Christine Montalbetti - The world behind the clichés, where the much-anticipated violence of the plot is continually, maddeningly delayed, and no moment is too insignificant not to be valued. A daring theft of movie technique and subversion of a genre

Christine Montalbetti, Western, Trans. by Betsy Wing, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009.

"Setting out to tell the story of a mysterious cowboy—a stranger in town with a terrible secret—Christine Montalbetti is continually sidetracked by the details that occur to her along the way, her CinemaScope camera focusing not on the gunslinger’s grim and determined eyes, but on the insects crawling in the dust by his boots. A collection of the moments usually discarded in order to tell even the simplest and most familiar story, Western presents us with the world behind the clichés, where the much-anticipated violence of the plot is continually, maddeningly delayed, and no moment is too insignificant not to be valued. Montalbetti’s daring theft of movie technique and subversion of a genre where women are usually relegated to secondary roles—victims, prostitutes, widows, schoolmarms—makes Western a remarkable wake for the most basic of American mythologies."

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"Western is Christine Montalbetti’s fourth book for the Editions POL, following Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine [His tale concluded, Simon walks into the drizzle] (2001), L’Origine de l’homme [The origin of man] (2002), and Expérience de la campagne [Experience of the countryside] (2005). It is a curious novel and a challenging one, principally because events are so scarce. That is all the more disconcerting, since the narrative model that Montalbetti has chosen to work with is that of the Hollywood Western, a genre that invests so heavily in action. Here, however, action is reduced to a bare minimum: characters do amble down the main street of this cowboy town; a stagecoach does arrive; and, two hundred pages into the text, there is finally a gunfight. But that’s about it. There is thus very little story here; yet discourse is found in abundance. Indeed, the text is saturated with it, as if Montalbetti wished to test the limits—and exhaust the possibilities—of novelistic discursivity.
Montalbetti draws her focus closer and closer upon what few events she proposes, suggesting narrative inferences and hypotheses that compete for her reader’s attention and vex each other in intriguing ways. She solicits her reader’s attention constantly and directly, sometimes speaking in her narratorial persona, sometimes in her authorial one. She lays traps and false inferential paths for her reader, at the same time warning her reader to beware of just such ploys. There are moments of what narratologists call “disnarration” here, moments when the text refuses to tell us what happens; and Montalbetti exploits that technique lustily, asking her reader along the way to entertain questions that can have no answer. The flashbacks and flash-forwards that she offers seem to beg the question of narrative organization, in a text with no firmly fixed center. Yet that is undoubtedly one of the points that Montalbetti is making here. For, rather than a tale of cowboys and their adventures, Western is in fact a story of writing and reading, and about how stories are constructed and come to be in both of those dynamics, through a process that involves both wandering and wondering in equal measure. This is, in short, an obsessional novel—and thus it is well suited to please those individuals who might admit to being obsessive readers of novels." - Warren Motte

"In her first novel to be translated into English, French writer Montalbetti explores the classic tropes of the Wild West through the lens of metafiction in this clever but convoluted story of a silent cowboy with a secret past. Though most of the so-called “action” takes place in the 1800s American West, Montalbetti also jumps to France and contemporary times. The unnamed 30-year-old hero spends most of the novel ruminating on a porch, until a stagecoach appears carrying a significant woman from his past. Spurred on by news the woman brings, the hero rides off to a climactic confrontation. There are myriad digressions into the tiniest details of the setting, incorporating the viewpoints of ants and even droplets of water. While these interludes highlight Montalbetti's keen observational skills and vivid imagination, the almost nonexistent plot may alienate readers looking for a cohesive story. But those willing to work a little harder will enjoy the intellectual and sensual—if not emotional—rewards of the story." - Publishers Weekly


"This novel is a true western adventure—including a duel under the sun—written a la Perec or Claude Simon." - Technikart

"With flashbacks and multiple narratives, the author is a master of innumerable tricks that destabilize the narrative and turn the very possibility of its ever concluding itself into the novel's true adventure." - L'Humanité

