Mathias Énard's THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGERS GUILD (Tr Frank Wynne)

I never realized, before plunging into the fray of Mathias Énard's The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, that a work of fiction could have terroir. This is not the kind of sentence I ever imagined myself writing, or taking such pleasure in having written, but it's the best way to describe this novel, at least insofar as I understand the concept I'm evoking here. 

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, hereinafter referred to by your lazy blogger as TABotGG, teems with the kind of rural characters that a reader might will be terribly romanticized -- but stubbornly refuse to be, who persist in their Rabelaisian crudity (the works of François Rabelais, and of François Villon, echo throughout this text even before the title scene begins quoting these guys outright) and gossiping ways as our main point of view character struggles to document their way of life for his anthropology dissertation, all while realizing that he doesn't really even understand his own. 

David Mazon, late of the academic world of Paris, has done field work before, but this time he's really got to dig into his subject and get his hands dirty (beyond his futile battle with the weird red worms infesting the bathroom of the hut he's renting from a local farming couple). But of course, like most academic fish-out-of-water types, he's realizing that his course of study and lack of experience outside of studenthood hasn't even prepared him to research well. He spends most of his time playing with the farm cats who adopt him, and playing Tetris, at least at first.

So,  TABotGG could easily fall into cliché and bore us to tears as yet another supposed sophisticate finally learns about real life from colorful locals -- but it never does. We get a certain amount of arrogant bumbling on David's part, and of deserved comeuppance, but Énard is much more interested in pulling us deep into the soil and its produce here, avoiding also the tiredness of bewailing how every particle of dirt in Europe has passed through innumerable human bodies over the centuries, Europe is a bone heap, etc: Énard is here, instead, to celebrate this. And, in the process, to hint rather gently at the responsibilities of stewardship these facts impose on the agricultural communities who have made all of this possible. But only gently. No preachy environmental polemics here!

Instead, as we follow David through his rounds of interviews and tours and trying of his hand at the odd farm chore -- and David turns out himself to have quite a bit of character, as we see early in his story when a winter storm knocks out power to the village and he resorts to stealing candles from a church for the benefit of a near stranger who is stranger than he knows (we'll get to Arnaud -- oh, Arnaud! -- in a moment) -- we are invited to feel the course of waters through the soil and the decomposition of bodies, and the nutrient cycle, but, again, without being lectured about it. 

Meanwhile, we get to know lots and lots of characters, and not just in their current incarnations; we're a bit in Eastern philosophical territory here, as, upon a character's ordinary or dramatic or untimely or actually pretty funny death, we follow his or her soul, unstuck in time but very much confined to this geography, through karmic cycles of lives as people and animals of other eras in the region. For instance, David's wormy nemeses have human stories, too.

This is best explored through the character of Arnaud, whom we first come to know as the poor, neurodivergent young man whom the locals think is fun to get drunk and make him do his one seeming party trick of being able to rattle off a historical precis of everything of significance that ever happened on a particular date. We learn later in the book that there's much more to this seeming fixation and... look, I would read a whole book just about Arnaud. Arnaud is the best. But this is a book about a banquet, according to the title, right? A banquet held by the people who start up the process of converting the meat puppets we walk around in for a few decades, back into soil.

And these guys know how to party.

"...as was his wont, he filled the glass to the ringing brim until the surface of the wine was slightly convex, which he checked, stealthily approaching the glass with the wiles of a Sioux warrior, chin resting on the tablecloth, as though the precious liquid must be caught unawares before it should flee: once again Martial Pouvreau managed to ambush the wine’s meniscus; with pursed lips and an inhuman slurping noise, he drank off a good two centimeters of Chinon in a single draft before lifting his glass by the foot, with airy insouciance."

Oh, the banquet scene, the novel's capstone and center and longest (and most exhausting) chapter by far. I initially complained a bit about it to a few of my book-nerdiest friends, who all agreed that it's a bit much and a major tonal shift that can feel out of place. It is, however, the title scene, in which a hundred or so funerary professionals from all around the greater area of western France (or it might be the nation, excluding those from the cities?) come together for three days to discuss business a little and eat and drink a lot. Traditionally, these three days are a time when no one dies so that the gravediggers and cemetery caretakers and embalmers and hearse drivers and whatnot can let their hair down, and boy do they ever. We are treated to careful and meticulous details about everything they eat and drink, to their shop talk as they guzzle, and to their over-the-top feats of public speaking in which they quote and paraphrase France's earthiest literary figures.

“Of a sudden, darkness fell upon the battlefield below. 

“‘Gendarme, an eclipse! The darkest shadow has surprised our armies!’ 

“‘Not so, Commander, ’tis the giant’s schlong that blots out Phoebus! His tumescent pork sword is big as a billboard!'"

Which brings me to translator Frank Wynne, one of the greatest to ever do it, and who had his work cut out for him in rendering many versions of spoken and written French, prose and poetry, into something like their equivalents in English; as he shares in a terrific translator's note at the end, for instance, he  cleverly resorted to rendering one character's outré and vaguely archaic dialect... as Scots. 

It totally works, by the way. In a scene in which a judge is struggling to understand her testimony in court, even with the help of a local "interpreter."

But so, this isn't, like, Doc Martin  (for all that I could see Martin and many of the other residents of Port Wenn at work and play here) but a French novel by the same guy who sent Michaelangelo on an imaginary sojourn in the Ottoman Empire; trigger warnings galore, here. There are bawdy and sometimes gross jokes. There is a very vivid description of rape and its aftermath. There is cruelty and negligence and lots of talk of creepy crawlies and rotting corpses and inept gunplay and cheerfully lusty sex. But there's also a nice love story or two and many depictions of healthy marriages and friendships and fellowship and good food and well-turned earth. 

Basically, TABofGG is a hefty French novel about hobbits. It's a book I didn't even know I needed, but find that I most certainly did. From now on, whenever I contemplate the Shire, I shall not imagine them with those rich English countryside accents, but robust and fruity French ones, starring Gerard Depardieu as Bilbo Baggins and Romain Duris as Frodo. Your mileage may vary. But I think you'll have more fun if you do. Give it a try, non?

Antoine Volodine's RADIANT TERMINUS (Tr by Jeffrey Zuckerman)

Recently I indulged in a buddy read with my old pal, the Popqueenie, of one of my favorite Philip K. Dick novels, Dr. Bloodmoney, so that tale of post-nuclear-apocalypse and mutant psychic superpowers was very much on my mind as I settled into my second foray into the one-man genre of post-exoticism* that comes to us from the many-named author who invented it.

Radiant Terminus has cemented my interest in the work of Antoine Volodine/Manuela Draeger/Elli Kronauer/Lutz Bassman/Infernus Johannes. And damn it, I may have actually to learn French at some point because only some of his books have made it to English translation.

It's also very much an exploration of what life would have been like in post-nuclear Marin County in Dr. Bloodmoney if [REDACTED] hadn't [REDACTED] [REDACTED].** Except instead of the remains of luxurious and affluent northern California, we're in what's left of an old collective farm from the heyday of the world-encircling Second Soviet Union, and instead of the aftermath of a nuclear war, we have a world slowly devastated by Chernobyl-type accidents as the Second Soviet Union, under constant attack by pockets of fascists, slowly receded from its high water mark, leaving collective farm/village complexes like Radiant Terminus to fend for themselves without regular and competent maintenance of their neighborhood nuclear power plants. 

Oops!

We begin our story following the desperate retreat of a trio of survivors of the battle that lost the fictional territory of the Orbise. Slowly dying of radiation sickness and out of food and water, the three have one hope left: if the most able-bodied among them can make it to the next settlement and bring back some water and food.

Unfortunately for this barely-survivor, Kronauer (yes, one of the author's heteronyms), the next settlement is Radiant Terminus, where the nuclear plant has not only failed catastrophically but its core has completely melted down and later sank deep into the earth. The residents now use it as a sort of all-purpose garbage disposal, which they can only do thanks to the heroic efforts of "one of the most valiant figures of the second Soviet union, a legendary survivor, sagging under medals and highlighted in various enlightening stories," the Gramma Ugdal. The Gramma Ugdal, who is only ever referred to this way, has mutated into an immortal woman who cannot be harmed by radiation and thus has become famous for rushing in to help after countless nuclear accidents. Since this is so, she can safely handle contaminated carcasses, bits of furniture and farm equipment, whatever needs disposed of, and push it down into the melted-down core to its destruction. She has found, furthermore, a way to, at least partially, heal radiation damage in some others by the use of various altered waters. And that's not all. Sometimes she can bring them back from the dead. And if she can't with her waters, there's someone else around who probably can.

