Troy von Balthazar’s music may always lead us into a feeling of deep sadness, but his first novel 3GIRLS gives us the benefit of the doubt. In around forty pages, his narrator travels across Europe, takes us back to California, and shares his existential and musical considerations on the way. We almost want to follow that solitary walker lost in his reveries, if only just to meet all that unbelievably beautiful women he keeps talking about. More than a novel, 3GIRLS resembles a “semi-autobiographical prose mutation” – in the author’s own words. The anonymous narrator is a quite tortured songwriter who suffers from various pains: the toughness of living in his own body, of feeding himself, of creating. The Annas, Emilies and other Venuses he meets on his European trip leave his heart broken and his soul wandering. Or it’s at least what we think we’ve understood. Balthazar’s songs are straightforward in their sorrow, but his writings are much more nebulous and sometimes close to unintelligible, with sentences like “All of Sweden at my doorstep, as modern as making love”. And while Troy’s music is seriously tragic, things go differently for this work; the presentation of the book itself breaks the literary pact of fiction and invites the reader to distance himself from the content: each page is a different picture of hands holding the book open, as if someone else was reading in our place. Thus we read 3GIRLS like we should: with the detached and pleasant voyeurism of a person who’s enjoying the beauty of a sibylline text without stocking our necks out.
Troy Balthazar, 3GIRLS
3GIRLS is available at the Galerie Yvon Lambert (au 108 Rue du Temple, 75003 Paris) and on www.sinnbus.de
http://www.troyvonbalthazar.net
http://www.myspace.com/troyvonbalthazar
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