René Belletto - A thousand first sentences, if not to say all, rush to my quill with a howl of collective suicide

René Belletto, Dying, Translated by Alexander Hertich, Dalkey Archive Press, 2010.

"Take several genre novels telling similar stories of love and death—a spy novel, a romance, an adventure tale—mix them together so that items and images from each start popping up in the others, add playful asides—such as a several-page historical digression on the etymology of the word "prison"—and a collagist's sensibility, and you might end up with the untethered celebration of writing that is René Belletto’s very strange and funny and surprising novel Dying."
"A metaphysical thriller about the lengths to which men will go to escape the inevitable—be it love or death. In this darkly playful novel, polymath René Belletto tells two complimentary stories: In one, a man finds himself paying a ransom demanded by the kidnappers of a woman he’s never actually met; in the other, a second man makes plans to fake his own death to escape a woman whose devotion has begun to terrify him. Fast, funny, and sarcastic, partaking of the same vocabularies, imagery, and pitch-black sense of humor, these two variations on a single theme form a novel as much at home in the surreal as in everyday reality."

"Both tales are pleasingly told, as Belleto wallows luxuriously in fiction for its own sake, inviting us to do the same. (...) We wander through the novel much like Belletto's characters, with no roadmaps and precious little control over events, willingly benighted and gleefully bedazzled." - Warren Motte

"This book has Belletto's characteristic style: fast-paced, quirky, derisive; it has the trademark atmosphere: dreamlike, dark, fantastical." - Journal du dimanche

"Belletto sets up a narrative hall of mirrors in this whimsically discursive treatment of the inevitabilities of life in two interrelated stories. A nameless narrator who has consigned himself to dying in Paris's Rats and Vermin Hotel shares the convoluted story of how he got there. The story, of course, involves a woman: Queene, a grifter, has been paid to impersonate a woman who has been kidnapped. The scheme is that the narrator, after delivering the ransom, will realize he has been duped, and leave in hopeless anger. Instead, he falls madly in love with Queene and the two travel to Spain and indulge their passion for each other, though he conceals from her his discovery of a troubling manuscript that he believes tells his future. In the second story, the same nameless narrator develops an infatuation for a woman, Anita, so stifling that he resolves to fake his own death in order to get away from her. That Belletto doesn't bother trying to form a coherent story line shouldn't be surprising, as his interest here lies in exploring cerebral, linguistic, and philosophical turf. The takeaway is playful and absurd, with thought-provoking text taking the place of traditional narrative." - Publishers Weekly

"Translator Alexander Hertich's Introduction to Dying gives some idea/warning of what is to come, as he mentions that, for example, not only does Belletto use repetition for effect in the novel but he actually also copies texts here, as parts of the book are made up of (unattributed) quotations from Renaissance composer Clément Janequin and Rabelais, as well as "page-long excerpts taken directly from Belletto's earlier works". Divided into two parts titled 'An Old Testament' and 'Dying (A New Testament)' - telling entirely different stories - and with claims such as, at one point, that: "what you are reading is a word-for-word reproduction of a manuscript that I discovered and concealed in a chest of drawers", Dying is no straightforward narrative. Its chapters further divided into short sub-chapters, each with its own title and many presenting discrete episodes, the narratives frequently veer off tangentially -- but always return to the strong 'main' storylines.
Incidentally death-filled, with the deaths both real and faked, Dying is a different sort of take on mortality. 'An Old Testament' begins with an impoverished narrator, Sixtus, holed up in a ghostly, ghastly hotel - a Kafkaesque sort of place - the only other person there its owner, Leo, whose outlandish claims Sixtus doesn't know how to react to. Eventually Sixtus makes good his escape, making his way to another building. Among the things he finds there are two dead men who'd apparently killed each other in a shootout, as well as a whole lot of cash, and two envelopes - one of which is a ransom demand for one of the dead men's kidnapped wife.
In the second section of the novel - another first person account (by the same man who copied the manuscript that was Sixtus' account ?) - the narrator describes faking his own death in order to split up with his girlfriend, Anita:
'Why such an undertaking, so extraordinary, so seemingly cruel ? Because there was no other way out if I wanted our love to endure, by any means necessary.'
Indeed, he claims: "If my real death had been a better solution, I wouldn't have hesitated". Helped in his undertaking by his friend Yves, it is Yves that turns to the more radical and permanent way out, as several actual corpses also litter this part of the book.
Dying does have clearly delineated plots, and part of its success is that these remain firmly in place throughout, like train tracks, even as the narratives seem to shoot off in all different directions (and include such feints as the copied passages, suggestions of stories-within-stories (all the more misleading since they, too, are purportedly word-for-word reproductions), previews of the future (and completely forgotten pasts), and uncertainty as to identity). Plot is not central for Belletto, and even where seemingly conventional - a kidnapping ! paying ransom ! - the stories don't follow the expected arcs, but he effectively uses plot to anchor his work. The short chapters also aren't mere digressive excursions or arbitrary stories, but Belletto's construct is also distinctive and unusual: there's method here, but unlike that found most anywhere else.
Belletto manages to repeatedly pleasantly surprise - not so much in his plots, where it's always easy to make the next twist unexpected or toss in another corpse, but in the variety of his presentation and prose. With chapters as short as a single sentence ("Thus the year drew to a close"), the stories both circle around themselves and advance in unexpected ways - there's certainly little one can see coming - and offer smaller pleasures in their bits and pieces. This is also a text which isn't so much a puzzle whose whole finally becomes apparent as the last piece is put in place - it remains puzzling, its meaning(s) and ambition(s) still shifting depending on how one looks at it - yet in which the whole (opaque as it may still seem) is satisfyingly greater than the parts, even as these also impress by themselves. Nevertheless, it's a decidedly odd text that does require a willingness on the part of the reader to engage with it on its own strange terms." - M.A.Orthofer