For the Gramma Ugdal is not the only immortal in Radiant Terminus! Her former husband from her long-ago (like 100 years long ago) youth, Solovyei, is also immortal and their reunion was unexpected and consequential, for he has powers even greater than hers*** for all that he has lived in obscurity where she became an international hero. But see, Solovyei is this novel's Hoppy Harrington, a figure of menace and bizarre psychic powers, who absolutely dominates Radiant Terminus and its environs by dominating the minds and bodies of its people. None of whom has the first idea of how to revolt against their god-king, all of whom have at least been led to believe that they literally owe him their lives, and many of whom are pretty sure that they only even exist because Solovyei has, Borges-like, dreamed them.

Solovyei also has a special hell set aside for any man dumb enough to involve himself, even in the most innocent way, with one of his three weirdly beautiful mutant daughters by "unknown mothers." Take poor Schulhoff, who legally married one of them and seemed genuinely to love her, but whom Solovyei has made to forget her utterly and roam the earth, as he explains upon meeting our veteran, Kronauer: 

Solovyei has made sure it will never pass. He makes me walk from forest to forest, from lake to lake, and when the absence of the woman I love seems a little less unbearable, when the loss makes me suffer a little less, he reintroduces himself in my head and he revives my urge to remember. He whistles in my head until I collapse. He keeps whistling, he sings his sorts of poems. It lasts for days and nights. I can't escape it. I can't die. I'm stuck within his clutches. Within his dreams. No death is available to me. I also wonder if maybe I'm actually inside one of his dreams. It won't pass and I can't escape.

Thus while we might have been expecting a tender reunion between the Gramma Ugdal and her Solovyei,  and a nice autumn twilight love story, what we get instead is a Twilight Zone episode. The one with Billy Mumy as a terrifying and omnipotent child. Except this time he's a gigantic full-grown man with yellow eyes and an axe in his belt and three beautiful mutant daughters and a conviction that no male human being ever born has ever meant anything but harm to the female of the species and must be punished for his bad intentions. And if a man Solovyei encounters actually doesn't have bad intentions towards those daughters, well, not only does Solovyei not believe it but he'll actually warp reality to make his preconceptions true. And then administer "appropriate" punishments.

Yikes.

So, half Hoppy Harrington and half Palmer Eldritch, let's say. Or maybe, the malevolent supercomputer I AM. And a little bit of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz - Solovyei loves to inflict his poetry on the entire village via a loudspeaker system.

But come to think if it, what Solovyei reminds me of the most is Dr. Haber, the subtly-terrifying-until-he-abandons-subtlety villain of Ursula K. Leguin's The Lathe of Heaven, who parlays his hypnotic control and medical/psychiatric power imbalance over poor George Orr to dream his way to world domination. Like Haber, Solovyei appears to have swollen his physical dimensions to match his massive self-conception; the first thing everybody notices upon meeting him is that he is simply huge, with a big axe shoved through his belt for extra intimidation. It's a classic diversion on both characters' parts, minimizing their actual threat by distracting their victims with the display of a quite different one. Few are guarding against a psychic attack when the likelihood appears to be that the opponent is going to just step up and tear one to pieces with his bare hands.

For all this, though, what Radiant Terminus seems most concerned with is the impact of literature, of Volodine's imagined post-exotic canon, on the people who have read it. The literary star of this novel is one Maria Kwoll, a post-exotic feminist whom even Andrea Dworkin might consider extreme. Because one of Solovyei's daughters is the village librarian and grew up on Kwoll's works, she has made sure that nothing written is left to be read except those works and things like machinery repair manuals and agronomy pamphlets. The result is a village of people, not only utterly under Solovyei's control, but also under Kwoll's influence: to them, sex is inherently aggressive and gross, it's impossible for a male human to think about anything else anyway, and everything such a creature says or does is in "the cock's language."

Which means that yes, even Solovyei is a Kwollite. Kwollian?

There's another element of Radiant Terminus that I can't help but single or for praise: its inventiveness in dealing with the altered landscape of a world that has suffered a thousand nuclear accidents. Volodine conjures up a whole alternate herbarium for his world. It's as if he decided that the Voynich manuscript was an accurate rendering that had just come unstuck in time. We get to learn a bit about them through the character of Kronauer, whose wife was busy on a project to identify all the weird new flora before the fascists murdered her, and about whom he thinks as he mentally catalogs what he sees on his journey to Radiant Terminus: 

Molle-guillotes, malveinés, ashrangs, smallglory captives, willow benaises. Damsels-in-flight, masquerats, four-o’clock beauties, pituitaines, sweetbalers, or midnight Jeannes.****

Like I said, I might have to start working on my French, which I can already kind of parse because of years farting around with Portuguese, Latin and Spanish, just so I can explore the rest of Volodine et al's works set in this bizarre world.

I hope there are lots more Crones in it.

*My first being Manuela Draeger's Eleven Sooty Dreams, another book with a prominent and formidable grandmother-who-isn't-a-grandmother figure -- which I simply love. As for what "post-exoticism" is, it's a sort of Marvel Cinematic Universe but for a group of imaginary and revolutionary writers who form the cultural milieu of a worldwide Marxist-Leninist society, the Second Soviet Union, that was hugely successful and utopian until it wasn't. The post-exotic works of Volodine et al are now its autopsy in print, melancholy and lovely and weird as hell. So, you know, pretty close to being my ideal reading material.

**If you know, you know. If you don't, go read Dr. Bloodmoney.

***Oddly, this gives an author the best excuse ever to use an omniscient narrator, for Solovyei can read minds even at infinite distances in addition to his other uncanny abilities, as is made plain when, almost exactly halfway through the novel, he is revealed to be possessing a crow that has been following some of his banished citizens around. These passages are written in the first person omniscient, but most of the rest of the book is in a very traditional third, which seems like a missed opportunity to have one of the best bastard narrators of all time. Le sigh.

****Those "Jeannes" have a longer name, by the way; they are Jeanne-of-the-Communists. Volodine is nothing if not committed to the Second Soviet but.

Michel Houellebecq's ANNIHILATION (Tr Shawn Whiteside)

Michel Houellebecq is an author I don't particularly like but I add compulsively to my towering, teetering TBR pile the way I often shake a few drops of bitters into my plain soda water. It's just not the same without it, though it tastes like ass by itself.

I don't read a lot of him in a row, is what I'm saying.

But when he publishes a new book, I'm never not interested. 

But so, since I have Houellebecq filed in my head as an unpleasant but necessary man to read, not as bad as Robert Silverberg or Albert Cossery in that I never want to read anything else by either of those authors ever again but still as someone I kind of need to brace myself for, imagine my surprise to discover that his latest novel, Annihilation is moving, human and lovely!

This is not to say that Annihilation is not bitter or bleak -- I mean, just get a load of the title! -- as I was expecting; there's still plenty to grit one's teeth through in this story of a prosperous civil servant enduring the disappointments of middle age in 21st century France. But our man Paul, whose image first really came into focus for me in a scene straight out of my favorite Editors song, depicting him smoking outside the hospital where his father has just been admitted as a coma patient, is the most sympathetic character I've seen Houellebecq create, and it's not even close.*

We first meet him as he's beginning to tackle a worrisome problem at his job, where I imagine him as a sort of colleague of Bug's father at Not-Nutella. An unknown entity is releasing very provocative video clips on the Internet, designed to stir maximum fear and unrest in French society. One even depicts the head of Paul's department, Bernard, who is the French Minister of Finance and a potential candidate for the next President of France, being decapitated. For a while, then, Annihilation feels like it's going to be a fancy high tech thriller/crime investigation, as Paul calls in personal resources to help him unravel who is doing this and why. For instance, an old friend who founded one of the best cinematic special effects companies in the world reviews the footage so far and quickly informs Paul that nobody, not his own firm, not Industrial Light and Magic, nobody, is currently capable of creating what they have been reviewing at the level of detail and realism they are seeing.

