Month: December 2021

Buckle Your Seat Belts For Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly

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I must say at the outset that I never intended to read, much less review, this book, at least not anytime soon. There I was, dear readers, working diligently (well, sort of) on a review of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives Tale, when I became consumed with restlessness. After all, I hadn’t started a new book in almost two days! Oh, the horrors of withdrawal from my favorite drug! Writing a post was simply no substitute for the rush of a new reading selection, particularly when one has been mainlining for decades! Perhaps I could work on my Bennett post while making do with a slow read of an Edith Wharton novella, at least until I finished with Old Wives Tale and I was free to choose a longer work. Work before play, that’s always been my motto (except when it hasn’t). Just a click or two on the internet, then back to Mr. Bennett . . . but . . . what’s this enticing new novel, a bestseller yet in France? I don’t normally read bestsellers but this one is translated (by the well-known British translator Adriana Hunter) and doesn’t that elevate it a bit over usual entries on the New York Times’ bestseller list (I’m thinking here of an All American Christmas, a self-described heart warming collection of holiday memories from the Fox News staff, selling like hotcakes for five weeks now)? I’ll download a sample and read only a few pages, just to get some idea of the thing and then it’s back to Bennett’s tale of Constance and Sophie . . . . Well, dear readers, I think you can see where this is going. The Anomaly is so engaging, I’m afraid poor Arnold B. never had a chance (but I will get to him! Spoiler alert for my upcoming post: The Old Wives Tale is a fabulous novel).

Perhaps if I were more familiar with contemporary French culture, and better read in French literature, I would have been less surprised by this wonderful novel. For those who (like me) need to — ahem — brush up on the basics (all others may skip to the next paragraph), Le Tellier is a major figure in contemporary French intellectual life. He’s one of those amazing individuals who are supremely good at many things, including writing, journalism and mathematics. Offhand, I can’t think of any public figure comparable to Le Tellier in my own country (U.S.A.), particular when you throw in the fact that he’s also a food critic! Le Tellier has written several novels; The Anomaly, which is his fourth, won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2020 and has sold over a million copies world-wide. Have you ever, dear readers, come across a completely unfamiliar term, only to have it pop up again very soon afterwards? The word I’m thinking of, in the context of my review, is “Oulipian,” which I first encountered quite recently in one of Kaggsy’s reviews. Sparing you the click to Wiki, the adjective refers to a loose association of (mostly male) francophone writers and mathematicians who use constrained techniques to create their works, the idea being that the very rigidity of their chosen structure triggers ideas and inspirations. Italo Calvino was a member of the group and Le Tellier is, among his other accomplishments, its fourth president. Given this link, will it hardly surprise you to learn that Le Tellier ends The Anomaly with a calligram (that is also IMO a lipogram)! If you need an explanation of these terms, dear readers, you must click for yourself; while I am indulgent, I’ll only coddle so much, as any more “background” will confirm that I’m hopelessly pedantic.

Has my background paragraph given you an impression of a drily witty, erudite work, full of Gallic “in” jokes incomprehensible to a less refined anglophone audience? If so, I’ve done you a vast disservice. The Anomaly was one of the most entertaining, thought provoking and funniest novels I’ve read in quite some time. With a light touch and great psychological insight, Le Tellier welds a wild mix of genres (science fiction, thriller, love story, social satire, mystery) into a seamless whole, while dealing convincingly (and entertainingly) with subjects as diverse as a professional assassin’s business methods, a doomed love affair, probability analysis, and a child’s intense love for her pet frog. All this, combined with a masterly ability to maintain suspense, to make me care about a surprisingly large number of his many characters and to leave me pondering, long after I’d finished, the issues he raised concerning the nature of reality, the existence (or not) of free will and the ability of individuals to adapt to a drastically changed reality. C’est Magnifique!

If you’re still with me at this point, I can imagine your growing impatience. “O.k., so you liked it,” I imagine you saying, “but cut the adjectives and just tell me something concrete about the story!” Because Anomaly operates on so many levels, this is both an easy and impossible task. At its simplest, it concerns a seemingly random group of very disparate characters and how they cope, or don’t, with a situation straight out of The Twilight Zone. Le Tellier immediately plunges the reader into the very different stories of (among others) a merciless hired killer with a double life (when he’s not murdering people he runs a chain of vegetarian restaurants in Paris), a critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful writer (quotes from his unexpected best seller, The anomaly, provide the novel’s epigraph and chapter headings), a closeted young singer from Nigeria who’s forced to conceal his homosexuality, and the six year old daughter of an American military family who’s blocking the memory of terrible events. Le Tellier develops these narrative arcs bit by bit, switching both style (the assassin’s sections are noirish, for example, while the arc devoted to an unhappy love affair is far more meditative and philosophical) and points of view. It’s a technique very reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (as I noted above, Calvino was also a member of the Oulipian group). As the stories develop, so does the suspense. In short order I was totally hooked on the mystery of what bound this seemingly random group together and why, as the novel progressed, they were being surveilled and/or apprehended by shadowy government agents. All I will say of the plot is that the reader eventually learns these flawed but engaging (well, maybe not the hitman) characters were passengers on a Paris to New York flight that underwent one of those terrible, near-fatal episodes that provide nightmares for every nervous traveler.

plane-lightning-aircraft-airplane-sky-flight-storm-aviation-clouds — I absolutely couldn’t resist throwing this striking photo into my post! Thankfully, it’s a stock image (unfortunately I don’t have the info to credit the photographer) rather than a personal photo . . . .

