Antoine Volodine / Lutz Bassmann / Manuela Draeger - Between a fragile lyricism and an almost silent poetic expression of an absolute, inevitable devastation

Lutz Bassmann, We Monks and Soldiers, Trans. by Jordan Stump, University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

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From one of the most original French writers of our day comes a mysterious, prismatic, and at times profoundly sad reflection on humanity in its darker moments—one of which may very well be our own. In a collection of fictions that blur distinctions between dreaming and waking reality, Lutz Bassmann sets off a series of echoes—the “entrevoutes” that conduct us from one world to another in a journey as viscerally powerful as it is intellectually heady.
While humanity seems to be fading around them, the members of a shadowy organization are doing their inadequate best to assist those experiencing their last moments. From a soldier-monk exorcising what seem to be spirits (but are they?) from an abandoned house, to a spy executing a mission whose meaning eludes him, to characters exploring cells, wandering through ruins, confronting political dissent and persecution, encountering—perhaps—the spirits once exorcised, these stories conduct us through a world at once ambiguous and sharply observed. This remarkable work, in Jordan Stump’s superb translation, offers readers a thrilling entry into Bassmann’s numinous world.

“Between a fragile lyricism and an almost silent poetic expression of an absolute, inevitable devastation.”—Hugo Pradelle

“A continually changing, continually new poetic force.”—Christophe Kantcheff

Written in a tersely descriptive prose appropriate for its grim context, this interconnected series of stories by Bassmann (a pseudonym for the French writer Antoine Volodine), is set in an indeterminate future when the human race is dying out, and the Organization—run by remnants of the Communist Party—is sending out trained monks and soldiers to assist anyone about to cross the threshold between life and death. Despite this intriguing premise, a leaden monotony quickly sets in and rarely abates, though Bassmann manages to conjure both disarmingly tender and decidedly odd moments along the way. In “An Exorcism Beside the Sea,” a monk/soldier sent to exorcise the demons from a house finds his resolve is no match for his memories when he finally encounters what is hiding inside. A soldier, in “Crisis at the Tong Fong Hotel,” discovers that the little girl he tries to save from a burning building may actually be “a strange spider.” The post-human future is well-trod territory in speculative fiction, and the element of surprise is needed to keep it fresh. Unfortunately, there’s not enough of that to save Bassmann’s latest (after Minor Angels, as Volodine) from its own portentous and derivative devices. - Publishers Weekly

Translated from the original French text, this collection of short stories presents a dark peek at humanity’s possible future. The seven tales are roughly connected by the general threads of being set at a time when humanity is dying out and the remnants that remain are controlled by the all-encompassing Organization. Agents are sent out on spy missions and assignments yet have no clear direction who they should be keeping under surveillance or what their assignments are. Insurrections are dealt with using a heavy hand while staging performances that have little to do with the truth. One solder-monk sets out to exorcise a home but with highly questionable results as it becomes apparent that things are not quite how they appear.

The boundaries between reality and dreaming become blurred and continually shift throughout this collection leaving readers wondering right along with the characters, which perspective is true and whether it matters. Bassmann’s view of the future is decidedly grim as a couple of the stories are set during mankind’s last remaining generations yet all is not lost as it opens the way for a new species to rise up. Vividly imagined, thought provoking and spare, this is an unusual collection is worth searching out. - Sandy Amazeen

Lutz Bassmann is not Lutz Bassmann. That is to say, Bassmann is not a flesh and blood author who needs sleep and food and who makes semi-regular bowel movements. Lutz Bassmann isn’t real. He’s an imaginary author invented by the French writer Antoine Volodine, who is, we can only assume, a real-life being who actually does eat snacks, go to the bathroom, and write books. To understand the intention behind We Monks & Soldiers, we must also understand why Volodine would create a work of fiction written by a work of fiction. What does this extra layer of guise add to the book itself? It is a method that calls to mind some of the playfully Dadaist identities assumed by Bob Dylan, like “Jack Frost” or “Sergei Petrov,” co-writer of the movie Masked And Anonymous, in which Bob Dylan stars as “Jack Fate,” who, of course, is really Bob Dylan. Volodine, too, keeps a stable of fictitious writers, each with his or her own interests, flaws, and voices. But more than just an empty accumulation of artifice, the method seems to be a way to emphasize the freedom of uncertainty, and it’s a move that fits thematically with the collection.

Weighing in at under 200 pages, We Monks & Soldiers is a slim book. And it’s better that way. Composed of seven interconnected stories, the work combines nebulous atmospherics with taut, professional control. It begins with the story of an errant monk, dispatched to exorcise spirits from an abandoned beachside home. But when things begin to go wrong (or do they?), Bassmann simply moves on to the next story. In this short time, however, Bassmann establishes some very important themes that will carry through the rest of the book.

One of these themes is ambiguity. We’re not exactly sure what sort of world the monk is living in. It’s not the same world that we live in, but it does rhyme with it. There are roads and beachfront property, for instance, but there’s also a sad sense of monotonous detachment that marks Bassmann’s world as being entirely its own. As the monk says when introducing himself to the reader, “Let’s call me Schwahn. Names and nicknames make useful labels, but they don’t tell you much. There’s more or less nothing behind them.” Of course, this is a clever nod towards the Volodine/Bassmann authorship, but it is also a fundamental pronouncement on ambiguity. In fact, it’s an ambiguous statement about ambiguity.