"Would it be far-fetched to imagine that Christine Montalbetti was musing on the interior monologue of a certain cowboy president while writing her novel Western, a deconstruction of the classic American myth? In this postmodern pastiche—published in France in 2005, now ably translated by Betsy Wing—the narrator, named Christine Montalbetti, writes a novel titled Western, starring a generic cowboy hero, unnamed until the end. Given the associative spirit and self-referential nature of the text, perhaps such speculation is appropriate.
By imagining multiple scenarios and using a teasing second-person voice (as well as the first and third persons), Montalbetti implicates the reader in the narrative’s development. The standard western plot is endlessly delayed, finally materializing in a duel during the anticlimactic climax. Seemingly inspired by Christian Metz’s theory of film—cinema as a kind of language that involves the participation of viewers, who project their own associations onto the screenWestern takes detours through the narrator’s and the reader’s memories: “plus your footsteps and my own, both of us looking like Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock—sticking out in our city clothes in all this western scenery.”
Montalbetti also owes a debt to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s postmodern detective novels, especially his myriad perspectives and close-ups on physical objects. She imbues scenery with vivid internal life, such as a brown piece of paper that “thinks it’s a tumbleweed like all the others, and is doing its best to hop along in their midst.” An army of insects edging around the cowboy’s boot is personified as pioneers battling against the harsh elements. Occasionally, these stagings are undone by the author’s obsession: A cow, for instance, stares at the countryside with a “nyctalopic gaze.”
Often, the narrative mirrors Chinese boxes, one tale nesting within another. The narrator spies a painting, a still life of a basket of peaches, and begins to invent a monologue for the antisocial peach that resides on the table, “a poor little excluded thing hoping to return to its brethren, envying their placid sociability.” She then pictures the canvas in the reader’s living room—“over your mantel, it would give your place quite a nineteenth-century look”—and imagines crowds departing from a landscape scene not even in the painting, the waving handkerchiefs resembling a “cotton aviary, still undulating their avian fabrics at the ends of their arms and presenting the perfect picture of a thousand crazed and impotent birds, vainly beating their wings in a ballet whose choreography delivers their message of good will.” This goes on for several pages, the narrative’s sections collapsing in on themselves in delirium. Montalbetti, however, rescues her work from the potential pitfalls of formalism, crafting a novel that’s clever and pleasurable, if exhausting in its exhaustiveness." - Kate Zambreno

"If there is one genre of publishing that lived its entire life span in one century, it is the western. From the best-selling heights of Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey to its present obscurity, the mass-market western quietly went extinct somewhere in the early 1990s. Oddly, the genre, once considered one of the lowest forms of writing, now belongs almost exclusively to authors of high literary merit like Cormac McCarthy and Christine Montalbetti.
French author Montalbetti's most recent novel, Western, is a wonderfully Oulipian affair; she shoves the action of the piece—a gunfight, a man looking for revenge on another man—far into the background, instead focusing on details and characters that would otherwise be a barely described, terse sentence or two in a L'Amour novel. With page-long sentences laden with self-aware clauses, Montalbetti tells us about the insects on a fence post, or a lazy but semialert cow:
It was back in the dark of night when the bovid heard the erratic banging of the gate, the braided cord ordinarily keeping it shut apparently having come loose and letting out a little more slack with every new reverberation. The other artiodactyl mammals are asleep, but this one has its ear—the only part moving, as it hasn't yet bothered to move the rest of its carcass as yet, lying on the sand—pricked, aimed at interpreting the sound.
The result is a John Wayne movie filmed by a cinematographer with ADD and a wildly malfunctioning camera: We stare at the stitching of boots or are struck giddily by the blue of the sky for 5 or 10 minutes before wandering back to the horizon line and the characters we are following. Western is a challenging book to read because it strains at the limits of our narrative patience, but as with much French literature, Montalbetti's boundless curiosity and enthusiasm for her experiment makes the book an ultimately satisfying journey into a dead genre." - Paul Constant

