Monaco by Juliet Jacques

A stylishly designed publication from indie publisher Tooth Grinder Press, Juliet Jacques’ super readable and very fun short 2023 non fiction book Monaco is exactly the kind of pointless, self-indulgent, lazy-feeling (though it could well be incredibly worked to create that impression – effortlessness can be a hard effect to create when it isn’t organic) writing that I really enjoy reading but could be held up by many as archetypal vapid indie lit.

Who is this book for? It’s for people like me. How many of us are there? Very very very few. And that’s probably for the best. I don’t really think we… errr… offer much to society (at least not to the one we’ve got).

But this book offers a lot to us: sad people who really like text.

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Monaco is structured as a series of increasingly discursive emails sent – mostly late at night – from a solo traveller visiting Monaco (the infamous tax-averse and money-loving microstate nestled in the (otherwise French) Riviera), ostensibly on commission to write about the city for an unnamed publication, yet the narrator doesn’t quite focus enough on anything to really offer any kind of meaningful insight about the place. (And, for me, that’s good.)

The addressee of these emails, then, is a former friend and a former lover, one who is missed but doesn’t seem to be missing, and the impressions of Monaco are filtered through the imagined responses and remembered interests of this erstwhile travelling companion who is not one any more…

It is, yes, flaneuring, flaneuring figured as email missives; it is epistolary travel writing, about looking at buildings and public artworks and going shopping and going gambling and going out for dinner and making out with a woman who turns out to be married but you can’t take her back to your place because you’re staying in one of Monaco’s cheapest AirBnBs which means you’re in a child’s bedroom on a bunkbed with the rest of a Monacese (is that the right word?) family still living in the rest of the flat and sharing a bathroom with them; it’s travel writing about peering at the bizarre ultrarich of a strange tiny place and wondering about the homes (and how far away or hidden they must be) of the country’s working classes who make it so shiny and nice…

There’s also lots of reflection on the depressing state of British politics (tl;dr: it’s depressing) and lots of bitter sounding ultra typical lower middle class whinging about London elites and how annoying they are to fucking be around, but in a way that has a lot of cowed, ultra typical British fawning towards the idea of a “real” elite that we no longer have…

The narrator swans about in Monaco, complaining about how the rich people back in London have no class, unlike the proper rich people down Monte Carlo way…

There’s a lot of “oh, isn’t it absurd, the idea of *me*, a left wing journalist with no money, being heeerrree in Monaco, of all places!?” But I think the 50 to 100 people this book is aimed at would also do the exact same fucking thing if any of us were in the same place, and I don’t really get the impression that Jacques is too po-faced to not be kinda taking the piss out of herself with some of this. But maybe she is and I’m waaaaaay out of line and just needlessly insulting one of the few people getting beautifully presented, pointless, self-indulgent prose published, and that’s really not something I should be doing…

Buuuut

This is the kind of stuff I imagine the vast majority of people don’t want from a book…

Are these emails included here genuinely just the late night emails a lonely Juliet Jacques sent to a former lover while hanging out in Monaco a couple of years ago, put into a nice book with some well-rendered street photography taken by the author to accompany the text? Or is the whole thing a fiction? Or a dream?

Was the trip real but its circumstances and actions exaggerated or fictionalised???? I mean the photos credit the author and SEEM to have been taken in Monaco, but that doesn’t mean they were or that the credits are real??? It doesn’t mean anything.

I have absolutely no idea what’s true and what isn’t and though I don’t care – tell me lies are the truth or the truth is lies and (in the context of literature) my only question is “is it well told?” (god, fucking listen to me, christ… 🙄) – but I think that many people would care, i.e. they wouldn’t like it if the conceit is true and Monaco really is just the copy and pasted contents of a Gmail sent folder with more time spent on the book’s graphic design than its composition…

If it is “just” that, I loved it. If it’s actually a honed and deeply worked text that has been sanded into the impression of that, then I loved it even more.

The narrator – whether that’s an authentic Juliet Jacques or not – comes across as articulate, impulsive, foolish, hypocritical, cultured, knowledgeable, and ultimately very human and very flawed.

Yes, it’s just emails and some photos. If that’s not what you want from your short books that are beautiful physical objects, then maybe it’s not for you.

But if you DO like your creative non-fiction so that it reminds you that other people are all over the place and self involved and ignorant yet well meaning and depressed, too – which I very much do – then it’s well well well worth a read. (As are my books, which are even more indiscreet and self involved than this is, and I don’t push them to people anywhere near as much as I should.)

Great fun. For me, though maybe not for you?

I’d read it again. Maybe. One day.

More like this, please, indie publishers. More like fucking this!

Order it direct from the publisher right here