What do you think?
Rate this book
Television
The amusingly odd protagonist and narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel is an academic on sabbatical in Berlin to work on his book about Titian. With his research completed, all he has left to do is sit down and write. Unfortunately, he can't decide how to refer to his subject—Titian, le Titien, Vecellio, Titian Vecellio—so instead he starts watching TV continuously, until one day he decides to renounce the most addictive of twentieth-century inventions.
As he spends his summer still not writing his book, he is haunted by television, from the video surveillance screens in a museum to a moment when it seems everyone in Berlin is tuned in to Baywatch.
One of Toussaint's funniest antiheroes, the protagonist of Television turns daily occurrences into an entertaining reflection on society and the influence of television on our lives.
As he spends his summer still not writing his book, he is haunted by television, from the video surveillance screens in a museum to a moment when it seems everyone in Berlin is tuned in to Baywatch.
One of Toussaint's funniest antiheroes, the protagonist of Television turns daily occurrences into an entertaining reflection on society and the influence of television on our lives.
164 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
About the author
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
68 books172 followersJean-Philippe Toussaint (born 29 November, 1957, Brussels) is a Belgian prose writer and filmmaker. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and he has had his photographs displayed in Brussels and Japan. Toussaint won the Prix Médicis in 2005 for his novel Fuir. The 2006 book La mélancolie de Zidane (Paris: Minuit, 2006) is a lyrical essay on the headbutt administered by the French football player Zinedine Zidane to the Italian player Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final in Berlin. An English translation was published in 2007 in the British journal New Formations. His 2009 novel La Vérité sur Marie won the prestigious Prix Décembre.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 68 reviews
Read
September 25, 2021
Here's a book that's a curious combination of subject matter – procrastination and television - signature Jean-Philippe Tourssaint with his idea of mobilizing the novel as a cultural form by what he terms an “intimate exchange."
The narrator of Television, a man I’ll call Hugo, announces on the very first page he quit watching television, once and for all, not only shows but also sports.
We’re in Berlin, following our forty-year-old scholar on sabbatical as he sets out to write a work on Titian with a specific focus: the relationship of art to politics as illuminated by a documented historical incident: Emperor Charles V bending down to pick up a paintbrush the maestro dropped when Charles V entered his studio.
Alas, there’s a small problem: Hugo is in a writer’s funk – he can’t progress beyond the first two words. As I turned the pages of Television, two quotes about procrastination popped into my mind: “To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.“ and “You cannot plow a field by turning it over in your mind.”
What Hugo can do is engage in miscellaneous activities to fill his time, things like watering his upstairs neighbors' plants, swimming nude at a Berlin park, join a friend for dinner, join that same friend on an airplane ride over Berlin – and reflect on what it means for an entire society to be flooded by the omnipresent reality of TV. And he has plenty of time on his hands since his pregnant wife and five-year-old son are off to Italy for vacation.
Yet again another reason Television is a curious read: the exact sequence of unfolding events leading up to the return of Hugo's family to Berlin does not appear to have much weight; in other words, rearrange the occurrences and nothing much would change - postmodern leveling in action.
What does make the novel a captivating read are the glimmerings contained within each scene - usually tinged with the humor, irony and absurdity that go along with modern living. As by way of example, in no particular order, here's a bunch I count among my favorites:
Boob Tube, One - “However reluctant I was to admit it, there was no getting around the fact that, ever since I’d gradually begun to turn forty years old, I was no longer physically up to five sets of tennis.” Oddly enough, Hugo is referring not to actually playing five sets of tennis but watching five sets of tennis on television. For me, a memorable instance of Jean-Philippe wry humor.
He goes on to admit over the years his TV watching became an addiction - he'd simply settle in to watch any show, any news, any documentary, any discussion: scholar as ultimate coach potato. “I was debasing myself in these long sessions before the screen, unable to drop the remote, mechanically and frenetically changing channels in a quest for sordid and immediate pleasures, swept up in that vain inertia, that insatiable spiral, searching for ever more vileness, still more sadness.” Oh, no! Even worse than a coach potato, Hugo the scholar, art historian and refined aesthete admits his TV watching has reduced him to a voyeur chasing his next hit of violence and anguish as if a jaded Roman spectator at the Colosseum.