And then things get weirder and worse.

In the midst of all of this intrigue, Paul's elderly, widowed father, a retired intelligence agent who still retains some files that his former masters have asked Paul to get back for them (possibly, somehow, related to the case Paul is currently working on, meaning dear old Dad may have one last chance to be a hero), has suffered a medical emergency that has left him in a coma. And Paul, whom we've seen so far as something of a typical cold and bitter Houellebecq character, is landed in a whole mess of family drama, involving his father's "companion" Madeline (originally a live-in nurse but now a romantic partner that it's easier to just regard as a wife), Paul's devoutly Catholic sister Cecile and her easy-going husband Herve and their daughters**, their much-younger brother Aurielle and his insufferable wife, Indy, and a whole host of compassionate but firm medical professionals who are there to ease them all through the transition from having a busy and still-active father to having one who will probably never walk or talk or do things for himself again.

All of these characters are richly realized and sympathetically portrayed enough to give the scenes between them considerable emotional heft without ever drifting into melodrama.

But lest I sound like Houellebecq has gone completely soft in his old age, there are still a few passages like this, which could have been lifted from The Elementary Particles, to remind us of with whom we're dealing: 

For some years, it's true, the balls of shit had been copulating in smaller numbers, they seemed to have learned to reflect one another, they were aware of their mutual stench, and disgustedly parted company; an extinction of the human race seemed imaginable in the medium term. That left other trash like cockroaches and bears, but you can't sort everything out at the same time, Paul said to himself.

This as he contemplates the recent destruction by the mystery terrorists of a Danish sperm bank. A golden star to you if you can guess what the balls of shit are in the above.

But all of this is just camouflage for the book's true nature. Houellebecq lies in wait for us at the bottom of a sandy funnel to which he has baited us with illusions of technothrillery and heartfelt family drama. We've traipsed along these fascinating and moving edges like an ant on a patch of sand, not noticing the funnel shape the sand is gradually assuming until abruptly the sides have gotten too steep. We fall into Houellebecq's waiting jaws; he will drain us and toss our husks back onto the pile of corpses above, the pile that we also did not notice while we were distracted by Paul's rediscovery of his marriage, by his father's apparent holding of the key to the mystery. 

And at last the title of the novel, heretofore seeming maybe an ironic joke at our expense, makes sense. I won't call Annihilation a shaggy dog story as such, but it shares some of that thing's qualities, though in service of a point a shaggy dog story lacks. I will caution you that,  for a little while after finishing Annihilation, I felt a bit disappointed in it. So might you. But I suspect that on further reflection you might overcome this feeling, as I did a few days later, when I realized what Houellebecq had, in fact, achieved. 

I suppose if anyone was, with his (probable) last book, going to reveal himself as a literary ant lion, it would be Michel Fucking Houellebecq.

Now excuse me; I am dealing with my own issues with aging and also with unhipness. I have only just discovered that Houellebecq is in a film with Iggy Pop. How the hell did this escape my notice????? Oh yeah, there was a presidential election and stuff going on, even way back then.

*Not that I've read all of his novels; just most of them.

**One of whom has an encounter with Paul out in the world that is possibly the funniest passage I've ever encountered in Houellebecq.

Virginie Despentes' DEAR DICKHEAD (Tr Frank Wynn)

Epistolary novels have never been my favorite, but when its author is someone like Virginie Fucking Despentes I'm going to drop everything and read it anyway. 

Especially since it kind of sounds like an epistolary novel of hate, as the title, Dear Dickhead (Cher Connard in French), heavily implies. 

The correspondence that unfolds here is between a world famous French actress and celebrated beauty, Rebecca, and an almost as famous French novelist, Oscar. As we quickly learn, both of them have seen better days; Rebecca has hit middle age, is no longer much of a sex symbol and isn't getting much in the way of work anymore; Oscar has recently come to the attention of the #MeToo movement for his treatment of one of his first publicists, a woman named Zoe Katana (gotta love Despentes' character names; this is the best since Vodka Satana in the Vernon Subutex trilogy) at the start of his career.

They knew each other slightly as children, when Rebecca was the best friend of Oscar's older sister, Corrine, who makes a kind of side appearance in the novel as a topic of discussion between the two, but Corinne is not terribly important. What matters is that Oscar, newly in shock, as he excuses himself, from his exposure via his former publicist's blog, recently made some very unkind remarks to the press about Rebecca's appearance these days. And Rebecca, not one to suffer dickheads gladly, emailed him a scathing personal reply that is... very much the kind of thing I read Virginie Despentes for.

I don't think anyone would truly want to read a novel-length flame war, however, and Despentes has other things in mind than just a moderately novel storytelling device. Not long after the opening exchange of fire, Rebecca and Oscar settle down a bit, not only out of mutual respect for Corinne or their own childhood connection to one another and the memories they share, but out of a simple curiosity that blossoms into empathy and then into a combative kind of friendship. Part of the catalyst for this is Rebecca's own investigation of Oscar's sudden #MeToo infamy, exposed when the publicist becomes a middling internet-famous feminist blogger and tells her side of the story, which we get to see in interludes quoting entries from her blog. 

Rebecca neither leaps to Oscar's defense nor takes Zoe's side, but, through her imperfect understanding of Zoe's experience as filtered through her own, makes a very good attempt at leading Oscar to consider how his behavior might have seemed very different from the point of view of an unwilling object of his attentions. Very good, but not perfect: Rebecca hasn't been as powerless as Zoe was since she was a young teenager, and has since lived the cosseted and insulated life of an international superstar. Still, she starts getting through to Oscar, enough to lead him to start reconsidering many aspects of how he has lived his life and treated other people -- and his relationship with drugs and alcohol.

Before we know it, Rebecca and Oscar have more or less talked each other into getting clean, with Oscar starting to actively go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and soon realizing that he's actually finally found the only people in perhaps the world that don't care about the sexual harassment allegations against him, and, once the COVID-19 epidemic first hits and changes the world/ Rebecca eventually follows him, first lurking on the online meetings Oscar has to resort to when Shelter In Place becomes the new norm and then, discovering the same value that Oscar has found in his participation, cautiously turning on the camera and allowing others in recovery to know that she is there and is also finally ready to admit that her own drug use has maybe been a problem.

The two never share a physical space; everything unfolds in true epistolary fashion through their emails and bits from Zoe's blog that allow us not only to see an outside perspective on what they are doing but also, at least from Zoe's side, the price that Zoe is paying for speaking up as part of #MeToo, because of course Manosphere internet trolls start harassing her, threatening her, letting her know via disgusting physical parcels that they know where she lives and driving home that she is trapped there while the epidemic rages unchecked.

The character arcs thus explored are extraordinary and moving without ever feeling sentimental or manipulative; both Rebecca and Oscar are acerbic, brave and, eventually, honest. They never stop needling each other; Rebecca never really stops calling Oscar a dickhead even after they've both come to realize that they genuinely care about each other. Their individual voices are wickedly fun and brutally entertaining. Zoe's is less so, but she still gets a chance, if somewhat indirectly, to appeal to the reader's understanding and empathy. The result is a novel that not only met my exceedingly high expectations of Virginie Despentes as a novelist (who, let's face it, made my automatic buy list long ago) but exceeded them. Despentes is an absolute wonder, and I can't wait to see what she does next, if she chooses to do anything next at all, which I sincerely hope she does!

Emmanuel Carrere's V13: CHRONICLE OF A TRIAL (Tr John Lambert)

I was emotionally unprepared for what awaited me within Emanuel Carrere's V13: Chronicle of a Trial. I imagine few readers are prepared, except perhaps for those who were present for the terrible events in Paris on November 13, 2015, or who attended the trial of the surviving accused of the multiple attacks at a nightclub, a sports arena, and a few cafes.

Nor did I even know that this same group of men were also responsible for suicide bombing attacks in Belgium, on an airport and a train station, on March 22, 2016, by which time I was even more distracted by events here in the U.S.