"I first discovered René Belletto’s novels when some years ago I fell upon a review in the Times Literary Supplement of his book Le Revenant, which seemed to be a combination of literary fiction and what the French call the roman noir, a kind of thriller sometimes involving cops, villains, and those dubious inhabitants of Soulless-on-the-Seine, though in his case we were firmly entrenched between the Rhône and Saône, in the heart of Lyon.
I ordered a Livre de Poche edition, and came to identify the tough guy in the fedora on the cover as the author himself. Though he often shares traits with them—a love and knowledge of music, expertise in teaching and playing the Spanish guitar, a fascination with fast cars and the best stereo equipment money can buy—Belletto only occasionally looks like the heroes of his novels. Of all the writers he’s sometimes (and sometimes capriciously) grouped with, whether the more modern stars of the roman noir such as Jean-Patrick Manchette or Thierry Jonquet, or those, like Jean Echenoz, who borrow from the genre but belong to a more nebulous group, René Belletto is the one most likely to surprise and entertain us.
His earliest publications were on the experimental side: Beckett seems to be the governing shade there, with a touch of Maurice Blanchot and a sprinkling of Mickey Spillane. And then came his breakthrough, Le Revenant (The Ghost), which on the surface seems to be a straightforward thriller told in the first person, but becomes a highly personal and compellingly readable narrative of loss and redemption set within certain recognizable tropes of American B-movies. It’s also the story of a man attempting to escape fate: the fate of family, the fate of vengeance, the inescapability of his own actions in a world full of traps and false smiles. This was followed by the second part of the Lyon trilogy, Sur la Terre comme au ciel (On Earth as it is in Heaven), and finally L’Enfer (Hell, or, as it was published in translation here several years ago, Eclipse). These days, Belletto sets his fictions in the narrow streets of Montmartre, where he now lives. His newest work, Hors la loi (Outlaw), is a complex and riveting novel of reincarnation that, as with some of his more recent works, goes beyond the limits of reality into unexpected realms of other genres as, by using the musical concepts of theme-and-variation, prelude and fugue, and stepping into the regions of science fiction, it explores the inescapability of fate, the pleasures and traps of desire, the loss of identity through passion for another. Yet Belletto’s novels really don’t adhere to the standard plot devices of polars or romans noir; his concern is with character caught through wayward fate in a plot not of his own design, drawn into a world that on the surface seems familiar but bristles with unreality and danger.
Mourir, first published in France in 2002 and now expertly translated by Alexander Hertich as Dying, has just appeared in a handsome paperback original published by the Dalkey Archive Press. It’s a work of unusual though never-confusing complexity, a novel of reflections and correspondences that contains all of the author’s strengths: Belletto, who has a brilliant grasp of pacing and possesses a connoisseur’s knowledge of film, is a natural storyteller with a strong, sure voice, and his books prove difficult to put down.
Although the original French edition of Dying contains a section of reproductions and photos (discussed in the translator’s introduction, but sadly left out of the Dalkey Archive edition, as they playfully comment on and supplement the story surrounding them), the governing image is Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez.
What at first seems to be a portrait of the artist painting the Infanta Margarita with her attendants becomes, the more we look at it, a study in realities. The painter himself looks away from his canvas to glance up at us. Or is it us? Reflected in a mirror behind the Infanta are the girl’s parents, Philip IV and Queen Mariana, placed nearly where we, the viewers, would be. Which suggests that the painter is in the process of painting a royal portrait. Yet this is called Las Meninas, “The Girls,” which from his vantage point is not what he’s painting at all. Isn’t this instead a painting of an artist painting another painting altogether, one that we may never see? And where is Velázquez in all of this? Has he basically vanished into the work itself? The reflexiveness of this complex work is echoed—indeed mirrored—in Dying, where a character is even known as Reine, Queen, or, as Hertich renders it, Queene. In this novel we are, in fact, in a world of mirrors, not as mere literary trickery, but as a skillful, serious and indeed brilliant play on levels of reality in a story that, at heart, is about conquering death. And yet this is also a book filled with Belletto’s characteristic humor and melancholy, to which Alexander Hertich is especially sensitive.
As Dying opens, the voice we meet, or rather the voice that creeps up on us, is a familiar one: it could be the narrator of any of the titles in Beckett’s trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, croaks and wheezes of men in extremis, or at least at their worst, a man so solitary that the presence of another—whether character or reader—unleashes a torrent of words, an obsessive and mad swirl of internal logic. For the narrator is a resident of the Rats and Vermin Hotel, and he may well be in that shimmering transitive state between life and death. But wait… Because on page thirty, just as we’re becoming lulled into thinking this might be another Beckettian exploration of the human condition, we’re in a kidnapping story—one we’ve seen before in a Belletto novel and that we’ll see again in subsequent works. It’s then that the narrator known as Sixtus claims to be the husband of the kidnapped woman; at that moment he has stepped into the plot and left his miserable life behind him.
Armed with the ransom, showing up at the specified time, Sixtus discovers that the kidnapped woman he has just met is an imposter. Not the Armelle of the ransom note, but Queene, with whom he’s immediately smitten as they drive to Madrid and a room at—where else?—La Casa Margarita. We are inside the world of Las Meninas, where reality can either be tangible, something glimpsed in a reflecting glass, or a tale that we tell ourselves to make sense of another’s universe.
And then, suddenly, part one—“An Old Testament”—ends and “A New Testament” commences, with a new narrator and a new voice, more human, more direct, more trustworthy, more modern and, dare I say, more Belletoesque. We’ve walked through the mirror, and we’re in another world. Or is it? “I know today…our story was nothing other than the world without us,” the narrator of this new section writes, and the line is like the center of gravity for this work: a tale told by a man present at his own absence. “We toil relentlessly to hide beneath artifice that which is naturally out of reach,” he continues, as though to inform us that the man behind this voice, René Belletto, is giving us a kind of self-portrait, though one so deeply coded that whenever we seem to catch a glimpse of the author (his passion for the music of Tomás Luis de Victoria is known to me, but I’d be hard pressed to say that the character he writes about is Belletto himself), he slips out of view.
Even whole passages in Dying are lifted from his earlier novel L’Enfer, as though Belletto were looking at his life and works through the lens of a kaleidoscope, capturing the shifting and changing details as they create new visions, new worlds, and the endlessly-repeated reflections that constantly alter our view of the author’s reality.
For Belletto is first and foremost a storyteller, a devotee of the films of, among others, the director Richard Fleischer, and the novels of Dickens (he’s also the author of a fascinating 700-page work devoted strictly to Great Expectations), and so his venture into a world as complex and as full of reflection and echo as Dying never once grows heavy with theory, or with the machinations of consciousness. To Belletto this all comes naturally. The ease with which he shifts between genres—whether they be straightforward thriller, detective story, spy tale, or the blisters and flames of a thwarted romance—is breathtaking and highly entertaining. One reads Belletto’s books both for the humor and the intricacies of plotting. Which isn’t to say that character doesn’t count, for all of his works depend on richly-drawn protagonists, many of them variations on a single theme: the man we first met in Le Revenant, a man with an honest soul and only the best of intentions for whom we feel only the warmest affinity.
But Dying isn’t just a literary trick that slips like mercury between genres. There’s a haze of anguish that lies over the tale, indicating that the author has brought his most personal side to the page. Loss, mourning, regret—all of these come into serious play in this most playful of books." - J.P. Smith