Water Can Man - Uwe and Inge, the couple in the upstairs apartment, ask Hugo to tend to their plants while they're away on summer vacation. They lead Hugo from room to room, offering precise instruction on what is to be done, introducing Hugo to each plant in turn, Inge notifying the plants in German that Hugo will be looking after them, to which our art historian remarks to himself that he's always a little surprised to meet a plant that speaks German.
On one trip up the stairs in his pajamas, watering can in hand, Hugo encounters a odd looking chap tiptoeing down the steps hauling a gym bag filled with stereo parts and silverware. He wonders if he's witnessing a burglary. Several minutes later, peering down from the balcony, he sees the same chap and a woman loading the gym bag in a van and overhears their conversation about a bald guy in pajamas carrying a watering can. Both are laughing so hard they nearly topple to the ground. If you're looking for a little drama in the novel, this scene might qualify as the most dramatic.
Boob Tube, Two - “When artists represent reality, they do so in order to take in the outside world and grasp its essence, while television, if it represents reality, does so in and of itself, unintentionally you might say, through sheer technical determinism, or incontinence.” Thanks, Hugo! If you can't write, you can at least luxuriate in a bit of philosophizing.
A painting is “by its nature fundamentally different from the illusion offered by television when it represents reality, the purely mechanical result of an uninhibited technology.” Echoes of Walter Benjamin's famous essay on the elimination of that special aura surrounding works of art when a society is bombarded by reproductions via photography and such gizmos as TV.
Keeping on topic, my own observation: there are works of art retaining their full aura even in our highly technological 21st century: novels! I suspect Jean-Philippe is making this point in his own sly way.
Gift From The Gods - Late one evening, all the lights out in his apartment, Hugo stands at his window and beholds a vision of beauty - a young woman, a student he's seen in the neighborhood, is stark naked in her fourth floor apartment across the street. This vision of svelte loveliness prompts Hugo to recall the nudes from German Renaissance painters such as Lucas Cranach the Elder. A single instance among many: even with all the television, Hugo likens what he sees around him to great paintings - most refreshing for a reader.
Boob Tube, Three - There are numerous additional ruminations revolving around television viewing: never ask people directly about their TV watching as nobody wants to admit how many hours they spend in front of the idiot box; unlike CDs or books, never ask if you can borrow someone's TV; the debasement of life via TV, as when an American reporter stuck a microphone in front of a young man who just committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. "Why did you do it?" The young man "feebly raising his hand heavenward in the manner of both Plato's august pose in The School of Athens and the more enigmatic gesture of Leonardo da Vinci's Saint John the Baptist, painfully extended the middle finger of his right hand toward the camera and murmured "Fuck you."
Amusing Conversation - While standing nude on a lawn in Halensee Park, Hugo is introduced to Cees Nooteboom by the gent who provided him the grant money for his Titian project in the first place (both men are completely dressed). When Hugo is asked if he would like to join them for lunch, he answers he can't since he has work to do. Ha! I'm sure you do, Hugo.
Thank you, Dalkey Archive Press. In addition to a fine English translation by Jordan Stump, there's an Afterword authored by Warren Motte offering insights into Jean-Philippe Toussaint's literary aesthetic. Count me in as a new fan - a number of the Belgian author's other novels are up for reading and reviewing.
Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, born 1957
August 29, 2013
Sigh, I harbor such hopes. My focus is so soon to sparkle and then, bam, my attentions/intentions dip or are upheaved. There I go. August was quite good to me. I loved every line of Javier Marias. I knew the Premier League was upon me and I thought I would maintain this bliss with Traveler of the Century and that didn't happen. Distractions piled. Football (soccer) was blooming and suddenly. I was lost. It didn't help that the heat normally associated with August finally arrived. Honestly I picked up Television because it had been resting behind me. It was of those ranks of tomes acquired but not yet shelved. They remain legion.
Television served as perfect mirror for my fortysomething floundering. Toussaint finds the painfully beautiful in the quotidian. This a poetics of the everyday. I loved it. I should give this five stars, what was I thinking? I'll likely correct that after I water our flowers.
Television served as perfect mirror for my fortysomething floundering. Toussaint finds the painfully beautiful in the quotidian. This a poetics of the everyday. I loved it. I should give this five stars, what was I thinking? I'll likely correct that after I water our flowers.