Mood is also important to the collection. The mechanics of creating mood depend upon the author keeping a fully realized world, complete with a cohesive emotional timbre, in her mind. Everything that happens has to participate in this new reality, and when the author mentions characters or locations, their relationships to each other, however disjointed, must be communicated without being made explicit. In We Monks & Soldiers, this reality is one of loss, desolation, confusion, and despair. There is a sense that civilization has ended, and the best we can hope for is gloom.

Gloom may not seem like a common mood for us, here, but for Bassmann’s characters, it is the atmosphere of broken worlds, an ever present fact of reality. It is the mood of the spy who finds himself on the coast of a dingy, vaguely East Asian town for unknown purposes. It is the mood of political radicals using strange mantras to will new realities into existence. And it’s certainly the mood that reverberates as the monk at the beginning of the book undertakes his strange rituals.

Ambiguity and gloom blend in this collection of stories to work the reader into a wonderful confusion. But it’s a useful confusion, one that expresses something fundamentally true about the world. And to add a bit to it, Volodine isn’t a real name either. - Scott Beauchamp

Partway through We Monks and Soldiers, in a story titled "A Backup Proletarian Universe," a character named Monge abruptly realizes that he has been granted another past and another life. Via dreams and shamanic chants, Monge has been sent into a new reality, the "backup proletarian universe." Here the facts of Monge's former life are as if tilted and rearranged: names recur, attached to different people than before; a companion in the former life has become a rival in the new one; and Monge's former world, a "hell ruled by assassins and capitalism," has given way to a world in which a barely extant Party has suffered disastrous defeats, one after another, though some few revolutionaries remain. Monge's second reality soon displaces the first, but for a brief time he is aware of both. Lutz Bassmann has structured Monge's story in a rare and striking way, and it is a structure that informs the entire book: the differing realities are not in opposition, nor are they arranged hierarchically as fiction and metafiction or reality and illusion. We are not presented with a logic of the double, nor yet with the kind of metafiction that ascends neatly up a hierarchy of levels, from least to most "meta." Instead, Bassmann's fictional worlds echo one another anarchically, and with a profound plangency.

We Monks and Soldiers is not a novel, although it has a distinct and even circular unity. The book begins with an introit—a "constant drumming" that falls silent for the duration of the text, lending the book the iterative aspect of a rite or recitation—and the book ends when the drums begin again. In between are seven fictions (neither chapters nor short stories), set against a backdrop of the slow and violent departure of humans from the face of this earth. It goes hard for the humans, this matter of leaving the world forever, and all seven fictions concern someone who assists during or at least attends the last days: an individual's last days, or the last days of humanity as such. But "last-ness" is a vexed category in We Monks and Soldiers; it could also be said that every time, what's at stake in these fictions is not the last day but what comes after: after the future, after the too-brief victory and subsequent degeneration of world revolution, after the collapse of belief in the meaning of religious rites, and even after death, in a shadowy world that is perhaps no longer a world. In particular, the "monks and soldiers" of the book's title[1] are aware that they have survived the decay of their purpose. The monks were trained in a faith they no longer exactly profess, but they remain ethically bound to those who wander in vagabondage after death. The soldiers (revolutionaries, activists, and operatives) know that world revolution and the egalitarian society it ushered in have been defeated, but they find in that defeat no reason to repent. All seven fictions are meticulously structured so that pairs of tales and names and incidents echo one another, as do photographs, incantations, dreams, lives, deaths, and worlds. It is not possible for a single character to be "the protagonist" of such a varied work, but it is worth staying with Monge's story just a while longer, because Monge's experience is paradigmatic for We Monks and Soldiers as a whole.

Consider the moment Monge meets his lover for the "first" time (for the first time in the book we're reading, though of course in Monge's new reality she has been with him for many years already). At this point, nothing would be more customary than for fiction to evoke either the dizzying symmetries of alienation or the opposition between reality and illusion; recall the urgent necessity of uncovering the true identity of the false wife in Total Recall. In contrast, here is Bassmann's Monge, at the hinge-point between one reality and another, or rather, already sliding into the second reality:
I remember, he thought.
And he did, in fact, remember everything. Everything that bound him to this new earthly existence, this new only earthly existence. Everything he'd ever experienced—here, in this life he'd led here. It was unexpected and sudden, but he'd instantly inherited a long personal history, alongside which lingered a few traces of dreams that just barely belonged to him, fleeting images whose link with the real had been broken over the past couple of seconds. Now he was aware of having come to this street by natural means, by a route that had nothing to do with this black space of whispers and dreams, or with a shamanic or exotic mission, or something more irrational still. He had in his head the last vestiges of slumber, the strange echo of a magical sentence—"Only those I love, only those I love, listen!"—and the idea that in the distance men and women were squatting in prayer, in delirium, or in prisons, and thinking of him with the hope that all would go well; but all that was even now disappearing behind the crystal clear memories of this one earthly existence. His existence. He felt within him an almost infinite mass of buried memories, lying at the ready, asking only to be summoned up to complete or refine his understanding of himself. I'm not a stranger here, he remembered. I don't come from some other place. I've lived on this earth since the day I was born. I'm forty-nine years old. I know this woman. I know her, and I'm in love with her.