Let's be real; the attack I previously knew as "the Bataclan shootings" mostly escaped my notice; there were ridiculously awful things unfolding closer to home then, and I don't follow the Eagles of Death Metal -- the band playing the Bataclan that night -- or international football -- there was a friendly match between France and Germany at the Stade de France -- very closely. I would probably still have been pretty ignorant of this whole affair had it not been a significant element of Virginie Depentes' Vernon Subutex trilogy, which she was still writing when the attacks took place and into which she wrote them with devastating effectiveness. 

Oddly enough, it was as I was grabbing Despentes' newest novel, Dear Dickhead (coming soon to a blog near you) off of Netgalley that I saw V13*, recognized the author (Carrere penned my favorite biography of Phillip K. Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead), and noticed the coincidence: she who first made me take serious notice of the Bataclan attack had a new book out, and a book about the trial was there for the taking at the same time. How could I not get them both?

Carrere was present for almost every day of the nine-month trial of the 14 men accused of helping plan or abetting the attacks; most of the men who actually entered the locations, fired the guns, and activated the suicide vests, died in the attacks or in later battles with police (some in Belgium, where the same Islamic State cell carried out additional attacks in early 2016). One of the defendants was supposed to blow himself up but changed his mind; some others were caught up helping him escape; others rented the cars or the apartments in which the attackers stayed, or watched ISIS beheading videos with the attackers at their hangout spot in Belgium back in the day.

Normally propaganda hides horror. Here it puts it on show. The Islamic State doesn't say: this is war, sadly for good to triumph we must commit terrible acts. No, it lauds itself for its sadism. It uses sadism, displays of sadism, and permission to be sadistic to recruit.

As I read Carrere's careful, vivid and extremely empathetic account of the trial, my mind kept looking for diversions from the tragedy, often using my ignorance as an excuse. Thus upon discovering that three of the attackers who killed and died that day rode into Paris in a SEAT, I took time out to reflect on how the only other time I've encountered that model of car in literature was in Graham Greene's charmingly bittersweet Monsignor Quixote, in which the title character and a Communist ex-mayor of a Spanish town drive around the countryside in a SEAT they've christened Rocinante. What becomes of my pleasant associations with that car -- which I assure you has not once crossed my mind since I read the Greene novel sometime in the late 1980s or so -- I started wondering. No, Kate, focus. It's not like this book is boring. It's just unbelievably tragic and tough and terrible. Because Carrere, and his English translator John Lambert, are committed to putting me right there in the courtroom while a few hundred witnesses and victims, investigators and, yes, perpetrators, tell their stories, and some very capable and committed defense attorneys try to do right by their clients... in an utterly unfamiliar-to-me justice system.

In the course of testimony, which includes that of François Hollande (who was the president of France at the time of the attacks), something happens which I can't imagine ever happening in a U.S. trial: the actions of the host nation are called into question, considered seriously as justification for what the accused and the deceased attackers did. France was heavily involved in bombing Syria, attacking the Assad regime that had mounted the first big backlash against the Arab Spring and which was continuing to repress its people -- but also, in attacking the territory ruled by the regime, harming civilians. The V13 attackers, many of whom had gone to Syria to defend Islam, felt that they were striking back. If they were culpable, so was France. And many other countries, including mine.

Carrere also devotes time to the stories of the defendants themselves, several of whom were close friends with the ringleader of V13, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and were involved at various levels in his journey to Syria to help the Islamic State help Assad's victims to fight back, and to establish and defend their hoped-for caliphate. Some even were along for the trip and spent time in Syria, even to bringing along their families -- an account of the experiences of one of their wives is especially memorable and harrowing.

Many of the attorneys on both sides, many of whom became friendly acquaintances of his during the Long months of the trial, also get time in Carrere's spotlight. On both sides they were highly skilled, professional and committed to finding the truth and seeing justice done.

In sum, if you know nothing about the attacks, if you want to know more about them, if you want to understand better what turns ordinary immigrants into terrorist killers, or just more about the French justice system and the investigative process that uncovered the identities of the assailants, living and dead, then you owe yourself a look at V13. If none of those things interest you, but you appreciate top level journalism and non-fiction writing, then you owe yourself a look at V13. Even if non-fiction isn't usually your bag and you just appreciate a compelling story and good storytelling, you owe yourself a look at V13.

Just maybe keep some tissues handy.

*The title refers to the day of the attack -- V for "Vendredi" ("Friday" in French) and 13 for the day of the month. Yes, the Paris Attacks occurred on Friday the 13th because of course they did.

Alice Brière-Haquet's PHAILANA (Tr Emma Ramadan)

What if the Mothman (of prophecy fame) were a little girl named Manon, lost in Jack the Ripper's London? Being relentlessly pursued by a would-be mad scientist and protected by a weird old lady and a pack of Very Good Dogs?

I mean, shut up and take my money, amirite?

In Alice Brière-Haquet's Phalaina (Greek for "moth") the Goodest of the Good Dogs, Giulio, even becomes a point of view character, as he is an agent of the secret Mothman People (I know it's basically the Secret Commonwealth aka Faerie, but they hang out with moths, have very moth-like habits and glowing red eyes; they are the Mothman People) via his friendship, not only with Molly, the woman who becomes Manon's human protector after Manon escapes from a convent, but with a strange and gangly man with weird abilities who is seeking to reunite Manon with her people. Her people who live in a special harmony with nature and can communicate telepathically with each other and with all animals. Manon can't yet because she's still a larva, basically.

Giulio doesn't entirely steal the show, but he does emerge as Phalaina's most dynamic and dependable hero even when he's not the point of view character, so I think perhaps this novel should actually have been named for him, but then someone would have to explain the cover art (though I like how, in the American edition, the upper wings of the moth depicted look almost like dog's heads in profile and the lower wings, combined with the tree's trunk and a hollow at its base, form yet another dog's face! I wonder if that was intentional? The cover artist for the English language publisher, Levine Querido, is not listed on the copyright or title page, dammit!). 

Ah, but the Mothman People are not her only people; Manon had a human father, a famous and wealthy professor, Dr. Humphrey, who corresponded with Charles Darwin and started an important scientific foundation before dying in a mysterious carriage crash out in the boonies, which some sinister types know Manon was in but survived...

Among the sinister types are the hilariously Cruella DeVil-ish Harriet Humphrey, the dead professor's sister and sole heir -- unless proof surfaces that he had a child, say -- and her icky boyfriend, John, who was the Secretary of the good doctor's foundation and is helping Miss Humphrey to locate Manon, but maybe not in service to Miss Humphreys' or Manon's interests!

The resulting tale is a chase narrative reminiscent of, say, The Quincunx (but written for a middle grade audience) tinged with all of the coolest cryptid stories, Charles Paliser meets Coast to Coast AM minus the mRNA vaccine hysteria.

Translator Emma Ramadan kept this book's intended audience very much in mind and kept the prose clear and direct, though for some reason decided that the very modern (I think?) "heave" was a good usage to convey nausea and vomiting in a historical fantasy set in the 19th century, which usage tripped me up every time. I doubt the intended readership will even notice that, though; they'll just be having a good time while absorbing the book's very timely message about living in harmony with, versus dominating, nature. What a different world we might have now if that message had gained more traction back then. 

I hear Alice Brière-Haquet has written a few other books. Perhaps the next time I'm in the mood for some weird fantasy from the French, I'll grab one and spend some time with her again. She is delightful!

Colette's CHÉRI & THE END OF CHÉRI (Tr Rachel Careau, Narr Gabrielle de Cuir)

A sort of anti-love love story in two phases, Colette's Chéri and the End of Chéri takes very seriously an affair of the heart that was never allowed actually to reach those hearts involved. 

It would be easy to dislike young Fred "Chéri" Peloux, a "beauty who has everything and is only the more wretched for it, " raised in cold opulence by the servants of his courtesan mother, spoiled, impatient and demanding -- but Colette is too incisive a dissector of character to let us off that easily. As his lover, the much older "ghoul who only wants fresh flesh" (as she'll rather exultantly describe herself later in the book), Lea, falls in love with him despite herself but would never admit it, we wind up kind of admiring his monstrous qualities, or at least forgiving them; Lea is herself a courtesan, a life-long colleague and frenemy of Chéri's mother, and watched him grow up and never took him seriously as a possible love interest until she found herself kissing him. She has known all his flaws from the start, may be a little bit at fault for some of them, and so intimately understands why he is the way he is, and shares that understanding with us. 