November 18, 2010
life in the eurozone! across the pond there's a fabled land, a kingdom beating us into decline and empire's twilight by a scant half-century. they say of it that democratic socialism is a viable political party there, but we're skeptical of the outrageous. rumor also describes a state-subsidized intelligentsia so embedded and entitled it flirts constantly with bourgeois decadence -- before collapsing into spasms of marxist self-flagellation. (our native, barbaric artists dream nightly of immigration.)
from those far shores, a message in a bottle. jean-philippe toussaint's TELEVISION was published in 1997 at the dawn of the internet era -- but, plus ça change, a find-and-replace of the one technology with the other would make a fairly (you could quibble) lossless reprise.
Television is formal beyond all reason, I now told myself as I lay on the Dreschers' bed; twenty-four house a day, it seems to flow along hand in hand with time itself, aping its passage in a crude parody where no moment lasts and everything soon disappears, to the point where you might sometimes wonder where all those images go once they've been broadcast, with no one watching them or remembering them or retaining them, scarcely seen at all, only momentarily skimmed by the viewer's gaze. For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evolving, always-in-progress superficiality (95).
the plot of an academic who gives up tv unfortunately allows toussaint to ocasionally lapse from the art of prose into the (admittedly well-done) rhetoric of cultural criticism.
..."No, no, very little," he said, "more or less never, maybe an opera now and then, or certain old films. But I tape them," he added, "I tape them" (as if the fact that he taped them might somehow soften the reproach that could be leveled against him for watching them).
I'd often observed this kind of quiet, troubled modesty when people were forced to speak of the relationship we all have with television. They seemed to broach the subject in spite of themselves, as if discussing some grave illness which touched their lives not indirectly but on the most intimate level... and even out in the streets, in the cafes, in the buses and subways, on the radio, in the offices, in every conversation the subject was never anything other than television, as if the very basis of conversation, its single visceral material, had become television, and in spite of all this everyone went on looking away, forever denying the gravity of the disease (150-1).
but toussaint is at his most hilarious and at his witty best when describing the familiar tiny tragedies of the pampered intellectual:
Then, my breakfast at an end, as I passed through the chiaroscuro of the apartment to make my way toward the study, I caught a fleeting glimpse of myself in the entryway mirror, and I found this image of me to be rather a true one, that tall, hunched form in the half-lit hallway, a cup of coffee in one hand, advancing at dawn toward the study and its thousand untarnished promises of good work to come. My mind still keenly focused, I switched on the computer, which bade me welcome, sputtering like a coffee maker. I pensively opened the hard drive icon with a quick click of the mouse. Wasting no time, from among the dozen or so vaguely bluish folders that appeared before me in the electronic window I'd opened I selected the file... and opened it with two more quick strokes of my finger over the mouse's clitoris, expertly teasing its little ductile zone. Almost without transition, a vast expanse appeared before on the screen, luminous and grayish. I raised my head, my gaze fixed, and began to think. I took a pensive sip of coffee and set the cup down onto its saucer. But nothing came.
For three weeks now I'd been trying in vain to get down to work (25).
an easy-flowing and beautifully lazy(-seeming) writer, toussaint's charming slyness at times distracts from a (perhaps purposeful) shallowness. up for grabs is how much that's mitigated by the fact we live in shallow times.
from those far shores, a message in a bottle. jean-philippe toussaint's TELEVISION was published in 1997 at the dawn of the internet era -- but, plus ça change, a find-and-replace of the one technology with the other would make a fairly (you could quibble) lossless reprise.
Television is formal beyond all reason, I now told myself as I lay on the Dreschers' bed; twenty-four house a day, it seems to flow along hand in hand with time itself, aping its passage in a crude parody where no moment lasts and everything soon disappears, to the point where you might sometimes wonder where all those images go once they've been broadcast, with no one watching them or remembering them or retaining them, scarcely seen at all, only momentarily skimmed by the viewer's gaze. For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evolving, always-in-progress superficiality (95).
the plot of an academic who gives up tv unfortunately allows toussaint to ocasionally lapse from the art of prose into the (admittedly well-done) rhetoric of cultural criticism.
..."No, no, very little," he said, "more or less never, maybe an opera now and then, or certain old films. But I tape them," he added, "I tape them" (as if the fact that he taped them might somehow soften the reproach that could be leveled against him for watching them).