In contact with a new reality, Monge does not experience alienation, but perfect hypermnesia, a rush of recognition, and a feeling of true and tender affection. There is no need for Monge to fight his way through the illusory veil of this second existence and back to the real one (though this is the narrative arc for any number of futuristic fictions). Of course, Monge himself weights the two realities differently (the one he's in now is real to him), but for the reader, for whom "now" always means both the past tense of narration and the present moment of this reading (this recitation of We Monks and Soldiers, now, between two briefly interrupted sessions of "constant drumming")—for that reader, there is a plangency in the fading of Monge's memory. The reader still barely remembers—as Monge himself is already forgetting—that the new universe is one into which Monge was sent on a mission of desperate importance to those who "were squatting in prayer, in delirium, or in prisons, and thinking of him with the hope that all would go well." The reader can still vaguely recall that Monge's route into the new world had everything to do with "this black space of whispers and dreams." But the reader retains these echoes only a little while longer than does Monge; largely confined to Monge's focalizing awareness, and disoriented by the strangeness of this entire story, a reader cannot know exactly what Monge's mission was or what it would mean for him to succeed. Everything in both Monge's realities is strange to a reader from our world: soldier-shamans, black space, the magical sentence, "Only those I love, listen!"; and, in Monge's next reality, the "Kovarskists," whoever they are, and the imperialist war against "the Orbise," whatever that is.[2] It is all so strange. (But one understands at once, without any effortful decoding, that only the enemy uses the label "Kovarskist," that the death of Kovarski was terrible and unjust, and that one sides with the Orbise, even without knowing what it names.) What the vantage point of reading grants the reader is not more knowledge than Monge has (if anything, we have less; we can only read about Monge's perfect hypermnesia, not experience it ourselves). The reader's slightly longer retention of these echoes grants her an intense experience of being a sympathizer.

"Sympathizer" perhaps comes across as an obscure or imprecise critical term; in fact, we're adopting it from a writer closely related to Bassmann, the contemporary French novelist Antoine Volodine. Volodine has said of his own writing something that could just as well apply to Bassmann's:
I wrote for readers whom I imagine, in principle, as friends or accomplices, for readers who are 'sympathizers' (this is the term used by the German police and the press to characterize those likely to appreciate the rhetoric and actions of the Rote Armee Fraktion in the early 1970s. My narrators always address themselves, over the heads of the police who force them to speak, to listeners who are friends and accomplices, real or imaginary.

Monge's "magical sentence," an incantation he has been instructed to repeat throughout his mission, is just such an address to sympathizers: "Only those I love, listen!" In compressed form, this incantation expresses the entire narrative poetics of We Monks and Soldiers. On the one hand, the book that is recited in the silence between two bouts of drumming addresses itself to sympathizers, to those who would find no great exaggeration in a description of the world as "ruled by assassins and capitalism." The text is narrated to a narratee who would concur, with Monge, that "Even in a flawed or degenerate form, a proletarian universe could only be better." And yet, on the other hand, Monge's assertion that "a proletarian universe could only be better" is relayed to us in fiction, and thus not without irony. It's a delicate irony, and a rare one in the republic of letters; fiction has had a difficult time representing revolutionary political passion as anything other than doomed or ridiculous. Maybe only Andrei Platonov's depiction of the strangely disappointing execution of the bourgeoisie in the novel Tchevengur achieves something similar. In both Platonov and Bassmann, the longing for a proletarian universe is not ironized to the point of destruction.[3] The "backup proletarian universe" may be fictional, but it is not false.

Bassmann is both a fictional author of and a fictional character in Volodine's 1998 novel Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze. That novel took the form of an extended explication of an imaginary dissident literary movement called "post-exoticism," a fictional movement which Volodine has nonetheless realized in print, in the thirty-nine books that preceded and followed the publication of Le post-exotisme. Some were published under the name Antoine Volodine (itself a pseudonym); others have appeared under Volodine's heteronyms Manuela Draeger, Elli Kronauer, and Lutz Bassmann. There are stylistic differences among the four writers, and they are not writing the linear chronicle of just one fictional world (the post-exotic works are not a series); nonetheless, it is evident that all four writers are engaged in the same vast project.

We Monks and Soldiers stands on its own; somewhat like Monge, a reader who plunges into a post-exotic world for the very first time already has all she needs. No one has to be schooled in the arcana of post-exoticism to see that We Monks and Soldiers is a gorgeously patterned and deeply moving work. And, conversely, familiarity with the immense and jagged edifice of post-exoticism does nothing to lessen its strangeness. Encountering post-exoticism for the first or the nth time is still an experience of attending raptly to the brief, fraught appearance of beings from another world.

