Agentic fates: In search of insights, the view has often been distorted.
Photo: Unsplash/Annie Spratt
In an interview, Rachel Kushner once said that she is particularly interested in people who live on the knife cutting edge. In “Flame thrower”, the first novel by the American author, it is racing drivers who set up speed records on a salt lake in Utah with their rocket cars and risk burning in their frenzied cigars. “I am a fate” deals with women who are forced to spend their lives behind bars due to the inhuman American prison system. In “See der Creation”, her new novel, the heroine and narrator is a former secret agent who works as a V-woman for private clients under the constant threat.
The fact that her job often does not stay with the outlaw has become doom as an undercover agent of the FBI. The lawyer of one of her spy on victims was able to convince the jury in court that his client was initiated for the crime he committed. When he is acquitted, she loses her job. Since then she has been working for private clients, glad that there were “no supervisors, no logbooks and no rules.”
Sadie is not a particularly likeable figure, unscrupulous, ready for almost everything.
For her new mandate, she is said to creep in a left -wing municipality in Guyenne, a remote region in southwestern France, and find out what the municipalities have planned against the construction of huge water reservoirs. The reservoirs are supposed to drive monocultural agriculture and threaten the existence of the small farmers. As “Sadie”, she first begins a love affair with the director Lucien, a friend of Pascal Balmy, the charismatic head of the municipality in Guyenne. While Lucien is still working on his new film in Marseille and later wants to meet, Sadie, as his American girlfriend, drives to the municipalities.
Rachel Kushner’s narrator is not a particularly likeable figure, unscrupulous, ready for almost everything. The perspective is one other than in Al Kennedy’s novel “As if we lived in a merciful country”, in which an anarchist theater force is infiltrated by an agent of the British police: Kennedy tells from the perspective of one of the victims. But both authors are inspired by the same real model, the British V-man Mark Kennedy, who built up love relationships in the left scene on behalf of Scotland Yard from 2002 to 2009, not only to write reports, but also to stumble into criminal offenses. Kushner’s perpetrator perspective has the advantage that the reader is classified in good or evil, right or false heavier.
In addition to the agent story, there is another important element in “See of Creation”. It is Bruno Lacombe’s emails, the spirit of the municipality, whose figure is based on the left-wing French philosophers, filmmakers and dropouts Guy Debord. Debord had withdrawn to a remote area in Auvergne after the murder of his friend and publisher Gérard Lebovici. In the “See of Creation”, Lacombe withdraws into the darkness of a cave after his daughter’s accidental death, which he had discovered on his country in Guyenne. In emails to Pascal Balmy, he gives advice to the municipality and writes about his view of history, politics and philosophy. Sadie chops Balmy’s account and quotes from the e-mails Lacombes.
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They are emails in which comedy, tragedy, madness and truth are close together. In the beginning you laugh at the sloping theses of Lacombe, for example about his speculation about the Neanderthals. Compared to Homo Sapiens, he writes, who tragically prevailed in the course of human history, were the more original, more intelligent person with their larger brain. However, they tended to be “for depression. They also tended to add addiction and especially smoking «.
At the same time, thoughts are always flashing in these emails. He believed that he once wrote that life was “better” and he now begins to suspect that this is a kind of reverse teleology, a mystification of the past, including the view that progress is not progress at all. Sometimes he sees things from his extreme outsider position in the darkness of his cave that nobody recognizes in normal life. Just like Sadie from her position as an undercover agent, the contradictions in the municipality are more noticeable. But you can feel at the beginning of the novel that she cannot completely maintain the distance from Lacombe’s ideas and the municipalities – unlike her -.
Rachel Kushner, Lake of Creation, Rowohlt 2025, 480 pages, 26 €