Albert Cossery's THE JOKERS (tr by Anna Moschovakis)

 Many years ago, I decided it was finally time to take on a bit of Robert Silverberg, after a particular book of his, The Book of Skulls, had been recommended to me so many times I'd gotten tired of hearing about it. Forewarned against Silverberg's rampant misogyny, I still felt so entirely slapped in the face by it that I actually fantasized about how great it would be if an edition of it could be published without any women in it at all. I mean, think about that for a moment: I was wishing my own gender out of a book. I mean, kind of on the Thumper principle -- if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all? The Book of Skulls told a really cool story and wrestled with a lot of interesting ideas and depicted some characters who were quite hideous all on their own and I didn't need to see them mistreating women all along their cross-country journey to prove that.

Well, now I seem to have found a companion volume, perhaps a companion author to Silverberg as well. Except instead of a speculative fiction tale of a search for immortality and its costs, composed by an author widely renowned within his genre (but only within his genre), this one is straight-up literary fiction, composed by an author internationally acclaimed but again only in the circles of International Literature and translated fiction. But they have a lot in common.

Albert Cossery, a 20th Century Egyptian Man of Letters (known as "the Voltaire of the Nile") who wrote his letters in France and thus in French, was a terribly interesting and terribly talented man, but as I was warned in James Buchan's introduction*, he did not have a terrific attitude about women. But so don't a lot of terrific writers; Chuck Pahlaniuk, say -- the popular American novelist I was most reminded of besides Silverberg as I took in Cossery's short novel from around the middle of his long but lazy career, The Jokers.

As one might expect from the title, suggesting to us 21st century westerners nothing so much as everybody's favorite Batman villain, The Jokers concerns itself with a special kind of discontents in one of Cossery's unnamed imaginary Middle Eastern/North African cities. Their city , which is impossible not to imagine as basically being William S. Burroughs' Interzone, is ruled by a pseudo-military dictator known in the book simply as "the governor" who has banned begging and is flogging its population sort of half-assedly towards striving to appear a busy and modern city-state, with its people bustling around in a parody of purposefulness amidst glittering mid-century edifices that are mostly just cheaply constructed shells of same disguising the same old mud-brick architecture the place has always had. I could have used a lot more attention being paid to the state of affairs prevailing in a city run this way, but alas, I only got a very amusing opening prank at the expense of a police officer that I could definitely see happening in 2020s L.A. or Portland or NYC.

Anyway, our heroes want nothing to do with this prosperity play, of course, but can't be bothered to organize anything so effortful and banal as an actual armed uprising against the regime. The three we chiefly get to know -- Karim, an educated and capable young man who could easily fit into the machinery of state and do well there for himself and for his people, but who'd rather loaf around, seduce prostitutes and then not pay them, and make and sell kites; Heykal, a successful businessman who learned his trade in the prison system but never learned to read; and Urfy, who runs a small school with his mother, or used to before dementia took hold and left her pretty much helpless and hopeless. -- have convinced themselves that ridicule alone can topple the governor, but not just any ridicule. It must be ironic AF.

Their plot revolves around a poster campaign which will plaster the governor's face all over the city above an absurdly fawning encomium to him that will provoke the citizens to mirth and the rest of the nation and the international community to assuming that the governor is so insecure and pathetic that he has felt the need to mount this over-the-top propaganda campaign. It's an entertaining idea and one that I might have once thought entirely plausible, but now I just imagine a plot like this during The Former Guy's presidency and realize that the governor, were this to happen in real life, would probably just eat up the flattery, and the international community's sniggering would not bother him one bit.

Of course, the comparison doesn't really hold, because Cossery's unnamed city is nowhere near the Big Player on the International Stage that the United States is; it's much easier to laugh at what one has no very great reason to fear. I'm pretty sure the home of Karim, Heykal and Urfy is not a nuclear power.

On the other hand, their plot reminded me more than a little bit of one of my favorite short films of all time, Mat Nix's Me and the Big Guy, in which an ordinary citizen of a totalitarian state modeled on Orwell's 1984 uses the always-on two-way video screen in his home/cell to annoy the dictator into leaving him alone. Again, we now know that this wouldn't work; TFG would never stay tuned in to the film's nebbish protagonist long enough to get annoyed once the initial flattery got stale. Still, it's a glorious little ten minutes I hope to embed here if YouTube hasn't taken steps to prevent that sort of thing nowadays. 

The characters in The Jokers entertain no such hopes of being finally allowed to plot revolution in peace, of course; plotting revolution is work, and besides, what would they find to laugh at smugly, to feel superior to, to trade witticisms about, without the greatest joker of all, their city's fearless leader, to kick around?**

Interestingly, Cossery kind of lets us see what it would be like for them in a scene which has Karim having to submit to a police interrogation, which turns out to be the job of an old frienemy, Hatim. Hatim is a bit excited as soon as he sees Karim in the wating room, because he considers Karim a worthy foe, the kind of revolutionary that makes policing worthwhile -- but Karim, as part of the Big Joke, denies any dissatisfaction with the current regime at all, even seizes the opportunity, when the Governor Himself passes by, to kiss the Governor's hand and praise him as a Good Father to His People. Hatim senses this isn't sincere but can't see a way past the irony and is left deeply unsettled by the pointless encounter. Again, I can't help but think, wouldn't it be lovely if this worked? But alas...