Despite the autonomy of We Monks and Soldiers, its further post-exotic context is illuminating. Almost fifteen years into the post-exotic project,[4] the novel Le post-exotisme undertook to fictionally describe that project, though its terms were apparently fanciful ones. Le post-exotisme delineated such imaginary post-exotic genres as the "Shågga," the "narrat," the "murmurat," and the "entrevoûtes"—the book examined all this while also narrating the tale of an imprisoned dissident, one Lutz Bassmann. In turn, in a fictional paratext at the end of Le post-exotisme, in a bewildering list of 343 books "by the same author," which are nonetheless attributed to 72 different imaginary writers, Lutz Bassmann is cited as the author of no fewer than nineteen fictional, non-extant post-exotic works, among them Un clown en peluche (in the post-exotic genre romånce), Savoir croupir, savoir ne pas croupir (genre: narrats poetiques), and La parfaite poussiere (genre: entrevoûtes). Before Volodine published Le post-exotisme, his books were labeled novels and they bore his signature; after Le post-exotisme, books by various other post-exotic writers, with Volodine's invented genre designations on their frontispieces, also began to appear (in print, for reals). Most remarkable of all, these later post-exotic works rigorously conform to and expand on those apparently so factitious, apparently so lightheartedly invented fictional genres. We Monks and Soldiers belongs to the post-exotic genre of the entrevoûtes. 

An entrevoûte in its original form, according the explication in Le post-exotisme, comprises a pair of texts, a "novelle" and its "annex" or "response." Entrevoûtes, though, always appear as collections of pairs, as a series of echoes.[5] Le post-exotisme never defines the paired entrevoûtes in the vocabulary of doubles or reflection; instead, Le post-exotisme describes the entrevoûtes as forming a circular structure, "a simple and solid curvature" which "opens onto infinity." This accords with what we pointed out about Monge's two realities at the beginning of this essay: they aren't arranged hierarchically or as doubles: a Monge and an anti-Monge, reality and illusion. And somehow the fact of fictionality is essential to the effect of Monge's echoing worlds, is even essential to creating the sympathizer it addresses. Our byline has lent this review a certain political earnestness, we don't deny that, maybe even an overly pious closeness to dissidents fictional and real, but we don't mistake We Monks and Soldiers for a work of rhetoric. The book makes no case for revolution; neither is it a code that could be reliably back-masked to reveal the minimum program for a renewed Party. It is fiction. And yet all the post-exotic works together are perhaps an "annex" or "response" to the real, just as one entrevoûte comprises a "novelle" and its annex. If so, the post-exotic works are an annex that forms a circular unity with our world, in the manner of the entrevoûtes. Which means that the "fact" of their fictionality may one day find itself undone.

According to Le post-exotisme, to read a collection of entrevoûtes is to find oneself
entre soi, far from the loquacious dogs, the propagandists, the amusers of millionaires. The literary field of the entrevoûtes opens onto infinity: it becomes a destination, a harbor for the narrator, a land of exile for the reader, of tranquil exile, out of reach of the enemy, as if forever out of reach of the enemy.

All the sorrow and irony of this tranquil exile seem dependent on the "as if" in the statement "as if forever out of reach of the enemy." The "as if" is the mode of fiction. The French title of "A Backup Proletarian Universe" is "Un univers prolétarien de secours," literally "aid," as in first-aid. But the aid that fiction (any fiction) proffers is strangely inoperative; stranger still, by not making a distinction between dreams and waking, between one world and another, post-exotic fiction seems always on the verge of undoing the distinction between the real and the fictional, the very distinction that seems to have set it all in motion. We Monks and Soldiers would be only another entry in the lonely crowded post-apocalyptic genre if it did not also lend its readers this peculiar and ambiguous form of aid, this tranquil fictional exile: too ironized to be dogmatic, too profoundly moving to be nothing but irony, and strangely activated in the fictional though not false mode of its address.

Postscript on the Op

Early reviews of We Monks and Soldiers have mentioned its "terse" and "spare" prose. But We Monks and Soldiers is not only terse; such reviews appear to be generalizing from the book's opening section, the noir-ish first-person narration of "An Exorcism Beside the Sea." To do this is to ignore all the other narrative styles of We Monks and Soldiers: the Vladimir-and-Estragon comedy of Monge and Fuchs's journey; the frequent slippages between first and third person, as well as between naming and anonymity; the elegy of the section titled "Forgetting"; the expansion of the iterative possibilities of narrative in the twice-narrated "Tong Fong" sections and in the late-Beckett circularity of "The Dive"; and the several, Blanchotian evocations of dark space folding in on itself amid the heat of flames unseen in "Crisis at the Tong Fong Hotel." The mistake isn't only in ignoring all these other styles; it's also in not noticing what the "terse" prose of the opening section actually does.

Almost alone among post-exotic characters, the quasi-anonymous first-person narrator of "An Exorcism Beside the Sea" is a little bit fat. It's a rare trait in post-exoticism on the whole (where the fare tends to be limited to a little fermented yak milk and even less pemmican), and it's rare in We Monks and Soldiers: not only are pickings slim in the last days, but monks and soldiers are ascetics.[6] Still, the first-person narrator of "An Exorcism Beside the Sea"—a monk-soldier—spends more than a few lines commenting on his own large size. "That's the one detail that might, if need be, distinguish me amid a group of monks, prisoners, or soldiers," says the narrator, before going on to remark that others have "the same failing" and that this description is more or less just a useful one, as if the image he's just given us were merely accidental.