The explanation of what happened occurs about halfway through the novel (and I, at least, was in suspense all the way there). After this, Le Tellier deals with the implications of this cataclysmic event for both his characters and society as a whole. I had expected to be a little bored at this point but found that Anomaly’s “how” was every bit as interesting as its “what,” so to speak. Not only does Le Tellier offer some fascinating philosophical as well as scientific explanations, he also never loses sight of the very personal way in which his characters attempt to cope with a drastically altered reality.

Le Tellier’s genre salad includes, as I previously mentioned, a bit of social satire. This mainly manifests itself in his treatment of U.S. popular culture as well as the differences in how the French and U.S. governments deal with events. At least one professional (U.S.) reviewer found this aspect of the novel condescending. Although I did not (Le Tellier aimed his arrows at legitimate targets IMO), I did think this novel’s satire wasn’t quite as strong as its more psychological and philosophical aspects.

A few other odds and ends deserve mention before I end this overly long post. Adriana Hunter’s translation is so lively and idiomatic it was difficult to believe that the novel wasn’t originally written in English. Hunter is British and it seemed to me that she found that almost impossible spot between British and American English, but I’d be interested to discover whether any readers of the novel from the U.K. would share my opinion. One particularly attractive aspect of Anomaly for us blogger types is its use of literary allusions, which add to its depth without detracting from the pace and flow of its narrative (because I haven’t studied French and am poorly versed in French literature, I fear I missed many of these but even so I have an exciting list of references to track down). Lastly, I kept my discussion of the novel’s plot to a minimum because I think that, especially with this novel, the less one knows in advance the better. If you plan on reading Anomaly, I strongly advise caution in checking out its reviews in advance (the Washington Post reviewer, for example, gave away practically every plot twist in his otherwise insightful review. I am deliberately not including a link).

It’s impossible to close this post without mentioning the novel’s literal ending. Le Tellier finishes his work with a calligram shaped like a funnel into which words and letters disappear, leaving only “e nd.”

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Le Tellier has declined to explain or supply the missing text, thereby compelling each reader to supply her own interpretation. His is a very elegant — and Oulipian — suggestion that there is no one answer to the questions raised by his novel.

Continue reading “Buckle Your Seat Belts For Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly” →

Drifting Through A Dreamscape: Fleur Jaeggy’s “The Water Statues”

1-179 — Although this photo is unrelated to The Water Statues (it’s actually a shot of an underwater museum off the coast of Mexico) it captures perfectly the eerie, dreamlike atmosphere of Jaeggy’s novella. (Uncredited photo taken from the website of the touring company Aquaworld).

Although I prefer realistic fiction and am most comfortable with a style that at least nods to tradition, I do occasionally venture further afield. After all, dear readers, we don’t want to read Anthony Trollope all the time, do we? Or even dear Jane, as fond as we are of Lizzie’s adventures and Anne Elliot’s romantic travails? When I do venture to sail in unfamiliar waters (I’m afraid the nature of the book I’m about to discuss has me thinking in aquatic metaphors), it’s a struggle for me to be open to work that is totally new, particularly if it’s written in a non-traditional style.

My immersion in the blogging world, however, has slowly, slowly, expanded my reading horizons, albeit in inverse proportion to my bank account! This was the year, for example, that I’ve almost become comfortable reading translated literature. Having dipped my toe into non-anglophone waters and survived, I decided to take on the ultimate challenge: a subscription to “the New Classics Club” sponsored by New Directions publishing. Once I did so, strange, exciting & frequently disconcerting works of fiction began arriving in my mail box on a monthly basis. This November, for example, brought me:

0-9 — *Although new to me, those who are better read than I have long enjoyed Fleur Jaeggy’s fiction. New Directions has recently released this early work, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff.*

For those who are interested in bio, Jaeggy was born in 1940 in Zurich, Switzerland, where she spent most of her early life. Like many of her fellow nationals, Jaeggy is multi-lingual and grew up speaking French, German and Italian. In her twenties she moved to Rome, where she became friends with the Austrian novelist Ingeborg Bachman. It was in Rome that she also met, and eventually married, the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso. Jaeggy, who writes exclusively in Italian, has continued to live in Italy, where she has bagged most of the country’s major literary prizes. The Water Statues, originally published in 1980, is an early work; it was in 1989, with Sweet Days of Discipline (translated by Tim Parks) that Jaeggy became widely known. New Directions has published English translations of these as well as others of Jaeggy’s novels, essays and story collections. In addition to writing fiction, Jaeggy has also translated the work of Thomas de Quincy and Marcel Schwob into Italian.