"A thousand first sentences, if not to say all, rush to my quill with a howl of collective suicide.
This early spring, believe me, was colder than the cold of winter.
The three squat floors of the Rats and Vermin Hotel were rotting away, piled up at the end of a cul-de-sac in the twelfth arrondissement of the city.
It was here that I was dying.
Not living had taken its toll. The bloom had lost its rose.
I couldn't remember life before the hotel. I had forgotten. Was it that I had seen so little of the world that I no longer remembered it, or had the world so completely deadened me that I could have forgotten?
I didn't know. (p. 3)
Rarely do works capture my attention so completely on the first page, yet French author René Belletto's 2002 novel, Dying (published in English translation in October 2010 by Dalkey Archive), manages to do so. Here is a first-person narrator talking not just of "dying," but also on "not living." What does he mean here? And what is this about not remembering "life before the hotel?" I wanted to know more and I ended up discovering that this story is much more than just a search for meaning and the defining of those boundaries between "dying" and "living."
Dying's back cover blurb describes it as a "metaphysical thriller about the lengths to which men will go to escape the inevitable - be it love or death..." and to a very large degree, this is true. It is a composite tale of two seemingly independent subplots that manage to interweave themselves, thematically at least, into a whole that is much more than the sum of its parts. There is a mystery surrounding an expectant father and his conflicted feelings about his mistress and their unborn child and there is a mystery revolving around the apparent death of another. Who "lives" and who is "dying" in these cases is much more than just the matter of events and situations, but rather is a set-up for so many of those central questions people ask themselves each day about the nature of their lives and the actions done and undone daily.
Belletto easily could have written a novel several times its slim 165 pages without repeating any of the motifs explored here. Yet in this small book he has managed to pack so many allusions to everyday life, our concerns, our pitfalls, and et cetera that the narratives' powers become even more effective because we are not allowed to become too distracted from the points he wants to explore via these fascinating characters. What is the origin of "prison" but in prehensionem, which itself contains its own fascinating etymology? What happens when the forger forges something that ultimately becomes genuine? In reviewing a novel such as Dying, perhaps it is best that the questions are considered at least as much as the possible answers which are provided (or in some cases, purposely left hanging for the reader to interpret as she may).
Alexander Hertich did a fine job translating Dying. There is a delicate sense of wordplay in this novel that appears to be largely intact in this English translation. Rarely did I feel that I was reading a translation, as the syntax was smooth even through the most intricate of passages. For those readers who value characterizations, Belletto's characters certainly do "live," even as they are "dying" in multiple senses through this novel. There were very few moments of tedium and the conclusion is a very fitting one for the novel. Generally, I discuss the plot specifics more than I have above, but this is the sort of novel where the explications can distort the effects created by the textual interplay. Dying is the sort of novel that will appeal most to those readers who want more than just an "easy" read where "more of the same" occurs. However, it is not so challenging that it limits its readership; it merely expects that its readers are curious, inquisitive beings who have questioned themselves at some point about matters of life and death and have not assumed that they know all the answers. For those readers, Dying will be just the sort of novel they will want to read." - ofblog.blogspot.com