Is it an accident that Bassmann's monk-soldier shares the characteristic of being fat with Dashiell Hammett's nameless Continental Op? More importantly, Bassmann's monk-soldier Jean Schwan (but even his name, Schwan tells us, is just an accident; he might have called himself anything) —Schwan shares with Hammett's Op the "terse" narrative habit of telling us everything he does but nothing he thinks. The Op's first-person narration pulled the trick of seeming to let the reader in on everything—what the Op drank, where he went, who he saw—while actually concealing until the end his most important thoughts about the case. That style is now so much a part of noir-ese that we accept it even from detective-narrators who have no interesting thoughts to conceal, whose narratives really are just "terse" and "spare" accounts of drinks drunk and people shot. Bassmann's Schwan, though, is not one of these.

Schwan comes to the seaside to "exorcise" some of the newly deceased, to persuade them to leave this earth and these bodies to which they uselessly cling, to persuade them not only with rites and incantations but also with incendiary grenades and a Yarygin pistol. Like many characters in We Monks and Soldiers, Schwan has come here to do a job he's done before. When he reveals, in a late, Op-style admission toward the end of the tale that something profound and sad binds him to one of these newly dead, what is created is not a solution to the mystery—that's what the Op would have given us—but a deepening of the mystery. We're not talking about "backstory"—it's not some fact that's revealed or even only partly revealed. What Jean Schwan reveals is the fictional nature of what matters most, and the anonymity of those closest to us. He does this by naming the newly dead; he gives them contingent names, fictional ones, as accidental as his own. Schwan names one of the dead "Mariya Schwan," but as if in quotation marks, as if in the fictional mode of the as if. The newly dead appear to Jean Schwan as he to them, as fictional characters do to us: suffering beings from distant worlds, whose brief appearance we can only attend.

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[1] The French title is Avec les moines-soldats, "With the Monk-Soldiers," and alongside monks and soldiers one often finds such crossed forms in this book: dissident monks, shamanic soldiers, monk-soldiers. Still, Jordan Stump's excellent translation is excellent in this instance, too: the phrase "we monks and soldiers" occurs in the book's first section, and the English title captures the solidarity implied in the French one. Additionally, the authors would like to thank Jordan Stump for his generous correspondence about We Monks and Soldiers.

[2]  The Orbise is a river in France, but Monge's world cannot be France, not exactly, and the book deploys the name "Orbise" as if it designated a region or even an organization; even this proper noun is disorienting.

[3] But neither can the fictional revolution compensate for the real, defeated one. The unrepentant dissident Linda Woo, in Antoine Volodine's novel Écrivains, recites a tale ironic enough to make this astute comparison of fiction and reality: "Crushed and condemned…the post-exotic writers persisted in existing, in the isolation of high-security prisons and in the definitive, monastic enclosure of death… Their memory became a collection of dreams. Their murmurs ending up fashioning books, collective books without a clearly claimed author. They set about ruminating on unachieved promises and they invented worlds in which the failure was just as systematic and bitter as in what you call the real world." (p 35-36, emphasis ours.)

[4] The term post-exoticism came into circulation well after the publication of Volodine's first novel; the term was initially almost a joke, a flippant answer to an interviewer who asked Volodine to situate his work in a wider literary context. Even so, the unity of Volodine's prismatic, multi-authored work is astonishing. Everything is there in the first novel, the stunning Biographie comparée de Jorian Murgrave (published in 1985). It is as though an introit had been sounded in 1985, and, for all post-exoticism's multiplicity, we seem still to be witnessing a single, ceaseless performance.

[5] In consultation with Volodine, Jordan Stump has translated the neologism "entrevoûtes" as "archode" (i.e., "arch-ode"). This retains the architectural connotation of the actual French verb entrevoûter, as well as the poetic "ode," though the connotation of "arch" in the sense of "first" or "principal" seems infelicitous.

[6] If there is an exemplarily post-exotic stance toward gustation, it might be that of Meyerberh in Biographie comparée de Jorian Murgrave, who is said to be "one of those people capable of depriving themselves of nourishment for days and days, and even for weeks." - Collective in Support of the Imprisoned Grand-Jury Resisters Matt Duran, KteeO Olejnik, and Maddy Pfeiffer

Lutz Bassmann belongs to a community of imaginary authors invented, championed, and literarily realized by Antoine Volodine, a French writer of Slavic origins born in 1950. Volodine’s many celebrated, category-defying works include the award-winning Minor Angels (Nebraska, 2004), which blends science fiction, Tibetan myth, a ludic approach to writing, and a profound humanistic idealism.

From Lutz Bassmann's The Eagles Reek

Antoine Volodine, Minor Angels, Trans. by Jordan Stump, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Read it at Google Books

"From Antoine Volodine comes a deeply disturbing and darkly hilarious novel whose full meaning, its author asserts, will be found not in the book’s pages but in the dreams people will have after reading it. In Minor Angels Volodine depicts a postcataclysmic world in which the forces of capitalism have begun to reestablish themselves. Sharply opposed to such a trend, a group of crones confined to a nursing home—all of them apparently immortal—resolves to create an avenging grandson fashioned of lint and rags. Though conjured to crush the rebirth of capitalism, the grandson is instead seduced by its charms—only to fall back into the hands of his creators, where he manages to forestall his punishment by reciting one “narract” a day. It is these narracts, or prose poems, that compose the text of Minor Angels."

