Amy Grandvoinet travels with Juliet Jacques' MONACO (Toothgrinder Press, 2023) and reflects on coastal venturing, time's perfume and the devastating art of the travel missive.
Last winter, scrolling a Microsoft Excel document of reviewable books, I was overjoyed to find lying lithely amid spreadsheet-y cells: Juliet Jacques’s MONACO (Toothgrinder Press, 2023). All was grey in Aberystwyth. My dream… to Get Sun and reflect on contemporary travel simultaneously, reading a holiday read about a holiday while on holiday. Holidays are complicated for me. Blood affiliation to the mass tourism industry, widely considered a tragedy, meant a youth staying free or cheap in luxury hotel rooms via free or cheap air-mile flights. Aside a naïve drive to want to try to critique absolutely e v e r y t h i n g e v e r y w h e r e, this was an open goal for psychological overwhelm and analytical burnout – I hadn’t even found go-to Marxist geographers Henri Lefebvre or David Harvey as cushioning yet. Observing the world aflame living an incongruous high life, baby. Juliet Jacques’s MONACO seemed somewhat about such dynamics, genius-ly documenting a complex trip, between work and leisure, to a sovereign tax-haven on the French Riviera. I’d tried to holiday in 2023 had been terrible at it; determined to continue untangling my hang-ups, I flew this June, sanctioned by employer and GP, to meet my friend Ian in Barcelona for six days, a review copy of MONACO stashed in bag.
Juliet Jacques is a writer, filmmaker, broadcaster, and academic currently based in London. As well as MONACO, she’s scribed much journalism and six other books – Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (Dalkey Archive, 2007), Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015), Variations (Influx Press, 2021), Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021 (Cipher Press, 2022), and The Woman in the Portrait (Cipher Press, 2024). She ran Suite (212) arts forum on Resonance 104.4fm from 2017 to 2021, and now co-hosts at Novara Media. She also plays football for Clapton Community FC Women and Surrey. Find out more here!
Jacques has globe-hopped for many projects, so far to France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, the USA, Canada, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Australia, and…
Monaco. In 2022, Juliet Jacques went to Monaco to report on an exhibition at the Nouveau Musée there, and a year later published MONACO: ‘I went to Monaco last year and found it so strange that I just had to write about it’. Read an extract from MONACO in 3:AM Magazine, and see behind-the-scenes in the LRB, where Jacques divulges, previously having feared archive fever, she only starting recording travel experiences in her thirties: ‘I walked round cities for hours, photographing constantly […] architectural and historical landmarks, monuments and memorials, public art, posters and graffiti’ blogged as ‘mini-travelogues with a highly personal slant’ (I’m delighted as I do something similar at Going About, Baby). Out of this autofictional preoccupation developed: MONACO.
MONACO, a slim tome red and white like Monaco’s flag, slips easily into my Ryanair hand luggage. Drifting through Birmingham International’s glittering Duty Free mazes, Marc Jacobs or Gucci scents and Metronomy’s ‘The Bay’ or the Sugababes’s ‘Overload’ pumping into the air, I feel lucky to be in its possession. Chart-ranked pulpy fiction and non-fiction loom from WHSmith bookshelves. I buy a LBN (Little Black Notepad) for £3.99, as my usual messaging-myself-on-Facebook-Messenger-Lite jot technique won’t work sans 4G on the Costa Brava. Flashing a gross post-Brexit passport at the guards, I’m stamped and granted temporary border fluidity due to racial and financial privilege. Sadly, I’m not wearing Toothgrinder’s MONACO-merch recycled polyester football shirt – they’re sold out.
Inside MONACO are two red circular stickers which look almost like stop signs: warnings of trouble on holiday? Cosying into seat 24C on BHX - BCN flight F3793, I regard the unbelievably dystopian pictograms on the back of seat 23C, and note ‘3/6/24 I am on the plane and I can’t believe how dystopian it feels. I pop a small mint, bright white like half of MONACO’s cover’. My nan said sweets on holiday take-offs stop ears popping; this ubiquitous practice strikes me as a far deeper ritual that attempts to soothe far larger cosmic distress.
Jacques’s website links two already-reviews of MONACO. I’m surprised there aren’t more, although Scott Manley Hadley, tagging ‘CLASS • FLANEUR • FLANEURING • INDIE LIT • MONACO • MONEY • TRAVEL • TRAVEL WRITING • WRITING’, argues MONACO’s playful pointlessness or leftie celebratory self-indulgence might challenge the common reader, heckling ‘More like fucking this!’. Terri Mullholland says Juliet Jacques takes us in MONACO on an oblique ‘“glamour” hunt’ where, like her, ‘we want to hate Monaco, but can’t quite bring ourselves to’, further praising its nuanced and tricksy authorial virtues.