"Christine Montalbetti is a woman after my own heart! For as long as I can remember, any attempt of mine to tell a story has been met by despairing cries of 'get to the point!' and 'is this relevant?' from friends and family who fail to share my fascination for life's smaller details. What a lot I have to learn, it turns out! I'm just a novice, flirting with trivial little bits of detail to pad out my main story, whilst Montalbetti has written a whole novel about those tiny details that never usually get told; in fact this is a new take on the action-based Western genre... without much action.
If you think about it, you'll realise that, in the telling of any story, an enormous proportion of 'what happens' is discarded. Not here! The novel opens with the main character, referred to until the last few pages only as 'our thirty-year-old', sitting on the porch at dawn—but don't expect a description of his appearance followed by a few lyrical sentences about the sunrise. Instead Montalbetti zooms in on the movement made by his leg to rock the chair: he 'relaxes the flexors of the foot, meaning, I think, the anterior leg muscle, and perhaps also, at the same time, the lateral peroneous longus, you can't exclude that possibility (I'm doing it myself, to try and feel what muscles I'm using, but even so, identifying them is not so easy).' After this we see the same scene again, this time from the viewpoint of the ants scurrying along the rail on which the cowboy's foot is resting—until he stamps his foot to get his circulation going, that is, leaving 'some of the victims [...] so deformed by the blow that you can no longer make out their features'.
As our cowboy (a mysterious stranger in town) goes about his day, Montalbetti constantly veers off, distracted by another tiny detail, maddenly yet wonderfully postponing the novel's climax (the action). Elements that usually exist only in the background are suddenly thrust into the limelight—the different-coloured hairs in one man's moustache, for example ("with hairs of both colours engaged in a merciless battle for priority on his upper lip"). Along with dizzying changes of subject, Montalbetti inserts endless changes of focus: What would characters in her other novels have made of this? What would other writers do now?
This is a not a relaxing novel to read; it demands that one sit up and pay attention, but a reader willing to make the investment will be whirled off into an exhilarating microscopic world. (The bad news for my family and friends is that it has made me even more interested in those "insignificant" little details!)" - Rachel Hayes

"Finally, all one can say about this - while the sapphire hue gradually becomes dominant - is that, among this troop of pitiful little thoughts, all bruised and indistinct, there's one that's steadier than the others, more robust, older, that fixes the gaze of our thirty-year-old on the wall in front of him, not because of any quality of the wall in itself, but because it is the ideal, neutral screen to project this thought upon; a thought unharmed by the jerky ups and downs of his rocking, a thought that was never made indolent by languid nighttime sleep, but remained strong and sure of what it wants, a thought whose power is at least partly based upon its longstanding and proven perseverance. We ourselves still know nothing about this key and almost authoritarian thought, but let's face it, it's not hard to figure out that said thought is what will provide the overall motivation for our man, explaining his days in this place and lending his mind a purpose that, unknown thought it is, no doubt forms the horizon of his life wherever he may be, and which - we can tell from the sort of tension persisting even in his early morning apathy - he must never let out of his sight.
You can see pretty well now, you can even see perfectly, the sky is completely blue, punctuated by the white fluff of small, neat cirrocumulus, a really nice effect, and so I think the action can begin. (pp. 21-22)
The Western perhaps is the Americas' gift to world literature. There is something awe-inspiring in the stark, bleak landscapes, in the actions of the rugged, fierce cowboys/vaqueros who populate its wastes and its lowlands, fighting for justice (or for greed). A good Western can invoke the best elements of a morality play, with the man with the white hat dueling with the man with the black hat. In between, there are struggles revolving around self-reliance, how to make one's way in an unforgiving locale. These stories, at least in their most popular form, did not originate in settled, cultured Europe, but instead were the product of frontier life and the sacrifices and (sometimes evil) decisions that the frontiers people had to make as they moved into a hostile environment, often peopled with natives who resisted their advance and who resented the depredations of these invaders.
Today, the Western as a genre is nearly dead. The frontiers have been tamed. The natives have been eliminated or subdued. John Wayne and Roy Rogers are in their graves and there is no need to retell their stories. We have seen it all, perhaps. We know how that gunfight at the O.K. Corral will turn out. We anticipate, before becoming bored, what it means when a man wearing a black hat walks into a saloon. We have satirized it in movies such as Blazing Saddles or reversed the myths in stories such as Cormac McCarthy's excellent Blood Meridian. What possible "new" ground could be trod in this desolate genre seemingly bereft of originality or interest?
French writer Christine Montalbetti in her 2005 novel (translated into English in late 2009 by Betsy Wing) Western manages to squeeze just one more ounce of water from that stone. She deconstructs the Western genre, both literary and cinematic alike, in an artful fashion. Instead of focusing on the "action," what she does so adroitly here is examine in minute detail those overlooked moments that serve to define the scenes that follow.
The plot, unimportant as it is to the story, is that of a gunman seeking his revenge and preparing for a shootout. But what's intriguing about this tale is that Montalbetti concentrates on things such as the insects in the soil where the man is standing, on the wall where he is staring, on those teeny-tiny details which add atmosphere to a story. In the passage above, a traditional Western writer might have stated in a sentence that the man was giving an intent stare while the sky was clear outside. What Montalbetti does here is invert the story, making the reader focus on the "close up." Here we see the troubled thoughts, the almost diffident way in which the gunman attempts to focus himself in preparation for the action to follow. It is akin to those ominous pauses in the movies before the showdown begins in earnest.
Montalbetti draws out these moments, turning what otherwise would be a humdrum, average duel into a psychological portrait of the gunman and of his surroundings. The attentive reader will find him or herself taking these insights and perhaps applying them to any Western book or film previously seen or read. This technique, although it can be wearisome to those who don't want to think about what they are reading, adds so many layers of depth to the simple plot that the reading turns into a reflective exercise that meditates on the semantics of the Western itself.
Western is a short novel at 192 pages, yet its brevity belies its content. Montalbetti takes us all the way through the course of the gunman's preparation for the duel, keeping our attention focused on the surrounding details just long enough for the reader to appreciation what is transpiring, rarely overindulging and thus risking tedium at the most critical juncture of the novel. Western adds so much to this nearly-moribund genre that it almost certainly will be a "fresh" read even for those readers who are well-versed in both the Western genre and in postmodernist literary techniques. Highly recommended." - The OF Blog