"In his rebellion against traditional narrative styles, Volodine borders on the pretentious. His attempt to create a new reader consciousness has an alienating effect not only by the overlapping of narrators but also by the often vile imagery that permeates this work. Although there are some rare poetic moments reminiscent of Baudelaire's prose poems, one is ultimately left with a feeling of total loss and futility on both an esthetic and a human level." - Donald J. Dziekowicz

"Minor Angels has all the markings of a masterpiece: compression, resonance, and vision."—Terese Svoboda

"His talent surfaces time and again in luxurious, hypnotic ways." —Publishers Weekly

"His quirky and eccentric narrative achieves quite staggering and electric effects... Dazzling in its epic proportions and imaginative scope." — The Nation

"Rilke was right: Every angel /is/ terrible. But the language here is intoxicating, and the buzz you get makes even the ugliest stories appear beautiful."—New York Journal News"Volodine isn''t afraid to tangle animate and inanimate spirits, or thwart expectations. He delights in breaking down our wellhoned meters of what’s supposed to happen. It is out of the shambles of these once-easy relationships that Minor Angels really soars."—Margaret Wappler

"Volodine''s characters struggle against humankind’s demise, managing to cling to their full names and little else, and in the process they reveal their compelling histories and strange presents, all of them concerned that their stories be told.''"—Tim Feeney

"Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels is presented in 49 short chapters, each except the middle one (25) paired in a sense with another (1 with 49, 2 with 48, etc.). Forty-nine 'minor angels' run through the text, each given as one chapter-heading, though many resurface in a number of episodes. Volodine calls what he presents: "narracts" - "the trace left by an angel", he explained in a preamble to the French edition that Stump quotes in his preface. They are episodes and stories, or mere glimpses of life in this world he has created.
Minor Angels is set in a quasi-post-apocalyptic world. Disaster struck centuries earlier, and humanity was decimated. The environmental and social effects are still being felt. Volodine doesn't describe what happened, but mentions such as "back when there was an Africa" suggest a major catastrophe.
It is also an unreal new world, filled with century-old women destined never to die. Lamenting "the sad fact that humanity had now entered upon the more-or-less final stage of its fading", the old women come up with a plan: to "assemble the avenger the world so desperately needed." This figure - put together from rags and bits of lint, becomes Will Scheidmann.
Will isn't everything they hoped for: he brings back capitalism, an apparently frowned-upon solution to the troubles of the times. Eventually he is tried and sentenced to be executed, but in this world even execution isn't simply accomplished ("Will Scheidmann's execution had been underway for three weeks", we learn at one point).
Will's story is one of the central ones in the book; other prominent figures include the writer Fred Zenfl (who writes stories about the extinction of his species) and any number of characters whose lives intersect - though not always in obvious ways. It is a very dreamy novel, allowing for the many surreal touches, and it's no surprise to learn from one character, for example:
'As on every sixteenth of October for what will soon be one thousand one hundred and eleven years, I dreamt last night that I was named Will Scheidmann, even though my name is Clementi, Maria Clementi.'Some of this is absolutely bewitching, as Volodine beautifully conjures up this bleak world with small, sharp images, but much is confounding. There are certain events around which the text focusses -- not quite a plot, but enough to provide some hold - but the dream-reality convergence, and, especially, the lack of sense of time can leave the reader at sea.
The individual scenes and chapters - the 'narracts' - are often compelling, but the book does not come together comfortably. What narrative structure there is is clever, but does not ultimately offer enough to make the book truly gripping. An interesting but not entirely (or satisfyingly) successful exercise." - The Complete Review


Antoine Volodine, Naming the Jungle: A Novel, Trans. by Linda Coverdale, The New Press, 1996.

"Antoine Volodine has been hailed as one of the most innovative and accomplished writers in France today. Compared by critics to Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll, Volodine weaves an unusual novel of political and psychological intrigue in a lush, exotic setting. The publication of Naming the Jungle marks his American debut and the first translation of his work into English. Puesto Libertad could be any Latin American city torn by the strife of civil war. In this isolated capital buried in the jungle, the revolutionary secret police have started digging into Fabian Golpiez's past. In order to avoid brutal torture and interrogation, he decides to feign madness. Led by a local shaman/psychiatrist in a bizarre talking cure, Golpiez must use indigenous names to prove both his innocence and his true Tupi Indian identity. To name is to conquer. He names the monkeys, the plants, and the insects all around him as he names his fears, his paranoia, and his pathologies."

"The American debut of a French writer is an intense, hallucinatory novel of a man's daring psychological ruse to protect himself from political brutality. Fabian Golpiez, a Jucapira Indian in a fictitious post-revolutionary South American country, is interrogated alternately by a psychiatrist and by local security forces as he tries to untangle a confession, or at least tell a story, from his feverish memory. Employing a strange ritual, the psychiatrist displays images on a slide projector that prompt Fabian to tell his tale. But the Indian feigns madness in order to conceal his past associations with both sides of the civil war?a one-night love affair with a guerrilla commando, and some time spent peripherally assisting an authoritarian judge in his inquisitions. Meanwhile, Fabian plans vaguely to escape into the jungle with an associate and with his lover, a nurse. The actual story has a sparseness that contrasts with the lush lexicon of Volodine's imagined jungle: e.g., "surucating" (making love), "caranguejeira" (a type of spider); "jacare" (alligators). While the author undercuts his rich style with a certain self-consciousness, and his narrative lacks a vital dynamic dimension, his talent surfaces time and again in luxurious, hypnotic ways." - Publishers Weekly