We first encounter this pair five or six years into their relationship, with Chéri all but demanding a long pearl necklace that is something of a trademark of hers. He argues somewhat successfully that it looks better on him but grudgingly leaves it with her when she finally chases him out to go see his mother, Madame Peloux, whom they call the Harpy. Lea, left in peace, models the necklace for herself in a mirror and sees all the ravages time is taking on her beauty and finds that the necklace that used to set off her best features now makes them look shabby. Much later her now-married-but-not-to-her lover will encounter a woman his own age wearing a similar necklace of imitation pearls and finally realize that Lea has meant more to him than an Oedipal-ish crush but it's already far too late. 

But now that he's worn the real thing, fake pearls will never do. 

Lea is highly marginalized for all that she's had a celebrated career, because unlike her rival/friends, Madame Peloux and Marie Laure, she never had children. While she enjoyed wealth and comfort in relative solitude, her the other two made plans to marry their children to one another and settle them with a considerable fortune. Thus Chéri has always been destined to marry Marie Laure's lovely daughter, Edmée, only 19 to his 25 (and Lea's 49). It is thus implied, but never explicitly stated, that Madame Peloux drafted Lea simply to break the boy in and teach him how to be a decent lover for Edmée. Very much a frenemy move, if I've ever seen one.

At any rate, for all that both Chéri and Edmée are born out of wedlock children of courtesans, they and their futures count in a way that Lea does not; they are above her in the estimation of their little wannabe-bourgeois society's values. At least as expressed and embodied by her erstwhile colleagues in a community that is exceptionally interdependent because envied and despised by the greater world; if you have no solidarity, you have neither security nor hope. And the years when Lea wielded enough personal power (via her lovers) to provide her own security and hope are fast leaving her behind; Lea has to go along with her colleagues' treatment of her, whether she even realizes it or not.

But meanwhile, oops, no one ever bothered to let the kids get to know each other or in any way facilitate a relationship between them once their mothers have decided. And like I said, no one ever spelled out what Lea's expected role was supposed to be, to her or to Chéri. 

So anyway, before long Lea, six months or so later, receives belated gossip that Chéri left his wife and is living in a Paris hotel, prompting Lea's maid Rose to observe that "the divorce will be happier than the marriage" and that everyone was "so gloomy" at the wedding. Before Lea can even agree, Chéri is, in fact, at her door once again and it looks like they might resume their prior idyll. But will they?

I mean, would a story like this be famous if it had a happy ending?

All of this takes place in the first novel, Chéri, set in France's Belle Epoque right before World War I. Six years after its publication, Colette took up these characters again for The End of Chéri and allowed an identical span of time to elapse. When we meet Chéri again, he is a war veteran, now returned to civilian life and, while unscathed compared to most Great War veterans of literature, still very much at odds with that life. He is still well off thanks to his mother's machinations but that just frees him of the need to earn a living; it doesn't tell him what to do with his life.

Meanwhile his wife and his mother have discovered charity work and between them seem to be running every aspect of a hospital from Chéri's well-appointed home; Edmée is even under consideration for high civic honors for her work. She and Madame Peloux are sure Chéri will eventually come around and start playing the role they've cast him in as the gracious host at their events and the masculine figurehead for their efforts, but he'd rather hide out in his bedroom when Edmée has committee members over for a working luncheon.

What's a still-beautiful boy to do but go look up old girlfriends, since his marriage, which Colette encapsulates in an early scene with him strutting around in front of his wife in just his underwear "more as a rival than as a lover" because he considers himself the more beautiful of the pair,  is still a wreck?

Ah, but six years has merely taken him deeper into his prime at age 31; Lea is now in her mid-50s in 1926 Paris, when Bright Young Things are running amuck and beauty is more important than ever. Those pearls become her even less well than they did in the first book. She has not only committed the sin of aging, but she has also gained weight -- and won't let him deny, in front of one of her friends when he shows up again uninvited at her home, that they were lovers once. She forces him to look at her as she is now, dumpy and grey haired in her "sexless dignity" and think "I used to hit that."

And worse, Lea finds this funny. And calls him out over the vanity and self-centeredness this exposes even as he still, in his head, is making it all about him; she must have come to this from grief over losing him. When she reveals that she's all but reading these thoughts and laughs aloud, it is, as they say, *chef's kiss.* Oh no, she's had a life of her own all along! It is here and now that he decides how the novel will end, if not on the details.

Was anything in his life real? Bitterly he wanders Paris, watches his wife and mother succeed, passes time with old friends whom he still considers beneath him; at novel's end we discover we were right to dislike him, but he has one last claim on our compassion because Colette was a damned genius. Ah, me.

Now I guess I'm going to have to take a look at the 2009 Stephen Frears film with Michelle Pfeiffer as Lea and Kathy Bates as Madame Peloux. I mean, the casting alone...!

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès' ISLAND OF POINT NEMO (Tr Hannah Chute)

Was Hagbard Celine your bad literary boyfriend long before Hubertus Bigend burst on the spec fic scene? Is "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" your problematic fave? Was your favorite bit of Jodorovsky's The Holy Mountain the roll call of evil tycoons? Were Jules Verne's books not quite as Jules Verne as you were expecting? Do you care about mustaches? How about ebook readers?

Or, to be more succinct, do you like having fun when you read? And what is French for "fnord?"

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès (who, are all Algerian-born authors simply amazing, or what? Admittedly, my sample size is a bit small, but still...) decided the answers to all of these questions was yes and decided to go them all one better and throw in a pigeon with a hilarious name here and there for good measure. 

Speaking of names, get a load of these: Martial Cantarel (dandified man of adventure), his pal Shylock Holmes (who solves crimes with the aid of a genius African butler with a big secret,  Grimod, in the mode of his famous grandfather, Sherlock), Inspector Scummington (of Scotland Yard, of course), French tobacco farmer Arnaud Méneste (whose personal bankruptcy -- after making cigars every bit as good as Cuban ones but since they're grown and rolled in France they have no exotic appeal to French smokers -- enables a Chinese syndicate to buy up his ancestral farm to set up an ebook reader factory), and Wang-li Wong, aka Monsieur Wang (the scopophiliac overseer of the ebook reader factory that arises from the unburnt ashes of the tobacco farm and the fancier of the pigeon with the hilarious name)... And there are more.

The action kicks off with an apparent murder mystery that may be connected to the theft from a Scottish castle of the world's largest diamond. While that thievery might be enough of a mystery to get things going, there is also the matter of three severed and saponified human feet,  each still encased in elaborate sneakers of a make and brand that do not exist, that have washed up on European beaches. No sooner are Cantarel, Holmes, Grimod engaged by the diamond's former owner (and Cantarel's baby mama) than one of the probable former owners of one of the severed feet turns up spectacularly and publicly dead and the gang is following an ingenious clue to Siberia! To which they travel in mind-bending luxury!

Meanwhile, a wife desperate to please and be pleased by her impotent husband resorts to desperate measures that result in improbable sentences like "His penis looks like a butcher's joke, a microphone made of bratwurst, ending in a big ball of calf liver." So, uh, content warning for bawdy humor though it's no worse than what you'd find in, say, The llluminatus! Trilogy.

I did not evoke Hagbard Celine in jest.

But this isn't much of a conspiratorial romp, nor is it merely a detective story, for all its trappings of both. Roblès has more on his mind than that, and he's been reading his Baudrillard, or at least his Umberto Eco, as we see when the action brings us to Tianducheng, China and an idealized,  hyperreal, scaled down version of Paris located there, with all of the City of Lights' famous sights and views perfectly reproduced but more conveniently situated, closer to one another "as if some genie had fulfilled a weary tourist's wish to shrink the city." It's carefully filled with all the expected cliches to populate the architecture, too:

Hundreds of white-skinned extras thus contributed to the authenticity of this immense garden of acclimatization, the designers having spared no expense. Among all these exhibitions of outdated and lost scenes, one display invariably provoked contemptuous chuckles -- that of a bookstore* reconstructed according to the best sources, in the image of those that existed before the digital divide that had finally stamped them out. Inside were fake readers around fake spindly booksellers who sorted piles of fake books.