"Christine Montalbetti's books are innovative, compelling, and slyly enticing constructions that provide some of the finest readerly experiences that French fiction currently has to offer. They put on stage a wide variety of characters, situations, and events, yet each book testifies in similar ways to a profound reflection on narrative art, and each pays close attention to the critical dimension of contemporary writing. That this should be the case is logical enough, once one realizes that Montalbetti leads a double life. On the one hand, she is beginning to make her mark as one of the most intriguing young novelists in France; on the other hand, she is a professor of literature at the University of Paris, and the author of a number of important critical and theoretical works that have confirmed her as a scholar of narrative. Insofar as her fiction is concerned, its most salient trait is undoubtedly the manner in which it takes the reader into account. These are generous texts wherein the author invites her reader to inhabit textual space, and to participate in a meditation focusing both upon the book of the future and the future of the book. For my own part, I am persuaded that it is precisely in such texts that the contemporary French novel realizes its potential and seeks to renew itself. From their very first sentences, Montalbetti's books call upon their readers relentlessly, inveigling us, flattering us, cajoling us, attempting to persuade us that we have a role to play in the process of storytelling. Western, for instance, begins thus:
Call him anything you want, this thirty-year-old in the checkered shirt who rocks back and forth under the roof of this porch in what can only be called a makeshift apparatus, haphazardly, with nothing like the harmonious movements of an actual rocking-chair—the slow movement of its curves in an ergonomic unity conducive to day-dreaming—making do, under the circumstances, with this senescent chair, even being a little too hard on it, a chair covered in nicks and smudges telling of past carelessness (see that chipping, those splotches, the gashes on its rungs, the scars in its back), a rustic model;(notice how thick the rungs are, the clumsy spindles fanning out), pushing it just a little bit too far, having wedged its back legs into a crack in the floor, while its front legs, like the lone two fangs, if you will, in some scarcely populated jaw, bite erratically at the ground, as though that jaw were snapping shut.
An imperative in the first-person plural is one of the most characteristic signatures in Montalbetti's writing. It suggests a complicity between narrator and reader that she wagers upon throughout her work, proposing a narrative contract steeped in complaisance, one which guarantees that, whatever else may come to pass, author and reader are—and shall remain—allied. Yet that very complaisance serves a variety of purposes other than that of merely putting the reader at ease, I think; and it sets the stage for a series of canny maneuvers that Montalbetti practices elsewhere.
The key technique that she practices is that of "intrusive" narration, and it colors each of her novels and short stories. Narrative voice in her writing is utterly irrepressible; her narrators are unrepentant causeurs who condition our reception of the text in crucial ways. Yet to be fair, as intrusive as they may be, they constantly invite the reader to engage in dialogue with them, as if both narrator and reader were present in the story, and in position to shape it productively. Montalbetti uses a variety of effects intended to engage us, and some are less subtle than others. Flattery, for instance: she often positions her reader as the one individual who is capable of appreciating the kind of storytelling she is putting forward. In one of her short stories, she remarks, "you are the one person who may imagine flawlessly the particular trouble that the unlucky hero of this story experiences." Another translation of this passage, this time cast in barefaced blarney, suggests itself: You are a smart and resourceful reader, indeed an ideal one; I have foreseen your readerly responses and have predicated my own narrative strategy upon them; I shall tell you everything you wish to know in this, my story.
Another technique, one closely akin to flattery, is cajolery. Montalbetti resorts to that tactic when she feels that the reader's attention might be flagging, or when she senses that the reader might be unwilling to make the kind of interpretive leap that a particular narrative situation demands. In the middle of an especially garrulous passage describing a sunrise in Western, Montalbetti enjoins her reader, "come on, there you go, easy now, easy . . . I want you even more passive, more trusting, that’s good . . . you’re floating, you paddle around, come on, let yourself go, reading can be wonderfully regressive . . ." She strokes her reader here as one might stroke a golden retriever, fondly and benevolently. It is quite a different figure, then, from the one she habitually appeals to, a reader distinguished by intellectual acuity, by resourcefulness, and by active interpretive participation. Yet the manner in which she attributes shifting characteristics to her reader is very much a part of the game she plays in her discursive strategy, and its ludic quality is meant to be savored.