Read it at Google Books

René Belletto, Machine: A Novel, Trans. by Lanie Goodman, Grove Press, 1993.

"Marc Lacroix, a psychotherapist, develops a computer that allows two people to exchange personalities. He chooses as his first subject Michel Zyto, his prize patient - a psychopathic sex offender and suspected serial killer. This is the point of departure in a chillingly realistic novel, the ultimate story of switched and stolen identity. What begins as a cutting-edge experiment in mind-body exploration spirals into a nightmare of page-turning suspense when, in his therapist's body, the patient escapes. Savagely sophisticated and intellectually cunning, Zyto uses his newfound incarnation to full advantage with Lacroix's colleagues, wife, and young son. Hidden in the perfect disguise, he plots one perfect crime after another until the deception is carried to its shocking and supremely logical extreme. A high-tech Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Machine turns and twists with deadly speed and diabolical precision, and Rene Belletto provides plenty to think about along the way. Do we all have bits and pieces of other people inside us? What sort of "transference" occurs in close relationships? How do our bodies shape our identities, for ourselves and others? To what unimaginable horrors will our faith in science lead? Are we just ghosts in biological machines? Something of a cross between Thomas Harris and J. G. Ballard, Machine is that rare thing - a novel that succeeds in stopping the heart while stirring the mind."

