Rating: 
Summary: Thought Provoking, Refreshing and quite Enjoyable
Review: A beautifully refreshing and creative work of art. Duncker challenges the status quo using fictitious characters struggling with real issues and societal constraints on love, creativity, and uniqueness. Duncker points out that insanity is perceived as anything that strays outside of societal norms. She also manages to make it very clear that stepping outside of societal norms is necessary to portray a more complete view of what is . . . its the diverse thought, experiences and perceptions of the whole of society that gets us closer to the truth of our collective reality. I thoroughly enjoyed the way the reader/writer relationship is portrayed in the novel. I finished this book believing that any writer worth the ink in his typewriter should hold the relationship with his reader in the highest regard and adoration. In doing so, the reader makes the writer accountable for producing work that will strengthen and glorify the relationship; forcing the writer to write from the heart and soul . . . .the center of any successful relationship.
Rating: 
Summary: Meeting Our Hero
Review: About a third of the reader's way into it, this novel becomes as entertaining as a holiday train ride into a splendid and previously unviewed landscape. The relationship which develops between famous author and fan is charming and serene, a sort of literary supper by candlelight, with chirruping crickets and the rush of summer twilight just beyond the edge of every lovely page. These parts of the novel are breathtaking, along with the proposed and well-illustrated premise that the friendship that builds between writers and readers is not only worthy of attention but can be the subject of a work of fiction on its own. For all these things, not small achievements, the author of this first novel receives full accolades, with silver trumpets and a flourish of drums! There are some flaws to the book, though, and they must not escape mention. First: the disconcertingly unexplained shift from the violently insane Paul Michel first met (threats, foul language, personal hygiene that somehow includes the reek of fecal matter) and the disarmingly handsome and rational lover of the rest of the book. Second: the first several chapters, which are little more than a randy recitation of student romances and confused cogitations on the nature of literary criticism. Third: the incredible way in which the researcher discovers that he can love a man, when he kisses Paul Michel, as if he had never thought about anything of this nature before, while living his heterosexual life. Though the first third of this novel is, to be charitable, tedious and weak, most of the rest of it is unforgettable. We, its readers, now have an intriguing relationship with its author and await her next creation. Fortunately for us, unlike her Paul Michel, she is still alive and (we hope most diligently!) writing.
Rating: 
Summary: Intriguing, absorbing
Review: All fiction is allegory: it's just a matter of how much each author is willing to go either into what Hawthorne or O'Connor called "romance," or into any other number of less baldly allegorical avenues with their writings. That was brought home to me in a new way with Halluncinating Foucalt. At first I assumed I was reading, basic, contempory, post-modernist fiction. But within the first 50 pages or so I began to realize that Patricia Duncker's characters and plot were deliberately singular. The anonymous narrator; his hysterically funny, intense paramour (equally anonymous, known only because of her study of Schiller, as "The Germanist"); the insane author Paul Michel, whose life long obsession with Foucault is ostensibly the novel's key: are all very subtly drawn symbols of certain types of people, i.e., readers and writers of fiction or philosophy. As the narrative progresses with inevitability and predictability, the charactors become symbols of those genres of writing themselves. Once I realized this, called myself a hopelessly bourgeois pig-man and looked at it again, many things that had begun to annoy me about the book fell into place -- specifically, the narrator's one-dimensionality and some rather heavy-handed plot moves. (The Germanist's history and ultimate role in the plot to liberate the instutionalized Michel, even still, was a strain on the suspension of disbelief.)Still, once I could look at the novel as deliberately sidestepping many typical narrative mechanisms, I enjoyed it a great deal. Ms. Duncker has written a mystifying book, no matter how you approach it. Its questions about devotion and loyalty and passion and sanity will, as another reader put it, stayed with me long after I put it down and went on to other, more conventional fiction.