As she deploys the array of effects designed to grab and retain our attention, Montalbetti occasionally puts that very process on display, and asks us, with transparent sincerity, to consider it, as she does on one occasion in The Origin of Man: “But what wouldn’t I do to retain your attention?” What indeed? For her solicitation of the reader seems to acknowledge no boundaries, and the pact that she attempts to seal with us includes a clear hospitality clause, “because you’re my guest, after all.” Yet it nonetheless becomes clear—and indeed Montalbetti takes pains that it should—that such effects are surface phenomena intended to function on a first level (just as polite conversation renders a more purposeful dialogue possible), and that both writer and reader, working within the complicity that those effects help to establish, recognize them as such. As complaisant as they may appear, then, they are nonetheless intended to reinforce the notion of narrative authority; and each of those techniques is calculated to make us imagine that we are hearing the author’s voice in each instance where that interpretation is even barely possible—and to make us feel, too, that that voice is addressing us directly and without mediation.
Montalbetti takes her time in her books, and she calls insistently upon her reader to follow her through the dilatory meanders of fiction. These are “loiterly” texts (to borrow a term coined by Ross Chambers), which put forward the notion that we are fundamentally loiterly by nature, and that we take pleasure in digression. However else stories may come to be, they are certainly not made in an instant, Montalbetti argues, and they should not be told in an instant, either. In their final form, they bear the traces, more or less legible depending upon the case, of a lengthy imaginative process. That process is a wandering one, Montalbetti argues, rather than a strictly ortho-linear one. Stories are governed by teleological principles, certainly, but they proceed toward their goal in a crablike fashion, going this way, then that way, then this way again. In short, they take their time—and so should we.
Montalbetti’s fiction posits plot only to shy away from it, deferring plot while constantly whetting our appetite for it, playing on our desire to know what “happens.” In so doing, she practices a dexterous sleight of hand, playing a textual shell game, keeping us guessing about where narrative truth lies. Each of her digressions tells a story, one that may be related to the principal story at hand only by the most tenuous of links. They are anecdotal and offhanded, chatty, and apparently spontaneous on the surface; yet a closer reading confirms that they are also deeply calculated. Just in that light, then, Montalbetti’s digressions may be seen as fictions within a fiction; and as such they perform an intriguing critique upon fiction itself, destabilizing conventional narrative norms and enabling other, less conventional dynamics to come into play. The skepticism that they display with regard to tradition may prompt us to think about process issues in the text at hand, and to appreciate the manner in which those process issues adumbrate new narrative prospects. In short, Montalbetti uses digression strategically, as a critical tool, in fictions that adopt an overtly critical stance, casting a speculative gaze on their own conditions of possibility.
Montalbetti encourages her reader to consider the notion that the interest of fiction may not be principally invested in plot, but rather in elements of narrative that we usually view as being peripheral to plot. She launches one of her short stories, for example, in the following manner: “I don’t know about you, but for my part, when I look at a painting, it’s often not the main subject that I focus upon; rather, it’s the little scenes in the background, those secondary subjects, limned quickly by the brush, and positioned vulnerably apart from the central figure.” She is clearly attempting thereby to shape our reading of the text to follow, exhorting us to make the broad leap of faith that it demands—that is, to entertain the possibility that more interest may be found in the margins of things than in what we have always thought of as their vital center.
The idea of discursive freedom is pivotal here, I think. It is a principle that Montalbetti claims for herself, but it is also one that she extends to us, as if fiction were, more than anything else, an unfettered conversation between author and reader. The kind of conversation that Montalbetti puts on offer in her books is a suavely playful one; moreover, it is one that does not hesitate to call the boundaries that we normally erect between fictional worlds and real worlds severely into question. From time to time, she postulates wormholes connecting those worlds, inviting us to follow her through them, imagining for instance situations where a character speaks directly to the reader, or consulting us about which way best to tell her tale, or indeed positioning us as characters in a fiction that she has constructed. We implicate ourselves deeply in the stories we tell and the ones that we read, Montalbetti argues, and sometimes we may lose ourselves therein. “You too, to a certain degree, inhabit a parallel world,” she says, making a crucial move in the game she plays with us, suggesting that different worlds do in fact collide, causing temporary havoc and opening troubling, aporetic vistas perhaps, but also—and more importantly—enabling us to see things anew.
In such a manner, Christine Montalbetti seeks to remind us that narrative may be a construction, but that it is nonetheless part of our world, whether it be a case of the stories she chooses to tell, or that of the stories we habitually tell to ourselves. We inhabit those constructions happily, sadly, blithely, earnestly, in work, in play, turn and turn about—in fact, just as we inhabit our more obviously material edifices. If we have no quarrel with the idea that the world is played out in fiction, why should we balk at the notion that fiction may be played out in the world? In such a light, the future of fiction will inevitably be decided both in fiction and in the world, in a debate that shuttles purposefully back and forth between illusion and reality, causing the boundaries between those sites to seem increasingly dubious. For the most urgent message of Christine Montalbetti’s writing contends that fiction, just like the world of phenomena, is staggeringly unconfined." - Warren Motte