I'd often observed this kind of quiet, troubled modesty when people were forced to speak of the relationship we all have with television. They seemed to broach the subject in spite of themselves, as if discussing some grave illness which touched their lives not indirectly but on the most intimate level... and even out in the streets, in the cafes, in the buses and subways, on the radio, in the offices, in every conversation the subject was never anything other than television, as if the very basis of conversation, its single visceral material, had become television, and in spite of all this everyone went on looking away, forever denying the gravity of the disease (150-1).
but toussaint is at his most hilarious and at his witty best when describing the familiar tiny tragedies of the pampered intellectual:
Then, my breakfast at an end, as I passed through the chiaroscuro of the apartment to make my way toward the study, I caught a fleeting glimpse of myself in the entryway mirror, and I found this image of me to be rather a true one, that tall, hunched form in the half-lit hallway, a cup of coffee in one hand, advancing at dawn toward the study and its thousand untarnished promises of good work to come. My mind still keenly focused, I switched on the computer, which bade me welcome, sputtering like a coffee maker. I pensively opened the hard drive icon with a quick click of the mouse. Wasting no time, from among the dozen or so vaguely bluish folders that appeared before me in the electronic window I'd opened I selected the file... and opened it with two more quick strokes of my finger over the mouse's clitoris, expertly teasing its little ductile zone. Almost without transition, a vast expanse appeared before on the screen, luminous and grayish. I raised my head, my gaze fixed, and began to think. I took a pensive sip of coffee and set the cup down onto its saucer. But nothing came.
For three weeks now I'd been trying in vain to get down to work (25).
an easy-flowing and beautifully lazy(-seeming) writer, toussaint's charming slyness at times distracts from a (perhaps purposeful) shallowness. up for grabs is how much that's mitigated by the fact we live in shallow times.
June 12, 2009
Humorous and philosophical contemporary (1997) French fiction from Les Editions de Minuit, a publishing house born out of the French Resistance during WWII and noted for its catalog of avant-garde and, more recently, postmodern novels. La Television tells the story of a French historian on sabbatical in Berlin, ostensibly to write a study on the artist Titian Vecellio. Late in the novel he realizes that Titian's initials are T.V., an amusing coincidence, since, while his pregnant wife and young son are away in Italy for the summer, he decides to stop watching television. The novel describes in detail his daily routine, which turns out to be one of complete procrastination or writer's block: his "work"-life consists in thinking about his subject while swimming at the local pool, staring for hours at paintings in the Dahlem museum, or sunbathing nude (the local custom) in the park. Tales of the protagonist's misbegotten and entirely negligent role as plant sitter for his upstairs neighbors, away on vacation like most Berliners during the months of July and August, and of a ride in a 3-passenger airplane piloted by a female student of his reading-obsessed friend John (a flight that takes off from a seedy airstrip formerly used by the Nazis and the Soviets), are particularly amusing. Throughout the novel, the central character's definition of "not watching television" slips and shifts as he wrestles with and examines this most pervasive of cultural wastelands and backgrounds, purveyor of what he ultimately classifies as "diverse parasitic information." Although I read La Television in French, it is available in translation as well.
April 23, 2015
Perfect Toussaint. Comic with a touch of Beckett, with a dash of Chaplin. Funny as hell. So funny in fact that it's a little scary. Prose that you can cut apart and still not understand how it works. How is so little so interesting?
October 16, 2021
Review to come.
March 25, 2024
Style et histoire agréables . Si vous cherchez de l'action oubliez ce livre sinon c'est très bien écrit j'ai pensé pour certaines scènes au personnage de Jacques Tati ou au personnage principal dans The Party pour l'humour et le côté attachant du narrateur. Je suis devenue fan de cet auteur depuis peu je ne me lasse pas de ses écrits
October 23, 2015
Je revois très bien le geste que j’ai accompli alors, un geste très simple, très souple, mille fois répété, mon bras qui s’allonge et qui appuie sur le bouton, l’image qui implose et disparaît de l’écran. C’était fini, je n’ai plus jamais regardé la télévision.