Rating:
Summary: erudite, entertaining, and enthralling
Review: HALLUCINATING FOUCAULT pays homage to the poststructuralist school, embodied by French philosopher Michel Foucault (whose presence in this novel, while illusory, is rather important) and the writer/radical Paul Michel who has been committed to an insane asylum due to paranoid schizophrenia. As the unnamed narrator traces his way through Michel's texts in order to complete his doctorate dissertation, his relationship with his subject takes interesting and complex turns that make this novel itself a page-turner. HALLUCINATING FOUCAULT is very much a novel about the relationship between the writer and the reader and also between the reader and the text itself. As the narrator explores both the textuality and the biography of his subject, Paul Michel, he learns of the inescapable personal bond between reader and writer, a bond that is rarely discussed and which has often been dismissed (even by many poststructuralists such as Barthes who claimed that the Author is dead) and rarely been dissected. Duncker's novel reads like raw and wonderfully musical poetry. Her erudite insertions and her cynical-comical insights are never intrusive and are always entertaining, succeeding in furthering along a plot based around relationships and which calls into question the reality of literary texts, authorship, madness and identity. Sadly, she has written nothing since the publication of HALLUCINATING FOUCAULT; with such an original and fresh voice, I certainly do hope Duncker will not completely disappear from the literary scene, especially not after such an amazingly powerful and haunting first novel. --- Reviewed by:
kris t kahn, author of ARGUING WITH THE TROUBADOUR: POEMS
Rating:
Summary: I'm not sure if I was reading the book or experiencing it!!!
Review: I am an avid reader and its not often that I now have the time to read. But this book, which I picked up more becasue of my love for France, turned out to be one of the best buys I have made in a long time. It is not often that one reads, better yet, experiences an experience which so takes you over that you are not sure whether it is a script handed to you or whether it is just a vicarious experience. The book is such a beautiful description of emotion, that of the reader and that of the writer so intertwined that they are really one. Who was taking care of who, I am not sure but a friendship, a love like the one described is well not necessarily beautiful, but simply so personal that you cannot but feel that its reality once displaced. Was it the writing or the magic wand to open one's emotions, I am not sure. A mix of lonliness, unity, love - in short a book which deserves a read and it will simple suck you in. The hero becomes the saved, the one to be saved becomes a saint.
Rating:
Summary: who IS Paul Michel?
Review: i have searched my local college library, the internet, other people, and have concluded that either there is no Paul Michel, that he is of a different name, or that paul michel is an unknown author. if someone knows who this author that she speaks about is, PLEASE post a message, alerting and educating the rest of us, who, like me, truly desire to read these great works!
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written tale
Review: I really did love this book. It was lush, tragic and really wonderfully characterized. I felt like too much time was spent building up to his meeting with his subject. I was left with one question....well, more than one, but this is my big one: is Paul Michel real? If so, where can I find his books? I thought he was fictious, but then there was that confusing biopic on him. Anyone know? PLEASE drop me a line if you do.
Rating:
Summary: An Academic Novel for Romantic Post-Structuralists
Review: I sat down to read _Hallucinating Foucault_ one sleepy evening and became to engrossed I could not stop reading until I finished a couple energizing hours later. Duncker makes my brain work. She brilliantly brings forth the human side of late twentieth century post-structural philosophy and post-modern literature, binding the reader into a love triangle that's both solid and ethereal. What does the reader bring to the text? What sort of relationship does the reader have with the writer? What happens if the reader really does go to seek the author--who isn't dead after all--and blends his intellectual dream with "reality"? As a doctoral student, my favorite thing about this book is that the plot has the best possible happy ending--the protag. finishes his diss. and gets a job!! This is better than Byatt's _Possession_ and up there with Winterson's _The Passion_ for me.
Rating: 
Summary: I don't know
Review: I want to feel guilty about giving it only two stars when almost everybody else gave it a five. Two stars for the clarity of the language, at least. But I can't be dishonest to myself. It bored me. The love story between The Germanist and the unnamed Narrator read like a high school affair despite the fact that they're both intellectuals. Can't finish the book. It sends me to sleep.
Rating:
Summary: Scholarly madness
Review: Patricia Duncker's HALLUCINATING FOUCAULT explores the relationship between scholar and subject matter, reader and writer, mentor and protégé - and the madness that connects them all. The narrator is a male graduate student at Cambridge studying the novels of (fictitious) French "wild boy" Paul Michel and his enigmatic literary relationship to the philosopher Foucault. When the narrator's girlfriend pushes him to locate the institutionalized Paul Michel, he begins to unravel the mystery of his subject with a growing and inescapable obsession. The psychological twists of this novel are astoundingly powerful. Duncker writes with a delicate authority that never loses it momentum. Her characterizations are deft, and, in the case of Paul Michel, delightfully cryptic. She melds the substance of philosophy and scholarship with a moving love story that transcends both gender and sanity. To her credit, Duncker never overburdens her story with her themes but instead allows the story itself to carry their weight. I highly recommend this novel for readers of literary fiction. You don't need to know anything about Foucault or scholarship to appreciate Duncker's exploration of madness, love, and the written word.
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