A delayed 16.10 flight F3793 departs; soon I’m flicking through MONACO sipping Bottega Prosecco D.O.C. Rosé Il Vino dei Poeti 200ml from Ryanair’s snack-cart, in dutiful champagne socialist spirit. Arctic Monkeys sing about travel-sized alcohol and holidays in ‘The Car’ from my dad’s SONY Walkman, which is remarked upon by someone across the aisle with gaffa-taped headphones. An airhostess’s bracelet reads (e) (x) (i) (l) (e) as scratch card 1 million euros are offered around. Help.
MONACO is so good. Over six days in April, ‘sergeant-rock@gmail.com’ (~Jacques) writes a series of emails to ‘robinsonrj191@gmail.com’ (an ex-lover or the compromised British Left) in heartbreakingly tender detail having scored a Photo World commission to ‘go and “capture Monaco” and the “atmosphere”’ just before the Grand Prix. Grotesquely and unjustly wealthy, it’s a location she anticipates to despise. An English translation of an eerie and charming poem about climbing honeysuckle and throbbing octopi and regretful gravediggers by Guillaume Apollinaire, proto-Surrealist schooled in Monaco, forms an epigraph. The e-sequence then ensues, from a country Wikipedia says is 30% populated by millionaires, as an account of personal and political love, loss, and loneliness in our socio-economically f**ked twenty-first century.
From: sergeant-rock@gmail.com
Date: 19 April 2022, 23:43
Subject: Hello from Monte-Carlo
Darling,
sergeant-rock@gmail.com’s first bulletin laments Gatwick Airport troubles, the UK’s disastrous 2019 general election, Covid-19 and its shambolic management, and unsatisfactory housing situations. She remembers to robinsonrj191@gmail.com their last holiday, to the Venice Biennale pre-lockdown, and relays her therapist has now suggested going away again for health reasons: ‘My therapist told me I should take a break, maybe somewhere I hadn’t been before, somewhere I wouldn’t normally go’. Advised to ‘fork out’ for a nice time, sergeant-rock@gmail.com’s Photo World budget only affords flying with easyJet and bunk-bedding in a child’s Asterix-postered Airbnb room on the French border. Arriving at her destination, sergeant-rock@gmail.com unpacks, then explores plazas of palm trees and fountains and plants and Chanel-suited humans and handbag dogs and beyond, all recounted to robinsonrj191@gmail.com at the end of the day. She says: ‘It’s so strange walking in a city without you, I keep expecting you to point out a statue of some long-forgotten politician or an Art Nouveau façade or some funny public art and now I’m just keeping my eyes peeled and doing some Googling. It’s not the same’, signing off ‘Until soon xxx’.
In an allegory of individual and collective bereavement, in which the once secure is no longer available, robinsonrj191@gmail.com never replies. My e-news subscriptions to poetryfoundation.com and lithub.com tell me it’s ‘Love Conquers All Day’ and the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death, who famously wrote elaborate one-way (love)letters too – sergeant-rock@gmail.com’s in great company.
Kirsty at SPAM zine – ‘MONACO feels like the perfect summer read, I agree’ – told me about Iphgenia Baal’s and Jacques’s Granta conversation discussing digital comms, place, and precarity. Jacques is inspired by Baal’s Merced Es Benz (Book Works, 2017) described as a ‘rehashing of a doomed romance, told through the “paper trail” of phone and digital messaging’ in the recent urban present of txt talk, preceding social media’s blow up. Baal perceives ‘your experimental novella Monaco […] gets pulled back a bit from the insanity of socials. There’s slightly more control – like a pen-pal, letter-writing format […] rather than just the inane splurge’. Jacques confirms nostalgia for an alternative kind of epistolary e-messaging she relates to the early 2000s. Efforts to sensitively connect in MONACO, if unreciprocated, type valiantly against a harsher tide.
Barcelona’s coastline cubes appear at the window. A child’s hand is at its oval centre, sunset beaming through precious skin, as we land. I reach Éstacio de Françia and cross the Avenue del Marquès l’Argentera to check in at Hostal Orleans, two-star glitz, in the Ciuta Vella Born District. After enduring 30 minutes of fervid chat with the concierge about the EU, 9/11, and Boris Johnson, I’m permitted rest. We’d planned to meet tomorrow, but Ian invites me that night to a club called Candy Darling. Recently diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and energetically cautious, I appreciatively decline and fall to Mediterranean sleep for more MONACO tomorrow.