C’est lors d’un été passé à Berlin que le narrateur et personnage principal de ce roman a pris cette terrible et irrévocable décision — pour les plus jeunes, il devait probablement disposer d'un modèle de télévision à tube cathodique dépourvu de télécommande ce qui explique la nécessité d’allonger le bras et le phénomène d'implosion observé lors de l’arrêt de l'appareil. Elle occupait depuis quelques temps trop de place dans sa vie. Et du temps il en a besoin puisque cet été il est resté seul, sa famille partie en vacances, pour se consacrer à la rédaction d’un gros essai — il a déjà le tire, ce sera Le pinceau — consacré à Titien. Enfin à Titien ou Titien Vecellio ou Vecelli ou encore Le Titien comme le nommaient certains dont Alfred de Musset. Cette question du nom à employer peut vous sembler anecdotique pourtant elle ne l’est pas. Elle est même très irritante et il faut bien la trancher pour pouvoir s'atteler sereinement à la rédaction. Il ne s’agit pas de faire preuve de la même inconstance que Proust qui tantôt utilisait Titien tout court et tantôt [..] préférai[t] adjoindre un petit article défini devant son prénom et l’appeler le Titien, comme à la campagne — décidément on ne peut se fier à personne.
Ce livre est le récit de cette période de travail (un peu) et de flâneries (beaucoup) agrémenté de réflexions (un peu) et d’humour (beaucoup). L’humour est omniprésent et participe grandement à la légèreté de ce livre. Les séquences sur l’arrosage des plantes (nombreuses) de la famille Drescher m’ont fait éclater de rire à plusieurs reprises.
La touffe, également, paraissait bien pâlotte, toute éteinte et flapie, au regard de celle, fringante, épanouie, que j’avais connue quand Inge [Drescher] m’en avait fait les honneurs.
Je vois déjà les esprits mal tournés qui n’auront pas compris qu’il est question de l’une des plus belle pièce de la collection de plantes des Drescher — la préférée de Inge —, une très belle fougère qui est exposée dans leur chambre à coucher. S’ajoute à l’humour une bonne dose d’autodérision car le narrateur ressemble furieusement à l’auteur de La Salle de bain jusqu’à sa coupe de cheveux très très courte agrémentée d’un duvet de caneton.
Cette façon de ne pas se prendre au sérieux permet à l’auteur d’aborder humblement et de manière fort agréable certaines questions moins futiles comme celle de la place prépondérante de la télévision dans notre vie ou plus simplement celle de la production intellectuelle. Evidemment, le tout est écrit avec beaucoup de talent, c’est un véritable régal de lire ce petit bijou que je conseille vivement. http://www.aubonroman.com/2013/09/la-...
March 6, 2010
In this short novel the Belgian author, Jean-Philippe Toussaint charmed me with his wry comic touch. The book is a humorous view of the effect of television on the lives of some people and how they change as a result. The protagonist of La Télévision makes one of the most daring gestures available to a citizen of our contemporary world: he decides to stop watching television. Television has taken over his life in insidious ways. It has made him a spectator, rather than a doer; he has become indifferent under its influence; he has no time left for reflection. Yet even as he flees from it, television and its simulacra pursue him everywhere he goes. Video surveillance screens in a museum mock him, as do microfiche machines in a library. The philosophy is suspect, but the humor is infectious.
July 12, 2016
I liked a lot of this. A lot of it I liked very much.
A man (the back copy says he's an academic, so I guess he must be) is on a grant in Berlin to write a book about Titian. It's summer. His pregnant wife/partner & son are vacationing in Italy. He's having a little trouble getting started with his writing because he can't decide what name to use for Titian in the text. He quits watching TV. He agrees to water his neighbors' plants. He swims. He hangs out with his friend. He thinks about stuff.
All this I loved. I found it familiar and funny.
Then, it seemed, Toussaint felt the need to get a little plottier and more cohesive, and I was less charmed.
A man (the back copy says he's an academic, so I guess he must be) is on a grant in Berlin to write a book about Titian. It's summer. His pregnant wife/partner & son are vacationing in Italy. He's having a little trouble getting started with his writing because he can't decide what name to use for Titian in the text. He quits watching TV. He agrees to water his neighbors' plants. He swims. He hangs out with his friend. He thinks about stuff.
All this I loved. I found it familiar and funny.
Then, it seemed, Toussaint felt the need to get a little plottier and more cohesive, and I was less charmed.
August 12, 2011
Inspector Clouseau hijinks mixed with a bit of Bernhardian nihilism. I wonder if his humor was aimed at his predecessor Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman which tended to eschew the funny like Camus' Plague.