"Intensely imagined evocation of post-revolutionary Latin America, from an acclaimed French novelist whose work appears here in English translation for the first time. The setting is the city of Puesto Libertad in an unidentified country whose new government assiduously examines the loyalty of those who fought in the recently concluded revolution. One such citizen, Fabian Golpiez, must match wits with Gonáalves, the choleric psychiatrist who grows increasingly frustrated with his ``patient's'' erratic memory (Fabian can't remember whether he served with government or rebel troops). The two engage in several amusingly combative conversations, in which Fabian is challenged to prove his native (Tupi Indian) identity by providing the correct Indian names for indigenous flora, fauna, and other phenomena. Volodine juxtaposes with these talks memories triggered by Fabian's efforts to "explain certain episodes of my love life or my revolutionary days'' - most notably his sexual relationship with a mysterious woman accused of collaborating with the former government's thuggish military police, and his complicated friendship with a rebel soldier with whom he'd planned to found an "egalitarian commune,'' climaxing with the pair's hallucinatory journey upriver into the dangerous interior. The novel is alive with color and detail, and its portrayal of the perils of existing in this volatile environment are powerfully evoked by the ubiquitous presence of seemingly endless varieties of snakes and spiders (which Fabian must both name and survive). And Fabian Golpiez, an uncomprehending little man who desires only to blend into anonymity with the jungle that hides him and with the compliant women with whom he blissfully "surucates,'' is an unusual and appealing protagonist. An unconventional look at the embattled human manifestations of amorphously large events - and a pleasing debut by a writer from whom we'll surely hear more." - Kirkus Reviews

"The jungle city of Puesto Libertad is reorganizing itself after a revolution. Imperialist speech is forbidden; only tribal vocabularies are acceptable. Anyone unable or unwilling to call a spider a "caranguejeira" is in big trouble, including war veteran Fabian Golpiez, who is suspected of disloyalty. To defer interrogation by the brutal police, Fabian agrees to undergo treatment by the grotesque Dr. Goncalves, a shaman-psychiatrist. As the therapy proceeds, Fabian is shaken to learn that he shares with Goncalves not only a first name but a lover, a violent past, and a wholly uncertain future. Fantastic events unfold in a surreal atmosphere of unresolved questions. While not likely to generate popular interest, this novel will appeal to readers of experimental fiction. Buy where demand warrants." - Starr E. Smith

"Antoine Volodine’s NAMING THE JUNGLE successfully mixes the stylistic and aesthetic conventions of Magical Realism, Surrealism, and Postmodernism to tell its strange tale of a band of outcasts barely surviving in a remote jungle. Thus, the reader must accept that characters are killed only to live again, that time is circular, and that the narrator is highly unreliable. Once these fictional conventions are accepted, Volodine’s story provides an exquisite glimpse of the grotesque side of human life.
Squirming in a dentist’s chair that his psychiatrist, Fabian Goncalves, has inherited from the previous owner of his office, the traumatized protagonist Fabian Golpiez must retrace his journey to the run-down town of Puesto Libertad. If he fails to use only Indian proper names for everything alive, Fabian will have to go back to the political police. In a narrative twist that powerfully comments on humanity’s amazing capacity for devising ever fresh forms of cruelty, Volodine’s police operate right in front of their kitchen. Here, unfortunate suspects are interrogated as cooks brutally slaughter alligators, monkeys, and tortoises, and play bloody practical jokes.
Once Golpiez decides to flee upriver, more quixotic characters appear. There is Manda, an Indian woman who sleeps with both the psychiatrist and his patient. Former soldier Rui Gutierrez snacks on snake meat and yearns for the deep jungle. Two of Golpiez’s lovers are mysterious women with government connections, Maria Gabriela and Leonor Nieves, who occasionally appear as gigantic bats, leaving Golpiez to pursue his escape by canoe.
With many of these fantastic turns and events, NAMING THE JUNGLE offers a deliciously absurd text where reality has taken a holiday." - www.enotes.com
 
 

Antoine Volodine, Writers, trans. by Katina Rogers. Dalkey Archive Press, 2014.

Here we have the anatomy of the contemporary writer, imagined by the pseudonymous, “post-exotic” Antoine Volodine. His writers are not the familiar, bitter, alcoholic kind; nor are they great, romantic, tortured geniuses; and least of all are they media darlings and socialites. In Volodine’s universe, the writer is pitted in a pathetic struggle against silence and sickness, when she is not about to be murdered by random lunatics or fellow inmates. Consisting of seven loosely interlocking stories, Writers exposes a chaotic reality in which self expression elicits repercussions both absurd and frighteningly familiar.