If this doesn't make you think of Jim Munroe's bitterly awesome Ghosts With Shit Jobs, you really haven't been paying attention, have you? I, for one, can absolutely read the characters from this film as those less fortunate and left behind in North America while their more attractive or better connected relatives made for the bright lights and hyperreal sights of China.

Our trio of detectives and the diamond's owner, the lovely Clawdia MacRae, who happens to have had a daughter out of wedlock by Cantarel and has brought her along for the adventure despite said daughter being comatose (!), wind up traveling the world in grand Edwardian style, which is an odd thing to be doing in a novel that also explicitly contains things like ebooks and the internet and other modern technologies, encountering an array of perversions that would make Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson gush with glee as they follow the trail of the three right feet and the diamond. I had a theory about the anachronisms that kept characterizing their story -- the other plotlines in Island of Point Nemo are deeply concerned with storytelling, particularly with oral storytelling in the form, chiefly, of workers designated to read newspapers, essays and novels to their co-workers on the work floors of cigar factories and, later, the ebook factory, to keep them entertained through their drudgery and also to enlighten them (and thus make their overlords a bit less conscience-stricken at how their comfort and enrichment is paid for by that drudgery). I turned out to be right, at least in more ways than I did wrong, which was satisfying.

Where they end up is as incredible and unexpected as any reader could wish, among circus performers, zoo animals, and renegade scientists who have a firm belief that any small repair a person makes to the world is worth doing, even if it's just replacing a bulb in a street light.

A word, as always, about the translation: Hannah Chute had better have been well paid for the effort this must have taken; the English text is so rife with unusual locutions and near-neologisms that one would think Gene Wolfe had had a hand in it. I am a person of a certain age and fairly widely read, but some of the vocabulary (favorite example: "apocolocyntosis") appearing in Island of Point Nemo had me very glad to have an ebook version of the text and thus the ability to immediately look up the dizzying array of references and the unfamiliar words that kept cropping up. I felt like a naughty teenager again, leafing madly through the scandalous pages of the Illuminatus! Trilogy and other RAWiana with a real-life encounter with Robert Anton Wilson still in my future. I wonder if Roblès has a similar anecdote lurking in his back-story. Wouldn't that be delightful?

What is less delightful is pretty much the whole Monsieur Wang storyline. I labeled him a scopophiliac earlier, but he is also a gross sexual harasser of his employees, some somewhat consensually, some decidedly not. If you haven't been scared off by the wilder sex scenes in the other storylines you might take this in your stride, but as someone who rolls her eyes and taps her foot through this sort of thing, well, I guess we're supposed to hate Monsieur Wang anyway? Silly name notwithstanding?

Regardless, I am fairly certain this is going to end up being one of the weirdest, if not the weirdest, books I'll read this year, but then again, it's only February. From the French. What's yet in store? Stay tuned... I'm about to read some French young adult fantasy.

*This has to be a reproduction of Shakespeare & Company, right?

Virginie Despentes' BYE BYE BLONDIE (Tr Siân Reynolds)

"Every time I find a guy I really like, I drive him nuts and he chucks me out... You know the effect I have on guys: at first they love it that I'm in such a bad place, they always want to help. But if you overdo it, it's bad for the furniture."

Is there a Virginie Despentes Cinematic Universe out there in the ether? Or is it just a thing that happens in realistic literary fiction that a reader can 100% imagine an author's other characters showing up in the backgrounds of that author's other books. 

I can totally imagine Gloria*, the boozy, angry, messed up heroine of Bye Bye Blondie, who named herself for a song Patti Smith made ubiquitous, turning up at one of Vernon Subutex' al fresco Convergences, is what I'm saying.

She'd probably be the only one Bleach's Beats didn't work on, and thus constantly getting yelled at for slam dancing, though. 

Bye Bye Blondie is, of course, an earlier work than the trilogy that captured my crusty old heart a while back, but its heroine would fit right in with the huge cast of characters that populate the Vernon Subutex novels. She's the right age, for a start, and has the right sensibilities and the right proximity to, but inability to share in, success.** She's tough but loves deeply, abrasive but sentimental, drunk out of her mind a lot of the time and really kind of violent; when she first encounters her old boyfriend, Eric, she leaves the encounter wondering why she didn't punch him in the jaw. And it goes without saying that she has fantastic taste in music. She is, in short, exactly as the great Molly Crabapple drew her on simulated notebook paper for the American cover art, here. "Her life has few good points, except that she's used to it."

I really shouldn't like her, but I sure do. Though I wouldn't want her in my actual life, of course. I've got my own shit to deal with. And my medical bills are already insane. 

Anyway, Gloria is also, as the action gets going, in exactly the same situation as Vernon is at the beginning of his odyssey, though for different reasons. Vernon was long-term sponging off a friend who'd just died; Gloria made herself homeless one angry fit at a time, until she and her boyfriend, Lucas had their final fight and she, well, she kicked herself out more than Lucas kicking her out, but either way it is her violent craziness and her refusal to address it that have left her couch surfing in Nancy.

Enter Eric, who broke her heart years and years ago, now a big time TV presenter with TV looks and TV clothes and a TV chauffer stopping his car in the rain when he arrives on location in Nancy -- and spots Gloria stumbling down the street, not long after she finally stormed out of her latest ex-boyfriend Lucas' apartment for good. Eric is unaccountably delighted to see her and urges her to meet up with him for a drink later that night, when he's done with work. Mostly just to get rid of him, she kind of half-assedly agrees and even tells him about her preferred dive bar where everybody knows her nom de guerre (as in "Gloria" [G-L-O-R-I-A] is not the name her parents gave her), towards which he was preventing her from heading by keeping her standing with him in the rain. I might wish I'd punched him, too.

Auspicious beginning for a grand romance, no?

In different ways, both of them would eventually realize what a very poor preparation punk rock had been for later life. Too much fun, too much utopianism. Getting back into reality wouldn't be a pleasant experience. 

Of course, this isn't the beginning, exactly. No. Gloria and Eric originally met when Gloria was just 15 years old (and he was around that age, too, presumably) when they were both involuntarily committed, she by her parents, he by the authorities who picked him up as a vagrant while his parents were off on unspecified exotic travels, to a mental institution, there to be locked up against their will for many weeks with a motley assortment of ugly, gross old people (aged 30 - 50. You know, ancient, decrepit, how are they still alive?) with real problems except they seem mostly to boil down to refusals to grow up, according to Gloria? Gazing askance at them all at the mature age of 15? Anyway, Erik is young like her, and while kind of camp and effeminate, good looking enough to sleep with, except she doesn't get around to that until later in life. No, his parents come for him a good month and change before Gloria's come for her, and they exchanged letters! On paper with envelopes and stamps! Remember those? Plus he sent his "Blondie" cassettes to listen to on the walkman he left her after hers got confiscated (she was listening to Motörhead too loudly, according to another inmate) in which he smuggled small amounts of marijuana, because of course he did, this was young love in the 1980s, baby!

My mom is probably reading this and raising her eyebrows right now, but dude, we lived in the middle of nowhere and the cops actually did their jobs back then. Nobody was going to go to all the effort it took to get drugs into the Upper North Platte River Valley of Wyoming and then share them with someone as uncool as the book nerd speech kid cop's daughter. They just called me Narc and shoved me back into my locker. I was perfectly safe. As long as the janitor was still around to let me out, but that wasn't anybody's worry but mine was it? Ptoo!

But oh, didn't I wish I could hang out with people like Gloria back then. I would have been her pen pal while she was in the hospital and everything. I would have sent her all the Cure tapes I could find. Sigh.

Adult Gloria is a rather less appealing friendship prospect, though, as she let her heartbreak over Eric stop her from developing much beyond her angry little punkette phase. At 35 or so she is on public assistance, a confirmed day drinker, not quite as pretty as she was as a teen and lets her most violent impulses run unchecked. If she's not a danger to others, she's a danger to herself if there's no one around to beat up. She's had a string of terrible love affairs that always end badly and violently, and her best friend is an older heroin junkie named Michel who just laughs at her when she loses her temper. 

