetic style of prose is never too far from reality: at times, it seems as though we are not in an alternate world of endless night, but instead in the coruscating fantasy and hallucination of present day madness.”

To prove O’Riley’s point, Grozni abundantly uses the deceptive nature of language to make the Hero’s head spin, just like today we are being bombarded with deceptive language to make us buy, think, believe, and do, what others want us to. But how ‘other’ are those others really, and how ‘me’ am I? According to a stilted, midget harlequin:

“You are I to you, and you to me; he to someone else, they when you are with those others, we when you are with us and it when you’re dead. Is there ever a moment when you could just be yourself, monsieur?”

Moreover, pretty much every philosophical and religious tradition teaches that in order to find our true self, we need to die to our false self first. But it’s exactly those false selves, our social roles, or masks, that keep us more or less sane in our ordinary everyday life, as the harlequin aptly states:

“If I put on a hat and a uniform of a genderme and tuck a baton in my belt, I can knock on all the doors around the campo, arrest everyone inside and tell them to stand naked under a fig tree with their fingers up their noses, and everyone would comply. If I tried to do this without the disguise, they’d give me a horrible thrashing. In other words, if you wear the appropriate disguise, people will buy fish from you, give you their money, and even surrender their freedom. But if you wear your own persona and pretend to be you, they’ll kill you. It’s very straightforward.”

A striking example of one who got killed for wearing his own persona is Jesus Christ, but the list is long. That is because as soon as we find out who we really are, all our anxiety falls away. Completely fearless beings put anxiety into others, particularly those in powerful places because their means of intimidation cease to have any effect on the fearless. Therefore those enlightened beings[2] are often demonized as subversive, and in that way the populace is turned against them. Gee, doesn’t that sound familiar?

Grozni, thus, keeps us staring into the mirrors of our own masks which represent all the different roles we have taught ourselves to play. And as long as we have not realised our true selves, it’s exactly the πρόσωπα (prósopa),[3] our social masks, that provide the sense of security in a world we simply do not understand. Or, to put it differently: when physicians wear pink tutu’s, police officers walk around in scrubs, and judges en masse put on the jester’s cap and bells, there really is nothing anymore to hold on to and we end up in a world like the one so delightfully depicted in this novel.

Farewell, Monsieur Gaston combines superb storytelling with mystical truths. It provides magical and mythical entertainment with food for thought and many aha-experiences for the spiritual seekers among us, in worlds and realms that we know all too well from the abysses of our own minds. I strongly suggest to let yourself be enchanted by this masterpiece.

Jolly reading,
Erik

Notes:

[1] Grand Guignol is a French theatre genre known for its violent and shocking plays, often with horror and comedy elements. The genre is named after the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris, where this style of theatre was performed from 1897 onwards.

[2] Enlightened as in being liberated from the burden of anxiety.

[3] The Greek word πρόσωπον (prosopon, meaning person, mask and face) was used by actors in ancient Greek theatre for the mask with which to show the audience which role they were going to perform (Hero, Villain, etc.), and contained a special mouthpiece to amplify their voices.

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Nikolai Grozni: Farewell, Monsieur Gaston (book review)

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