When Jeanne Dargan, a young teacher in a Paris high school, is accepted on to a PhD course – the subject of her thesis will be “the labyrinthine motif in the works of Franz Kafka” – she could not be more thrilled. How she has longed for this. Not only will she be supervised by Alexandre Karpov, the closest thing to God in the world of Kafka; at last, she’ll be able to quit her hated job. OK, so the university has not selected her project for funding. But she is certain she can survive. How hard can it be to pick up casual work teaching undergraduates? More to the point, how hard can it be to complete a PhD in three years?
Her disillusionment doesn’t take long. Oh, the research is lovely. How delightful it is to make the National Library of France your second home. Writing, though, is an altogether trickier prospect. How much easier it is to procrastinate – to read one more book, one extra paper – than to set down that first paragraph. Meanwhile, there is the problem of Karpov, a vain careerist who would rather offer empty blandishments (“At this rate, you’ll be the one supervising me!”) than give her more than a few minutes of his time. Of course, she’s flattered at first. After their initial meeting, she convinces herself that his look was Full of Meaning. But she starts to feel differently when her increasingly desperate emails go unanswered. As for the teaching, the university will not pay her for casual work, which is how she winds up working in the office of the departmental gorgon, Brigitte, booking hotels for staff attending academic conferences.
And so the years pass. One, two, three, four, five… By now, Jeanne has read 3,200 works of literary criticism; she has also drawn up a 69-page plan of how her PhD will look. The end, however, is nowhere in sight. She just cannot get started. This is not to say that she is about to give up. Alas, her obsession with all things Kafka and Karpov seems, if anything, to be taking over her life – even if a heavy dose of self-pity is now in the mix. No wonder, then, that as she embarks on rereading the texts she first dealt with years before, her endlessly patient boyfriend finally ends their relationship.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that Tiphaine Riviere’s Notes on a Thesis (translated by Francesca Barrie) is quite possibly the funniest book about academic life since David Lodge’s Changing Places. How brilliantly she captures its veiled bitchiness; how expertly – yet lovingly too – she sends up the silly cul-de-sacs of scholarship. But if this makes its appeal sound limited, think again. Procrastinators and wage slaves of the world unite! This is a book for anyone who has ever laboured under a deadline, battled a stubborn pig of a boss, or half drowned beneath a wave of bureaucracy and paperwork. Put off what you intended to do today and go out and buy it, right now.
Notes on a Thesis is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £13.93