All very interesting, I can hear you mutter, but — what about the book? Who are the characters, what is the plot and, most importantly, what is your opinion of it? Ah, dear readers, it’s easier to provide questions than to supply answers regarding this enigmatic little work, whose nature and meaning are as elusive as the element contained in its title. Jaeggy’s novel (more properly novella) clocks in at a scant eight-nine pages of generously spaced text that, technically, could be read in an hour or two. Its impact, however, is disproportionate to its word count. Unlike my usual way of plowing through a work of fiction, I read this one very slowly, in small bits spread over several days and stopped frequently to re-read a phrase and to savor the atmosphere. The impression it creates remains long after the last word is read.

For a variety of reasons, The Water Statues doesn’t lend itself to an analytical discussion. For one thing, it concerns encounters rather than events and marks time in a circular or even random, rather than linear, fashion. Essentially its “structure” is a seamless web in which one’s point of entry or exit doesn’t matter too much. Stylistically, TWS struck me as a hybrid of poetry and prose (some of its short sections definitely call prose poems to mind) as well as a combination of a play — Jaeggy begins with a list of nine “Dramatis Personae” and there are a few sections that consist solely of dialogue — and, well, what isn’t a play. TWS’ viewpoint continually shifts among the characters, who sometimes address the reader directly; these shifts in view and narration heighten the malleable, fragmentary nature of the reality they are experiencing. The inclusion among the named characters of an additional individual who is never identified but who sometimes narrates or gives his/her version of events further heightens the novella’s mysterious nature. Who is this person and what are they doing in the story?

The protagonist, to the extent there is one, is Beeklam, the rich and eccentric collector of the statues that provide the novella with its title. Early in the novella Beeklam relates how as a child he experienced the death of his mother Thelma. After her death (pp 8-9):

He’d abandoned his newly widowed father to go and “buy statues,” he said, and it was as if he were joking. From early childhood he’d been drawn to figurative imitations of grief and stillness; from childhood he’d been a collector, museums were in him; statues were his playthings, a privilege of all who are born lost and who start out from where they end. The child looked at them: he inspected eyelids and napes, drawn into their definitive dimensions of seriousness, some molded by artists of renown, others by unknown workshops. He had a name for each: Roselind, Diane, Magdalena, Thelma, Gertrud. Those statutes with their often amiable faces disclosed the things that dwell in things themselves, vitreous things.

After abandoning his father, Beeklam moves to Amsterdam, where he lives, “quite alone” with his statues in the basement of a villa close to the sea. Because the villa’s basement extends “down to the water,” its gaps and cracks give (p 8):

a sense of the movement of the waves: of a submerged world that he [Bleeklam] believed to be populated by other statues with feet (if they still had them) tied to stones; and whose knuckles of stone knocked on his walls. No one shooed him away when he rested his head on the wall and waited — perhaps for the statues of water to return, or to summon him. The child now wished to live as though he’d drowned.

Although I don’t pretend to any expertise in interpreting these strange and beautiful images, it seems to me that Jaeggy is hinting that the wall between living and dead is thin and that we each long for some form of permanence in a shifting and unstable universe. In this respect, I think it’s significant that Beeklam calls one of his statues by his dead mother’s name. It’s also worth noting that Jaeggy dedicated TWS to her close friend Ingeborg Bachmann, who had died several years previously in a fire (at one point (p 22) Bleeklam remembers reading that “Water is a burnt body,” a line that further hints of themes of death and mortality.)

Emerging from his basement of statues, Beeklam wanders the streets of Amsterdam in the late spring twilight, accompanied by his servant Victor. The lives they observe at a distance and their sporadic encounters with others are their only human connections: fleeting encounters and detached observations, with no lasting effect or central meaning.

The second part of TWS concerns Katrina and Kaspar, who may, or may not, be Katrina’s father. These “two loners” reluctantly share a pavilion on the grounds of a boarding school; “reticent in speech, they tolerate brief and stinting evening conversations” (p 44). Images, phrases, characters and even some of Beeklam’s statues make a reappearance in this section of the novella, reinforcing its non-linear structure and the circularity of time. As once character puts it (p 72), “One says goodbye to everything here; in places like these it’s as if all that is yet to happen were already in the past.”

It’s impossible to quit this overly long review without briefly mentioning the beauty of Jaeggy’s language and images, all the more striking because her prose is so very economical. Without wasting a word, or deploying any particularly lush or descriptive adjectives, Jaeggy has an unbelievable knack for creating images that stick in the mind long after her novella is finished. A crow’s eyes are “two miniature swatches of velvet” (p 53); cabbage leaves dropped in a garden are transformed overnight into “green drawing rooms” teeming with snails (p 84); the child Beeklam has “a horror of anything hereditary, because whatever comes * * * by natural inheritance belongs to the dead” (p 38). This particular combination of beauty and reticence is something new in my reading experience.

Have any of you, dear readers, explored Jaeggy’s fiction? If so, what do you think of it? Although TWS tested my limits a bit, I’m glad I read it and will definitely try more of this very interesting writer’s work (most probably I Am the Brother of XX, a collection of short stories). Would I recommend TWS to others? It’s definitely not for those wedded to a traditional style and a linear plot, but for those willing to tolerate ambiguity and open to atmosphere it’s an immersive and rewarding work.