Been really interested in French post-Existentialist lit lately and am planning on following this up with Michel Houellebecq. I'd recommend anything from Dalkey Archive Press if you want to see what the Europeans are up to. Even when the material is flat I still put the book down with a new perspective. That's what it's all about.
Been really interested in French post-Existentialist lit lately and am planning on following this up with Michel Houellebecq. I'd recommend anything from Dalkey Archive Press if you want to see what the Europeans are up to. Even when the material is flat I still put the book down with a new perspective. That's what it's all about.
October 16, 2016
this guy tells everyone he doesn't watch tv anymore but since they're all middle and upper class intellectual and politicians they respond by saying they don't watch tv, and no one is impressed.
as a person who has been in college for 8 years, i no longer watch television either, and spend my time more profitably watching streaming anime on crunchyroll, or collecting yokai in yokai watch 2.
as a person who has been in college for 8 years, i no longer watch television either, and spend my time more profitably watching streaming anime on crunchyroll, or collecting yokai in yokai watch 2.
December 28, 2009
This is one of my favorite reads in the past five years. I'm not sure why, but I laughed hard and long throughout the novel. Many of my friends who read it did not find it very funny, but it really struck a chord with me. Probably not a flattering thing to admit...
January 6, 2022
Love Toussaint and the weirdly distilled, blatantly human voices of his narrators.
November 22, 2017
A neurotic "writer" (he barely gets any actual writing done) obsesses about not watching television (all though he has all these loopholes) and taking care of his neighbor's plants.
April 19, 2010
An academic acquires a grant to write a book on the painter Titian in Berlin for the summer, while his wife and son vacation in Italy. Early on in his time in Berlin, he decides that television has become too distracting and he swears it off while he works on his book (If this doesn't sound like a pretentious plot, I don't know what does). This proves more difficult than he expected and instead of being distracted by television, our academic quickly finds other ways to procrastinate: swimming, museum gazing, street wandering, single engine airplane flying, etc. And this seems to be the plight of the artist, because his work is never far from his mind:
"I felt a sudden twinge of regret at the thought of having to forgo my work for the day. Truth to tell, it was always this way: the less I thought myself obligated to work, and indeed the more certain the impossibility of working, the more desire to work I felt, and the more capable of working, as if, with the prospect of work receding into the distance, the task shed all its potential torments, simultaneously draping itself in all the many promises of future accomplishment."
And this:
"For the simple reason, it seemed to me, that if you've already extracted all the pleasure from the potential joys of a project before you've begun it, there remain, by the time you get down to it, only the miseries of the act of creation, its burden, its labors."
And that seems about right. The Idea of the thing always feels and looks much better than the Act of the thing...well, sometimes anyway. And of course, the most important thing is the Act, not the Idea, when it comes to writing that is.
This book was written originally in French, circa 1997. Toussaint's views on television are of a very specific kind of television:
"...twenty-four hours a day, it seems to flow along hand in hand with time itself, aping its passage in a crude parody where no moment lasts and everything soon disappears, to the point where you might sometimes wonder where all those images go once they've been broadcast, with no one watching them or remembering them or retaining them, scarely seen at all, only momentarily skimmed by the viewer's gaze. For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evoling, always-in-progress superficiality."
Ok, sure, fine, television can be shockingly bad and requires nothing from us as viewers. But also, television can be really friggin good, at least in the past ten years it has shown it can. And again, this was written in 1997, when television in Belgium (Toussaint's place of origin) was probably really bad, just as it was also really bad here in the U S of A. I mean, come on, 1997, what was on? And I think it's unfair of Toussaint, or his character, to compare books with television. They are two different mediums. It doesn't really work. They offer different pleasures and require different things from their audience.
"I felt a sudden twinge of regret at the thought of having to forgo my work for the day. Truth to tell, it was always this way: the less I thought myself obligated to work, and indeed the more certain the impossibility of working, the more desire to work I felt, and the more capable of working, as if, with the prospect of work receding into the distance, the task shed all its potential torments, simultaneously draping itself in all the many promises of future accomplishment."
And this:
"For the simple reason, it seemed to me, that if you've already extracted all the pleasure from the potential joys of a project before you've begun it, there remain, by the time you get down to it, only the miseries of the act of creation, its burden, its labors."
