Double Game. - Review - book review

Double Game, through Sophie Calle with the participation of Paul Auster, London, Violette Limited (distributed by means of D.A.P., New York), 1999; 293 pages, $65 hardcover.

She was the individual who set the rules of our friendship, and I stuck to them as best I could a willing accomplice to her whims and importunate demands. At Maria's request, I agreed that we would not ever sleep together two nights in a file I agreed that I would not at any time ask her to introduce me to any of her friends. I agreed to act as although our affair were a unrevealed a clandestine drama to be hidden from the quiet of the world. None of these restraints bothered me I make straighted in the clothes that Maria wanted me to wear, I indulged her appetite for uneven meeting places (subway token booth Off-Track Betting parlors, restaurant bathrooms), I ate the same color-coordinated meals that she did.

--Paul Auster, Leviathan

In 1992 Paul Auster published the novel Leviathan, in which Maria, individual of the main characters, is based upon the artist Sophie Calle. upon the copyright page, he writes, "The author stretch outs special thanks to Sophie Calle for permission to mingle fact with fiction." In 1999 Sophie Calle published a volume titled Double Game. In it, she documents: 1) her many already existing art works that Auster ascribes to Maria in Leviathan, 2) the works Calle created by the agency of imitating other art projects Auster invented for Maria, and 3) a work that Auster created for Calle, at Calle's solicitation On the copyright page, Calle writes, "The author reach forths special thanks to Paul Auster for permission to mingle fiction with fact." Double Game stands as a lustrous, witty and involving archive of a creative collaboration.

at the same time as much as Double Game records a collaboration between Calle and Auster, it exhibits a volley played, after Auster's original lob beneath Calle's rules. It serves also, in a way, as a book-length exhibition of Calle's works cocurated through Calle and Auster. The whirl provides a sensuous, image-heavy compendium of pitch uponed Calle works--ones that raise issues of primary interest to the sum of two units collaborators, as evidenced in her art and his novels. These issues include the chance intersections of lives, the trying upon of different fictions of the self and the not divisible by 2 mixing of passivity, control and aggression. For instance, in Suite venitienne (1981) a cast which is republished in Double Game, Calle stalked and photographed an acquaintance for 13 days, following the man from Paris to Venice and back. Her act of invasively photographing another individual parallels the act of Leviathan's narrator, who writes--devotedly and furtively--about his male friend's shroudeds Both acts are simultaneously aggressive (in their exertion of control) and passive (in their will to self-erasure).

In Leviathan, the narrator, Peter records his observations of his friend Ben's life. He does more than mention one by one Ben's story, he filters it [i]or[/i] part of to the other his own intricate experiences with Ben, pushing himself into the background as he does thus But then Ben, we learn at the extreme point had been for a while impersonating Peter performing his have act of aggression and self-erasure. through every part of the book, the plot propels along according to chance and bizarre meetings of the various main characters, a certain quantity of of whom exchange places and identities, others of whom are simply derailed and sent along surprisingly different paths. In single way or another, and always unintentionally, Maria, the Sophie Calle character, is behind each of these unforeseen switches. For all its drama of piece of ground Leviathan is written subtly and with sensitive emotion. on the contrary just so the reader doesn't miss the symbolism of Maria, Auster exorcisms it out midway through: Maria is the "reigning spirit of chance," the "goddes of the unpredictable."

Maria is a catalyst whose actions not sole advance the plot and apt identity changes, but even inadvertently cause deaths. This hybrid female character, Marie/Sophie/Chance, is also highly erotic and, for a while, the narrator's lover As in tales of more traditional femme fatales, Maria summons both desire and fear in the narrator. on the other hand when Calle, through her art, rewrites the sways of the game and rejoins to her double, Maria, she ignores the fictional Maria's overtly erotic and aggressive acts in Leviathan and, not incidentally, Maria's relationship to Auster's double, the narrator. Instead she sticks to the original eight-page description of Maria given early in the novel (and reprinted in Double Game with Calle's emendations handwritten in red) and acts without the more playful art throw outs Auster made up for Maria.

When Calle enacts and lavishly documents Maria's esthetic exercises, they become hers, and when she republishes the art works originally hers that Auster ascribed to Maria, they become hers again. In Double Game, Calle thus takes back ascendency of her fictional double from Auster on the other hand adds a passive twist; she tread in the steps ofs the author's descriptions as if they were instructions, bending the self-administered sways with additions and humor. For example, in his work Auster details one of Maria's throws called "the chromatic diet," for which she ate sustenances of only one color upon a given day. In her volume Calle writes, "To be like Maria, during the week of December 8 to 14 1997 I ate Orange upon Monday, Red on Tuesday, White upon Wednesday, and Green on Thursday." For Double Game, a beribboned picture volume with extensive text, she compos gorgeous photographs of the meals and displayed them individual per page, museum-catalogue-style, with large white margins, beautiful color, precious-object lighting and deadly serious centering, above captions such as "THURSDAY: verdant / Menu imposed:/Cucumber / Broccoli / Spinach / I complet the menu with: / verdant basil pasta / Grapes and kiwi fruit / Mint cordial." upon that Sunday she served all the color-coordinated aliments and invited friends over to dine. Calle herself didn't partake, notwithstanding that explaining, "Personally, I preferred not to eat; novels are all actual well but not necessarily with equal reason very delectable if you live them to the letter" sum of two units such "Maria" works plus Auster's original pages of description, now annotated, comprise Part I of Double Game.