MONACO’s missives continue to chronicle sergeant-rock@gmail.com’s fragile antics abroad homeward, dispatched with endearing vulnerability. Further emails – there are 10 in total – are subject-headed wistfully: ‘La Solitude’, ‘Ne chantez pas la mort’, ‘Songs of the Poorly Loved’, ‘Les amants tristes’. Their content is full of intimate in-jokes in various parentheses, for example ‘I walked along the beach, past this “Promenade du Champions” where lots of footballers had left their footprints (I didn’t recognise the names but I’m sure you would’ve)’, and is peppered with casual acronyms such as ‘FFS’ ‘tbh’ ‘btw’. Tourist snaps are included – the Fairmount Hairpin, the Prince’s Palace, shrines to Grace Kelly, sculptures by Giorgio di Chirico and Fernando Botero, Fluxus graffiti, Musée Oceanographique, Jardin Exotique, superyachts. Erich von Stroheim’s Monaco-set erotic film Foolish Wives (Universal Pictures, 1922) is cited, and local 1960s musician Léo Ferré on YouTube provides a soundtrack throughout, as does commentary on Europe’s fascist histories plus Apollinaire poems hither and thither. Detail is vast and intense. ‘Maybe it’s just me but there’s a melancholy running through the Principality’ suggests sergeant-rock@gmail.com, as Juliet Jacques wryly tests the parameters of projection. ‘If you don’t want me to tell you any of this, let me know x’ (!) sergeant-rock@gmail.com movingly sends as she realises her attempts at meaningful experiential sharing are met with complete silence.
Ian and I write postcards at Café del Born, its interiors wooden and its flowers parched. Old men in shirts and jackets sit with Estrellas and newspapers. Shuttling from Gothic Quarter to beach, we talk about self-disclosure, the attraction of pseudonyms, how to speak, and bathe in Vitamin D / Sea.
In MONACO, an artificial plage at Larvotto ‘just about sums up this place: expensively imported sand on reclaimed land and a single palm tree’, reminiscent of the emblem some might use to symbolize h o l i d a y on WhatsApp etc. ~ 🏝️.
sergeant-rock@gmail.com eats croissants and drinks cartons of apple-juice from the local Carrefour; I eat 90¢ pain con chocolats and drink tiny espressos from Hostal Orleans’s vending machines, beneath sparkly stucco’d ceiling at a glass table of fake cerise orchids. Jacques’s Monaco’s chic-ness is brash, and way more concrete-industrial than one might presume. sergeant-rock@gmail.com notes working classes filed into the Beausoleil are just outside of it, mirroring immaculate residential rows in Barceloneta restructured Hausmann-esquely for uprising management. Beginning to doubt the whole Photo World assignment hearing rien from robinsonrj191@gmail.com, proximal opulence becomes a more tempting source of psychic and creative revival. sergeant-rock@gmail.com buys a €-heavy new dress from a boutique on the Avenue Saint-Michel, red and white like Monaco’s flag which ‘fit perfectly’, and wears it out on a last evening spent at the Hôtel de Paris and Monte-Carlo Casino. It’s a milieu she compares to Surrey’s devastating snootiness, as astounding today as in the nineteenth century or fin-de-siècle: ‘You can really imagine Baudelaire, Huysmans and Mirbeau being fascinated by it, with its gold-plated domes and balconies […]. You’d have puked if you’d seen the inside’.
MONACO crescendos as sergeant-rock@gmail.com nearly succumbs to the very lifestyle she set out to critique. After a fancy dinner – ‘no photos, I still hate people who post their meals on Insta or wherever’ (ha ha) – she gets lucky in gambling, feels like a film-star encouraged by a supportive and sympathetic if suspect audience, and briefly kisses a belle femme to whom she introduces herself as ‘Monica’. sergeant-rock@gmail.com leaves affectively confused about Monaco, and returns ‘through those dismal Tory suburbs where I grew up’. All, of course, is conveyed in an inevitably unanswered final email to robinsonrj191@gmail.com. But some kind of soothing has happened; Monaco’s shifted things. There is a sense of solace and also endurance.
It is the last morning in Barcelona, a Sunday, and we awake to rain. I run to the Basílica de Santa Maria del Mar as a brass band plays, passing the Carrer del Comerç and ‘en defensa de les llibertats i constitucions de Catalunya en el setge de Barcelona (1713-1714)’ memorial. Holidaying away from devolved Wales as another UK general election approaches and genocide continues in Gaza (a reality which has devastatingly worsened and evolved since the time of writing), my thoughts are to selfs and states and freedoms under globe-wide capitalist realism. I still feel uncomfortable about holidays, but calmer and better-focused for studying that uncomfortability.
Juliet Jacques and I met up in Euston on 3rd July, the day before voting day, to confer about MONACO irl. We sat inside a pub at plush green seats, onto which Jacques cast a splendid shiny striped bag. We discuté how recovery can take ages and is myriad, the exhaustion of elections and their coverage, different editions of Apollinaire, wanting to learn French and making your own translations, Twitter’s stranglehold, playing on autofiction and B. S. Johnson, the Home Counties we both grew up in (did we both complete History degrees to tackle this particularly pernicious topography?), Sharon Kivland’s Freud on Holiday series (Cube Art Editions and Information as Material, 2006-13), addictions of snap-taking, the balance of acting ironically and stopping before you turn into truly a (Monaco)monster, joys of prose and poetry extract exchange, and more. We agree writing might have at least some capacity to buoy-up aliveness when hope might appear waneful or optimism futile. Time’s perfume is a sprig of heather! Among friends, the sun shines forever!
~
Text: Amy Grandvoinet
Image: Amy Grandvoinet
Published: 15/10/24
Comments