And that seems about right. The Idea of the thing always feels and looks much better than the Act of the thing...well, sometimes anyway. And of course, the most important thing is the Act, not the Idea, when it comes to writing that is.
This book was written originally in French, circa 1997. Toussaint's views on television are of a very specific kind of television:
"...twenty-four hours a day, it seems to flow along hand in hand with time itself, aping its passage in a crude parody where no moment lasts and everything soon disappears, to the point where you might sometimes wonder where all those images go once they've been broadcast, with no one watching them or remembering them or retaining them, scarely seen at all, only momentarily skimmed by the viewer's gaze. For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evoling, always-in-progress superficiality."
Ok, sure, fine, television can be shockingly bad and requires nothing from us as viewers. But also, television can be really friggin good, at least in the past ten years it has shown it can. And again, this was written in 1997, when television in Belgium (Toussaint's place of origin) was probably really bad, just as it was also really bad here in the U S of A. I mean, come on, 1997, what was on? And I think it's unfair of Toussaint, or his character, to compare books with television. They are two different mediums. It doesn't really work. They offer different pleasures and require different things from their audience.
February 2, 2016
Television is an oddly paced but beautifully rendered satire of contemporary culture's obsession with technological distractions. Television was originally published in 1997 (its English translation came much later in 2004), so the references are a little archaic. In fact, this book feels rather comfortable situated beside 90s pop staples such as Fight Club. While the narrative itself is underwhelming, the book's success is located in its passively unmotivated but hopelessly idealistic narrator. He is a scholar on sabbatical researching a pedantic piece of Italian art, but his obsession with television (in addition to his obsession with his obsession with television) stymies his research project. Ultimately, he wants peace and serenity (although this notion is complicated countless times throughout the novel) in a culture that seems to find such quaint preoccupations useless and unnecessary. As a closing but admittedly complicated final statement, Toussaint ends the novel with the following, "Then I aimed the remote at the set and turned off the television. I leaned back against my pillow and sat for a long time in dark, not moving, simply savoring that little moment of eternity: silence and darkness regained" (164). As Television illustrates, these moments of eternity are too often momentary and fleeting. Who is to blame, however, is an entirely different question with a potentially less-than-savory answer.
January 16, 2019
I wish I'd read this five or ten years ago; unfortunately, a book about giving up television (and thus about television as a social phenomenon) doesn't really have the same instant impact now, when "the television" is basically defunct (or at least defunct for anyone likely to read Toussaint's novels). Reading this mostly made me realize how little TV I watch--half an hour over lunch, twenty minutes over dinner, and that's about it. But it's hard for me to say that I've thus escaped the negative effects of TV, because, well, I have a smart-phone.
The novel is perfectly fine--occasionally funny, if you're into that my uncle's monocle kind of thing; sometimes quite smart; far more attractive than either TV or smart-phone. But I'm just not capable of suspending disbelief to such an extreme that I can both imagine that TV has a hold over my life, and then imagine that my life might have changed if, having had a hold over my life, I broke that hold. Must be getting old. This probably deserves four stars.
The novel is perfectly fine--occasionally funny, if you're into that my uncle's monocle kind of thing; sometimes quite smart; far more attractive than either TV or smart-phone. But I'm just not capable of suspending disbelief to such an extreme that I can both imagine that TV has a hold over my life, and then imagine that my life might have changed if, having had a hold over my life, I broke that hold. Must be getting old. This probably deserves four stars.
August 3, 2011
Un historien d'art se fait subventionner pour passer un été à Berlin (au CMB?) afin de rédiger une étude sur l'Art et le pouvoir.
En fait, il n'arrive pas à écrire et glande, en dissertant solitairement sur l'usage de la télévision (Une lucarne de lumière, blabla) qu'il souhaite arrêter (Aussi efficacement qu'on arrête la clope.)
J'ai systématiquement sauté tous les passages sur la télévision (Barbants et trop nombreux) pour me concentrer sur la dérive du chercheur et la difficulté de se trouver face à un travail d'écriture quelqu'il soit...Surtout qu'il finit par se faire nommer directeur du centre en question! C'est dire si la paresse paie!
Finalement, un guide d'excellents prétextes au non-boulot!
En fait, il n'arrive pas à écrire et glande, en dissertant solitairement sur l'usage de la télévision (Une lucarne de lumière, blabla) qu'il souhaite arrêter (Aussi efficacement qu'on arrête la clope.)