"Christine Montalbetti was born in Le Havre in 1965. She teaches literary theory at the University of Paris (VIII) in Vincennes-Saint Denis. Her academic interest in textual structures and elements and the relationship between language and reality also permeates her literary work, which consists of several prose texts and a recent play. In her oeuvre the text itself, not the plot, is the focus – as a result Montalbetti has often been classed as following the »nouveau roman« or post-modern style.
In her first novel, »Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine« (2001; t: His Tale Concluded, Simon Walks into the Drizzle), the rather idle protagonist makes a full retreat behind the meandering narrative flow, the intelligent elegance of which earned critical approval. »L’Origin de l’homme« (2002; t: The Origin of Man) is an ironic play on the realist novel and uses the biography of Jacques Boucher de Perthes, an amateur scientist who, in the 19th century, made a revolutionary contribution to research on prehistoric man. In Montalbetti’s account, his life-story finds proper form – he is hero, star and protagonist at the same time.
»Western« (2005) focuses on that particular genre and its conventions. The classic Western film is modified through Montalbetti’s narration: snapshots, zooms and changing perspectives interrupt events, which nevertheless culminate in a typical duel showdown. The narrative voice forces dialogues between the characters aside and, in commentaries and reflections, moves through the familiar scenery as through the prop room of a theatre. By directly addressing the audience, the narrator shatters the fictional world of the work. A similar play on the expectations of the reader is found in »Petits déjeuners avec quelques écrivains célèbres« (2008; t: Breakfast With Some Famous Writers). The title and table of contents encourage the expectation that the book will be a portrait of authors such as Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Tanguy Viel and Haruki Murakami. However in reality, the history and sub-plots of the narrative voice, his commentary, thoughts, memories and feelings overgrow the portrayal of the meetings with the authors, and indeed the reality of these meetings is in question: »Christine Montalbetti, he says for a third and last time in a voice which suddenly seemed softer to me, certainly a little more tainted with that assertiveness which he had shown in the two preceding paragraphs, you know very well that we have never, never, had breakfast together. We would have needed to meet for that to happen. // What, do you think, should I answer to that?« - International Literature Festival Berlin

Christine Montalbetti, The Origin of Man, Trans. by Betsy Wing, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012. [forthcoming[


"The Origin of Man is the story of one man—and all humanity—waging a war against oblivion without ever quite winning the day.
With a name like Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, it ought to be easy to become a hero. Yet, how to go about it? A real-life nineteenth-century paleontologist and explorer, excavated here by Christine Montalbetti to serve as her protagonist, Jacques has tried everything: fighting off pirates, writing poetry, becoming a dandy, a man of culture . . . all without ever quite feeling he fits the bill. At last, when Jacques decides he’ll make his name by discovering evidence of early man, it seems we, his audience, will be treated to a novel about mankind itself—unless, of course, our putative hero gets shanghaied into a love story along the way. The Origin of Man is the story of one man—and all humanity—waging a war against oblivion without ever quite winning the day. It’s also a comedy about being immersed in heroic and fantastical events without one’s ever noticing."