Into this paradisical existence comes Eric, who does indeed show up at her bar and, even though she left it hours before, sticks around in the hopes that she'll come back, meanwhile charming the socks off of all her crummy bummy drinking buddies who are falling all over themselves at the chance to be in the same room as a real live TV star. Their opinion of Gloria is changed forever when they learn that Eric considers her the One That Got Away and also the Love Of His Life!

Eventually, of course, the two reunite and whether it's true love or just neither of them has the strength of will to avoid making the same mistake twice, they get a kind of second chance. But this time, if things go wrong, they can't blame parents or prejudice or anything but their own deeply flawed characters. A kind of romance does indeed develop, but Gloria is still Gloria. If it succeeds, it will be in spite of rather than because of this fact, looks like.

Me, I think if I ran into 35 year old Gloria, I'd squeak and run. But I'd probably still love her from afar. Very afar. So afar. Just like I know I'd never be cool enough to hang with her author, who, also a filmmaker, made a film of Bye Bye Blondie recast as a lesbian love story that I'm gonna have to hunt down sometime. But I know there's no way I'd survive an encounter with Blondie. Bye!

*Who is almost exactly my age, and I'll probably never get used to that, having been raised, first,  on the classic literary Dead White Male canon and second, on the 20th century Boomer Narcissist canon. It's like I barely have room in my head for a woman who's anything like me. I have to shove Rabbit and Garp and David Copperfield and Jean Valjean aside to make room for a literary figure who, while both way cooler and way more fucked up than I am, has shared my actual progress through the world so closely. And I'm still a privileged American white woman! It must be so much weirder, but also even more refreshing, for actual demographic minorities to encounter their own Glorias.

**She even has dealings with an unnamed producer type who could very well be a younger Larry Dope from Vernon Subutex, and at one point she and Eric wash up outside a record store in Paris that could easily be Revolver before Vernon was old enough to buy it and run it into the ground.

Marie Ndiaye's THE CHEFFE: A COOK'S NOVEL (Tr Jordan Stump, Narr Edoardo Ballerini)

Cuisine is an art form that still resists duplication. A painting can be made into prints, as can a film; a book can be re-printed in a variety of formats but still with that original text. A recorded performance can outlive its performer(s). But a culinary artist's specialty? That can barely be approximated, a recipe published, yes, but is it the same when someone else, following mere written instructions that only poorly communicate the scents, sounds and colors occurring in the process, attempts to make it? Or if the chef/cheffe has to make it AGAIN long after he or she has grown tired of doing so, for, in order for a new person to experience this art, the artist has to create it all over again from scratch. Imagine Leonardo da Vinci having to paint that famous smile anew every time someone wanted to see it!

Then, too, there is a huge chasm between the appreciators, fans, of great or even just good, cooking, and those of any other art form. Only perhaps aficionados of pornography feel the same tinge of shame that lovers of food for its own sake either actually feel or know they are expected to feel; gluttony and lust are both among the seven deadly sins, after all. And making a meal for someone is perhaps as intimate as titillating them sexually, for in the realm of the art of cooking it's pleasure and not mere consumption of calories to sustain life, that is the object of the preparation and consumption of food. 

Which is all to say that the life of the woman known only as The Cheffe* in Marie Ndiaye's novel is more fraught with ethical and moral issues than it is with the kind of cutthroat competition and tests of skill and endurance that we more usually associate with the restaurant business, with the professional kitchen. Anthony Bourdain: The Novel this ain't. Though it has glimpses, perhaps, of Michael Pollan: The Novel. If Pollan had a creepy stalker trying to stage-manage his life from behind the scenes.

We learn of the Cheffe's childhood poverty and unpleasant early education, all the steps of her rise to prominence as that rare thing, a female chef in France, through the unctuous narration of one of her assistants, a man who would gladly have been her lover had she any interest in such a thing,  and whose feverish idolization seeks a kind of possession of her anyway. He claims to be the only person who ever really understood her at all, to have known her better than anyone else ever did, but of course it's the Cheffe emulation that lives in his head that he tells us about, even as he expresses complaints on her behalf about how misunderstood she was. Voiced by actor Edoardo Ballerini doing his best Jeffrey Coombs impersonation, his every word is fawning, admiring, exacting but also more than a little creepy. He's younger than his idol by quite a bit but there's still something Humbert Humbert-ish abouut him, though it's a Humbert who genuinely is, instead of just wants to believe so, the submissive in the relationship, as he constantly revels in her moral superiority to him, and of course her greater culinary gifts and her status as his employer. 

A bit comically, the narrator, who refuses to see a single flaw in the Cheffe, sees nothing but flaws in the one person who may know the Cheffe even better than he does: her daughter, who is almost exactly his age. 

The venom Ballerini imparts to descriptions, even casual mentions, of this daughter reaches levels of absurdity that perfectly complement the poetic adoration of his perfect goddess of a boss, only barely letting escape here and there any hint that maybe the daughter, whose greatest sin in his eyes is disloyalty to her divine mother, might have a story of her own to tell of the Cheffe that isn't quite so flattering.

Hilariously, he constantly accuses the Cheffe of speaking of her daughter with the exact same refusal to find fault that he uses to speak of her, never once noticing the blatant projection and hoping that we don't, either, always perfunctory apologizing for mentioning it and rushing to return to the subject of, not so much cooking itself as the sublime meditation and the moral universe in which good cooking can take place. He has no sooner stuck another knife into the idea of the daughter than he's off again expounding on the Cheffe's commitment never to waste ingredients or to disrespect either the animal a kitchen worker is dismemberment or the kitchen workers themselves.

The result is a bit of a stifling read, this account of an obsessed man obsessing about the object of his obsession, anxiously micro-managing our every impression or idea about what's going on, but it's still also such a glorious story of life and art and food that you keep reading, or listening, anyway. Truly, this is a book that will make you hungry, will tempt you to blow that diet you started in January while I was indulging in tamago sandos in Japan.

But we never get to enjoy the literary food porn for long before our narrator is yanking our attention away from the food like a stern host who is saving those dishes for more important visitors, even as he makes us doubt their existence; the Assistant goes down in my books with some of the all-time great unreliable narrators. By about a third of the way through the novel, his status as an unreliable narrator really starts to sink in; I found myself speculating that this whole story is a bit of slight-of-hand, meant to distract us (again I think of Humbert Humbert) from, perhaps, an actual crime or two,  and not just crimes of the heart on the part of our boy. Neither of the women of whom he so passionately speaks ever makes an actual appearance on stage, as it were. Both are just figures he manipulates as he tells the story, the one serenely engaging in various acts of creation and kindness in his memory, the other maligned and despicable in his present account. Is this really "a novel of cooking" or a heavily disguised confession? 

Have I just been reading too much crime fiction lately?

It would be interesting to someday read a counterpart to this novel that is more truly a character study of the Cheffe as she struggles for and wins her place in the still deeply sexist world of fine cuisine, with the tremendous pressure and discomfort of fame and being misunderstood through that fame, with the values of her dignified but bohemian parents who raised her in simple and, our narrator insists, strangely happy poverty but have no wish to benefit from her success. She overcomes these obstacles and more, but in this book we only see her indirectly, an elegant insect trapped in the amber of a dude's imagination. Which is maybe the whole point of this book. I bet Ndiaye herself has had a few guys like this narrator in her life. I think most of us have. 

Meanwhile, parts of the Assistant's strange post-Cheffe life have crept in. He seems to be sort of hiding out in a very posh retirement village he is technically too young to live in, spending wonderful days on various terraces in the kinds of endless parties that cannot but remind me of those in J.G. Ballard's High-Rise, a novel I did not expect to be thinking of in reading this book. A sub-plot involving an approaching visit to him by a suddenly announced daughter there becomes so prominent in the last quarter or so of the book that it starts all but breaking up paragraphs about the Cheffe without really seeming like it's ever going to have anything to do with the title character. Many reviewers have complained about all of this as an annoying distraction, a diminishment of quality on the part of critical darling Ndiaye, but if one understands that this is the story, not of the Cheffe but of another's hijacking of her legacy, all of this material snaps into place. The Assistant confides to us that he's never told his new friends and neighbors that he had a modest culinary career in the shadow of greatness and gloats over the pleasure he takes in being always given their own inferior efforts in that direction to try and how their condescending assumptions about his uneducated palate (more projection on his part, of course) amuse him. It all leads us further into the labyrinth of his telling of the Cheffe and her life as we wonder not only what became of her beyond those quiet late nights with him in the kitchen of her famous restaurant (a fait accompli from The Cheffe's earliest pages so this is not a spoiler), but how he came to retire so early and in such splendor. 