J'ai systématiquement sauté tous les passages sur la télévision (Barbants et trop nombreux) pour me concentrer sur la dérive du chercheur et la difficulté de se trouver face à un travail d'écriture quelqu'il soit...Surtout qu'il finit par se faire nommer directeur du centre en question! C'est dire si la paresse paie!
Finalement, un guide d'excellents prétextes au non-boulot!
February 20, 2014
Ce court roman met en scène un professeur qui prend un congé sabbatique en vue d'écrire une étude sur Titien. Seul durant la période estivale, il décrit quelques-uns des événements et occupations qui ponctuent cette période initialement dédiée au travail. Et en filigrane, il décrit son rapport à la télévision, et notamment sa décision d'arrêter de la regarder. Bien que la trame ne soit pas spécialement accrocheuse, j'ai été entrainé agréablement et sûrement dans cette lecture que j'ai trouvée pleine d'humour, très fine et bien écrite. L'observation réaliste de notre rapport à la télévision, de la place qu'elle prend dans nos vies et des conséquences inéluctables qui en découlent n'ont pas été une révélation, mais un rappel que j'ai trouvé judicieux et d'utilité publique...
October 22, 2011
This is a great funny read. It's like a Thomas Bernhard took a whole bunch of xanax and accepted a challenge from his life-person to use parentheses and paragraph breaks. It's got some really wonderful comedic moments.
I say this about a bunch of writers, I know, but I'm looking forward to reading more (and am quite excited I recently found his _Making Love_ on sale at Third Place Books).
I say this about a bunch of writers, I know, but I'm looking forward to reading more (and am quite excited I recently found his _Making Love_ on sale at Third Place Books).
February 26, 2015
I love the concept of this novel--in the modern day, is it possible to not stumble upon distraction in every moment?--but I couldn't muster up any real feeling for the protagonist and his predicament.
Though quirky and funny at times, it left me feeling a bit whelmed...fittingly, Toussaint is European.
Though quirky and funny at times, it left me feeling a bit whelmed...fittingly, Toussaint is European.
April 5, 2012
A self-involved academic narrator allegedly working on a mongraph on Titian while in Berlin reflects on culture, art, and himself as he tries to give up watching television in this ridiculous little story. It is funny and perceptive, but also uneven, with scenes of brilliance and others that I hurried through, maybe uncomfortable as they struck too near my self-indulgent bones.
June 7, 2013
Our narrator is an academic who's supposed to be working on a project on Titian/Charles V in Berlin, in service of this he stops watching TV, only to find himself inevitably surrounded by television. The narrator takes a critical tone, which is funny because Toussaint's writing is so sitcom-ish (a clever, actually funny sitcom) - it occurs in scenes and the humor is that of the everyday.
Read
March 7, 2014An author can't finish his book because he becomes so obsessed with not watching TV. A great look at the power of television and peasant's revolt of the Luddite. Also a dead on analysis for anyone who has procrastinated finishing an important paper.
August 20, 2008
I reread this book in August of 2008.
This book is excellent. My only complaint is the overuse of variations of the word "pensive" - at least once per page. By the end of the book it was very distracting. But still, this is a great book, humorous, witty, and engaging.
This book is excellent. My only complaint is the overuse of variations of the word "pensive" - at least once per page. By the end of the book it was very distracting. But still, this is a great book, humorous, witty, and engaging.
August 2, 2010
I read this for french class, and thought it would be perfect as I'm also procrastinating on writing my thesis. But this dragged a bit. And I didn't like the main protagonist at all, which didn't help. It's still a good read, just not terribly riveting.
February 1, 2011
this starts out very funny, normal seeming, but then as the academic becomes more manic and frustrated by not being able to write, paranoia strikes deep. All because of TELEVISION. even turned off, they still affectyour life.
August 8, 2012
A man gives up watching television, but that is really not pertinent to this novel of the “roman infinitésimal” school. He pretends to work on a thesis. The question of time and being, dissected into moments; water and streaks of light. In French (La télévision).
September 16, 2012
Le livre qu'il vous faut si vous cherchez quelque chose de léger mais de tout aussi intelligent. L'épisode de la fougère oubliée dans le frigo des Drescher ou encore de l'attente inconfortable chez une famille allemande moyenne m'ont particulièrement fait rire.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 68 reviews