I sound like I hated this book, but honestly, I didn't; I generally don't make the effort to write about books I don't like, both because I really don't have the spoons to waste and because I agree with W.H. Auden, who opined long ago that writers of bad reviews are usually just showing off. Better to let bad books sink into obscurity. But so, no, I didn't hate The Jokers, even with its misogyny that I haven't even gotten around to really describing yet, because Albert Cossery, and his translator Anna Moschovakis, have produced a really engaging and compelling little novel here, with just enough of a plot to keep it all going and a lot of ridiculously entertaining scenes, such as one midway through when Heykal, just moments after putting up the very first poster in a casino bathroom, watches a drunk stagger in, try to take a pee, look up and see the dictator's face staring down at him above a ridiculous paragraph of praise to him, and keels over stone dead -- while the dictator himself is sitting in the VIP section of that same casino, fending off the Jokery trio's young friend Soad's badgering attempts to get him to join her on the dance floor. And I like Cossery's insistence on idleness being a virtue, and his dandy-heroes could be my heroes if they would only include people like me in their plans. I can write poster copy, too, guys. Never mind that I could theoretically also have a baby. Guys? Guys?

But so, let's talk a bit about Soad, a 16 year old girl whose father is close in the governor's counsels, and who gladly turns over all the information she can because she has a crush on Heykal. When first we meet her, Humbert Humbert-ish-ly, the first thing we learn about her is that she has a wispy, underdeveloped body. The only point of view we get from her is either fawning admiration of Heykal or waspish hatred for a famous singer, a middle aged woman, who was her father's mistress for a while. Everything else is just cavorting and giving Heykal the eye, which only ever brings Heykal to ponder how much the true object of his admiration is Urfey's poor mad mother, about whom he rhapsodizes emetically: 

All the tenderness in him went out toward the face of the old madwoman, Urfy's mother. Her insanity was what he admired more than anything; she existed on a plane free of corruption, an extraterrestrial universe of inviolable purity, immune to the usual abominations. Heykal, who cared about nothing, was jealous of Urfy's crazy mother, this sublime being buried in a basement in an unsavory part of town; the schoolmaster possessed the one thing that could actually move Heykal.

Never mind the poor woman's actual circumstances.

But back to poor Soad. Toward the novel's end, she gets the Susan Pevensie treatment; her father, sensing that the governor's ship is sinking and he's not going to have the mental or economic resources to deal with raising a teenager on his own, has finally given her her late mother's jewelry and made her start dressing like an adult so she can quickly be married off. Her last scene with Heykal is as bad as anything C.S. Lewis wrote about Susan; now that her hair is up and her jewels are on she has no attraction for Heykal, who suddenly shifts to equating her to all the other women in the cafe where they've met for a last exchange of intelligence:

There was the little girl*** and her mother, and apart from that just two other tables occupied by ladies gorging themselves on cake and blabbing quietly to each other. Heykal was nauseated by the women's voraciousness.

I mean, they're just hanging out in a cafe? Having a nice conversation and a bit of cake? They're not, like, wolfing down a ten course meal and talking with their mouths open and spitting crumbs everywhere and looking his way and licking their chops? They're just there? Where they maybe are often because they like to be idle just like Heykal and his friends do? They might even have a more sophisticated understanding of what's going on in the governor's circles? Or just be nice, ordinary people who are hurting no one? But anway... then poor Soad arrives, proud of her new grown-upness and knowing that she looks nice, but when she makes the error of fishing for a compliment, she's told she looks "Superb!... You remind me of my grandmother!" And when she reacts to this as any teenaged girl might, Heykal gives her a dirty look and muses on how

She had just voluntarily crossed the border that separated her from childhood; from now on, she would no longer be able to move him. She was a woman now, and she knew how well he was defended against the ploys and duplicity of her sex. 

What? You thought I brought up Lolita by accident?

I really wonder what it was like for Anna Moschovakis to translate stuff like this from the French. Here's another choice passage:

Karim was relaxing. He leaned against the stone parapet that ran along the cliff road and studied the languid asses of the woman strolling by, so plainly visible beneath their light dresses. How different they all were! They came in every shape and size. In the veiled gray light of dusk, these amazing asses took on a life of their own, promising him sensuous delights. The owners of the asses were, for the most part, so ugly that even a sex maniac would run screaming, but Karim barely noticed; he seldom looked at a woman's face.

I mean, maybe I could convince myself that Karim and Heykal are being satirized for their horrible attitudes toward half the human race, if I was being paid very well to do it, but I know that publishers, even the famous NYRB Classics line, pay as little as they can get away with for translations. Let's hope she got a grant.

I'll stress again that I did not hate this book, but I did hate how I felt after finishing it: hopeless, tired and more than a little skeeved out. So I'll say I can see why this book and this author have garnered admiration, but I'll say also that someone is going to have to make a very concerted and sincere effort to get me to read any more of Albert Cossery's work. Humor and style aren't everything, and my TBR pile is still approaching the infinite, y'all.

And, apropos of nothing, I haven't read any Houellebecq beyond his Lovecraft book and The Elementary Particles, either.

*Which I only skimmed at first; I tend to prefer to take my fiction as it was written and only to turn to forewards and whatnot afterwards. Kind of like people who try not to see trailers before they see an actual film, I want a pure experience if I can pull it off.

**In other words, they remind me a lot of a guy who was one of my best friends from age three until we graduated high school, whom I wanted to punch right in the junk when we met up for drinks in 2016 and he told me he really hoped one Donald J. Trump would be the next President of the United States because it would "never be boring." Anybody who values politics as entertainment being more important than at least trying to make other people's lives a little bit more bearable seriously needs a punch in the junk at least once. But I kind of used to do that to him sometimes when we were little, and I was in a public place, so I refrained that time.

***Before Soad's arrival, Heykal has been all but flirting with this little girl, even to the point of imagining spiriting her away from the cafe and her "monstrous" mother.