This is my second Marie Ndiaye novel, and my first read for my follow up to January in Japan, February from the French (I'm focusing not merely on novels from the nation of France, but from throughout the French-speaking world, so I couldn't call it February in France). If my public library were quicker about buying stuff I request, or I were more in funds, I would be in great danger of just letting this turn into Marie Ndiaye Month. It's a bummer that I can't. But I console myself that I've got some Virginie Despentes and Yasmina Khadra and Balzac and Collette and more on the pile. It should be a pretty great month here at Kate of Mind!

Herve Le Tellier's THE ANOMALY (Tr. by Adriana Hunter, Narr. by Dominic Hoffman)

A phrase that repeats often as Herve Le Tellier's The Anomaly gets going is "Maybe this is happiness," usually describing something banal and material, or at least basic, implying that if this is what happiness is, it's been oversold, at least to the cast of characters whose mini-biographies form the first part of the novel. Among these are a novelist who wrote a book called The Anomaly and committed suicide (this is not much of a spoiler; it happens early in the book and it's one of the pivotal issues that touches off the many philosophical conundra that pepper Le Tellier's The Anomaly as the fictionalized author of The Anomaly achieves a posthumous level of fame and respect he never enjoyed in life and if you're thinking of Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, you're supposed to; the book gets an explicit name check in the account of the dead author's success.)

But the fictionalized writer of that other The Anomaly is far from being the most important character in this The Anomaly. After all, as far as we get to know, his The Anomaly is not, in fact, the text we are reading here. That would be almost too Borgesian, no?

Anyway, there are lots of other characters more interesting and more important to the story than this author. Like a professor of statistics and probability who, in his undergraduate days at M.I.T. cooked up something called "Protocol 42" as a set of guidelines to follow when something truly unexplainable, unpredictable or unprecedented happens -- when there is an anomaly that can't be handled by any normal means. He chose 42 for its name because Douglas Adams, of course -- a signal that he and his friends who cooked it up together never in a million years expected it ever to be taken seriously, let alone actually employed by the U.S. Government, even after U.S. Gov made them all sign contracts requiring that they be permanently available to be called on at any time, no questions asked, if it was ever deemed necessary to activate Protocol 42. Which, of course, is what The Anomaly, as in the Le Tellier novel, is actually about.

In March of 2021, an Air France plane traveled through some very adverse weather but fought through to JFK International Airport, sporting considerable hail damage but otherwise all right, and its several hundred passengers disembarked and went on with their lives.

Then, in June of that same year, the exact same plane, with the exact same crew and passenger manifest and serial numbers, the exact same everything, emerged from a similar storm and sent a Mayday message to JFK because the damage was a bit more severe this time around, only to be diverted to a New Jersey military base under fighter escort because all this had already happened three months before and this was too weird to allow the plane to come to JFK and disembark, etc. Yes, this all feels very familiar. We've seen the TV show, etc. But this is a French novel, you guys, and it's the Frenchest thing I've read since I finally got tired of Michel Houellebecq's shit (and yes, this includes the terrific Vernon Subutex trilogy I enjoyed last year), so, buckle up, there's going to be a whole lot of philosophical speculation going on. Starting with a lot of attention being paid to how this manifestation of a duplicate, a perfect copy in every way, of the plane and all of its contents, including a few hundred passengers, is an almost incontrovertible argument in favor of the Simulation Theory, which, in brief, states that our entire phenomenological cosmos is actually a computer simulation, none of us are real, we're all just programs running in a vast godlike computer system called Deep Thought, wait no, not that, but all the other stuff? Yes.

But again, the novelist isn't the interesting passenger. Not when there's an honest-to-Ludlum international assassin who had been traveling from Paris to NYC on his latest assignment (but left behind a wife and children and charming double life in Paris -- double lives are a theme here, my friends)! Except, we don't get to see him much, just enough to see how he handles coming home to Paris and finding another version of himself living the aforementioned charming life with wife and children and reacting the way a guy like him might react, since he alone of all the passengers is the only one who didn't get the memo about what was going on because he escaped from US Gov too soon to get in on the briefing and counseling sessions. D'oh!

There's also a Nigerian rap star who, between March and June, wrote a song that went batshit viral on the internet and catapulted him to fame on the level of being invited to collaborate with Sir Elton John on a song, because our Nigerian, stage named Slimboy, is actually gay in a country that still considers homosexuality a serious crime, see, double life again! How he -- the he's, the Slimboys -- handles the sudden dopplegangery is one of my favorite bits of The Anomaly along with...

And also there is the issue that suddenly hundreds of people who have been going about their ordinary lives in this world suddenly have perfect doppelgangers, exactly like them in every detail except they are three months younger and have no knowledge or memory of the three months that have elapsed since the original plane landed. Among the passengers on this plane were the novelist who wrote the in-book novel The Anomaly and then committed suicide; suddenly the novelist is alive again and ready to resume his life just as if it were still March 2021, except, of course, he doesn't even have the germ of the idea for The Anomaly yet so whatever experiences led to the writing of the novel and the author's suicide are quite beyond his ken.

Slight digression time. This book was written and translated and published at a very specific moment in 21st century history, and the President of the United States is very much a character in The Anomaly, only it's pretty obvious from tons of context clues and the POTUS' general behavior and way of speaking that Le Tellier assumed the United States would be dumb enough to re-elect our most embarrassing POTUS and sketches us a pretty merciless portrait of that man without ever naming him. It's sort of darkly fun to imagine that guy handling a philosophical crisis like this story poses, almost as much fun as it is to watch Le Tellier's merciless skewering of American pop culture in the person of Stephen Colbert and The Late Show, an episode of which is depicted in minute detail when Colbert et al land an interview with a pair of doppelgangers who are very attractive young women willing to go along with the producers to create some Fucking Great Television with, uh, unfortunate results.

OK, back to the others. Like the aging French architect who finds himself with a second chance at saving his relationship with his much younger girlfriend, or rather, in learning from his March self how the March self ruined said relationship with the girlfriend's March self and making a plan not to make the same mistake. And the girlfriend herself, who is a single mom with a young son who suddenly has, not just two mommies, but two absolutely identical mommies except one of them doesn't remember anything since she took a trip with her boyfriend in March.

What I'm saying is, Le Tellier took a rather tired trope -- airline experiences mysterious event and passengers lives are weird forever -- and turned it into a specific way to examine a lot of different solutions to the problem of What If Suddenly There Were Two Of Me on both a personal and a worldwide scale. Being a French novelist not unlike Houellebecq, Le Tellier does not think the rest of society, especially not American society, will handle the advent of a few hundred duplicated human beings well, let alone the news that potentially one of the less hopeful ontological interpretations of our existence is proven pretty much true, and I wish I could say I thought he took this too far but unfortunately, as events just this last week or so have proven all over again, I think Le Tellier was right on the money about how badly a lot of us would behave.

All of this is conveyed beautifully by the smooth voice and precise diction (as in consonants so crisp they sound almost British) I last enjoyed in the gigantic audio edition of Chuck Wendig's Wanderers (co-narrated with fellow audio narrating superstar Xe Sands), who performs the difficult feat of giving each character their own voice and flavor without pushing through into voice acting, meaning he also gives female characters the right hint of femininity without falling into caricature that I so appreciate.

As for translator Adriana Hunter, I have nothing to say about her work, which in my book is a compliment in that it's pretty great when a translator does so well that they seem to disappear into the translated work, where often I notice a translator for a weird word choice that sends me down rabbit holes to find out if the weird phrasing originated with the author or the translator. No, here there were only philosophical rabbit holes, and that was enough.

Maybe this is happiness.