"French suspense writer Belletto begins his new novel with a shocking scene--10-year-old Leonard Lacroix planning to stab his mother in bed--but the extended flashback that comprises almost all the remainder of the text doesn't live up to the opening. The boy's father, Paris psychiatrist Marc Lacroix, invents a machine that will allow him to peek into the mind of his deranged patient, serial killer Michel Zyto. But something goes wrong: Lacroix gets trapped in Zyto's body; the psychopath convinces everyone he is the doctor; and it becomes open season on the women in Marc's life. In a final twist the first chapter gives away, Zyto manages to swap shapes with Leonard. Belletto fails to make the story's scientific and psychological elements convincing, and his ability to keep the various characters distinct is sorely tested by the number of different bodies they inhabit. At its best, the writing is slick and efficient, but at its worst it equals the plot in mechanistic implausibility." - Publishers Weekly

"Marc Lacroix is a rich French psychiatrist who has secretly built a computer that allows brain impulses to be exchanged between two creatures. After careful testing, he decides that he and one of his tame psychotics will try a brief swap. But alors! it goes wrong. What follows is a gripping yarn of terror and imagination. As Marc and Zyto, his patient, pursue each other through Paris, no one else realizes the menace of this terrible transformation. Indeed, Zyto completely captivates Marc's wife, son, friends, and colleagues, leaving only Marc's mistress to help him undo the disaster. As in a nightmarish chess game, Zyto counters every move until he controls the game and launches his own attack. Belletto (France's answer to Michael Crichton?) is totally convincing; seldom is suspending disbelief more chillingly rewarded. This work has a nice translation, interesting setting, and cast of engrossing characters. Well recommended" - Ann Donovan
René Belletto, Eclipse, Trans. by Jeremy Leggatt, Mercury House, 1989.

"Stylish and sexy, this French novel could be termed an existential detective thriller. Michel Soler, a suicidal music critic and shoplifter in Lyon, swings between murderous rages and tender effusions. Out of boredom he accepts $5000 as down payment to kidnap 10-year-old Simon, son of a quadriplegic colonel. As ransom Michel demands to sleep with the boy's sister, Michele, a pianist; they fall madly in love. When Simon is snatched away again, Michel turns amateur private eye to track down the new kidnappers. Pieces of the jigsaw include a wealthy Bolivian couple, a Spanish ophthalmologist who has mysteriously vanished, a nubile hitchhiker and a reclusive German pianist with one finger missing, whose memoirs Michel is compiling. Although the narration is heavy with existential baggage, Belletto's Gallic wit and deft literary style keep the reader turning the pages to the shocking, unforeseeable, tragic denoument." - Publishers Weekly
René Belletto, Coda: A Novel, Trans by Alyson Waters, Bison Books, 2011.

“It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt.” With this sentence René Belletto begins a novel that compresses every genre he has worked in—thriller, science fiction, experimental literature, horror—into one breathless narrative in which what is at stake is nothing less than our own immortality.
Playing with the expectations of the reader, Belletto constructs a logical puzzle that defies logic, much like the “almost-perpetual motion machine” invented by the narrator of this novel and his father. What sets the story in (perpetual) motion is a package of frozen seafood. This lowly mechanism triggers a series of picaresque and otherworldly events, from the storyteller’s meeting with Fate disguised as a beautiful woman, to the kidnapping of his daughter, to his amorous reunion with the younger half-sister of a high school friend, to the elimination of death from the world. It’s a funny business, but Belletto’s playful and falsely transparent language opens the book to such serious matters as explorations of death, immortality, love, and the innocence of children."

“Belletto’s readers will be happy to find once again the strangeness, the mischievousness, and the atmosphere of looming danger of the author’s early novels. Total master of his art, Belletto lets the doubts that penetrate him seep into us. Life is a dream, he whispers, in a narrative voice worthy of eighteenth-century tales, slyly blended with modernity. And what if death were also a dream?... Each of us must solve the mystery.” — Michèle Gazier