A loosely concatenated series of seven stories, all focusing on writers in various and cunning guises.
The opening tale introduces Mathias Olbane, a suicidal writer and former inmate at a penitentiary now plagued with oncoglyphosis, a rare illness whose manifestation is a “retraction of the scalp,” a condition that torments him. Convicted of being a member of a terrorist organization, despite his emphatic denials, Olbane served 26 years—and came out with plenty of material. “Begin-ing” plunges us into a Kafkaesque world in which a man is being tormented into making a confession about almost anything—“that he has contacts with parallel universes, with aliens, that since his birth he has been a double agent"—although he professes that his mind is completely empty. Bruno and Greta, his incredulous interlocutors, turn out to be sadistic, murderous and insane. “Acknowledgments,” one of the few stories with a lighter tone, is in fact a delicious sendup of a writer’s elaborate appreciation for all the help he received in completing his novel, but also included is a list of those who did not aid the creative process, those whose “malicious critiques, mean-spirited little reviews, and unpardonable silences carried substantial weight towards my books’ lack of success.” In the futuristic “The Strategy of Silence in the Work of Bogdan Tarassiev,” the narrator explores an author whose career spans a period from 2017 to 2053 and whose periodic silences raise cryptic issues about creativity.
Many of Volodine’s writers inhabit a “post-exotic” world, in which they’re obligated to remember the atrocities and horrors of the 20th century—and to serve as repositories of a dark cultural memory. - Kirkus Reviews

 Writers was published in the French original as a novel ('roman'), but even Dalkey Archive Press, usually open to most any form of genre-stretching, demurred here, opting merely for some back-cover copy that describes the book as consisting of: "seven loosely interlocking stories". Loose is right -- there's some suggestion of overlap of characters and work, but little obvious connection -- but then this is a book by Antoine Volodine, whose entire œuvre at first seems disjointed and yet must be considered part of a 'body of work'. In particular, Volodine stretches the usual writing bounds by assuming different authorial identities: like Pessoa, he's adopted a number of heteronyms (and, indeed, 'Antoine Volodine' itself is a pseudonym) -- notably Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger.
       In Writers, too, identity is rarely fixed: writing about a Linda Woo, suddenly:
     She takes on the voice of Maria Iguacel. Suddenly she is Maria Iguacel. So am I.
       In a way, Writers is Volodine-in-miniature: variations on themes and identities, with similarities and overlap but never making it too easy or obvious -- as in, for example, ascribing An Autumn at the Boyols' to one of the subjects of the book, and A Meeting at the Boyols' to another. His work as a whole -- and often individually, as also in this instance -- is more like a finely spun spider-web, the gossamer threads barely visible, but an intricate connected design there nevertheless.
       Writers essentially offers seven separate pieces on the lives of a variety of writers, the summary-approach differing in the pieces, most notably in 'Acknowledgments', which takes the form of a writer thanking those who have supported him and his work over the years. Several of the authors are killers, though generally of those who arguably deserve to die -- Mathias Olbane "assassinated assassins", as did Linda Woo ("assassins who had indirectly killed hundreds of thousands and even millions of people").
       Volodine has termed his writing 'post-exotic', and this features here as well; in 'Speech to the Nomads and to the Dead' Linda Woo gives an impassioned speech about this movement -- noting, too: 

Their murmurs have ended up fashioning collective books with no clear claims of authorship. They have set themselves to ruminating on promises not kept and they have invented worlds where failure is as systematic and stinging as it is in what you call the real world.        Volodine's books are all such murmur -- and here many of the authors are, indeed, abject failures ("it had a print run of a thousand copies and sold just under forty" (and the next book does even worse ...)).
       Volodine even looks ahead -- though here, too, retrospectively: 'The Strategy of Silence in the Work of Bogdan Tarassiev' looks back on the career of Tarassiev from the 23rd century, fifty years after the death of the writer who: "started his career as an author in 2017". (Typically, too, Tarassiev started that career: "under the name of Jean Balbaïan, by publishing a crime novel series".)
       Long periods of silence aren't unusual among these writers, either: Tarassiev: "kept quiet for twenty-three years", while Olbane spends years simply formulating: "lists of imaginary terms, such as names of plants, names of persecuted or exterminated peoples, or quite simply made-up names of camp victims". Conventional narrative isn't the primary interest of Volodine's writers -- or of Volodine, as Writers includes extended riffs on names and pseudonyms, titles, and events.
       These are finely crafted pieces. Volodine is a thoughtful and precise writer, and there's an elegance to these stories. There's a great deal of humor, too -- mainly in artistic failure. The difficulty with the work is, as with most of Volodine's work, it feels like a sliver of a much larger whole, and too much of it -- the cross-references and meanings -- remains obscured. Volodine heaps on the references -- dozens of (imagined) author names, just for one -- and it can be difficult to separate wheat from chaff (further complicated by the sneaking suspicion that most of the hidden meaning is to be found in the chaff).
       Somewhat hard to appreciate as a whole, Writers nevertheless often feels very rewarding: there's pleasure in the texts themselves, and there's a sense of a much larger whole, which, with more effort, might slowly be grasped. - M.A.Orthofer

“I hate reading ‘difficult authors.’” In this interview filmed in 2011, French writer Antoine Volodine looks pained when asked why he dislikes hearing his books called “difficult.” He counters that his books are only difficult to summarize, not to read. It’s true: the ramifying narrative strands of Volodine’s novels fascinate, but they are almost impossible to describe. Like the fictitious novels penned by one of his writer-characters in the newly translated Writers (Dalkey, 2014; Éditions du Seuil, 2010), Volodine’s books consist of “dark scenes, oscillation between political and mystical spheres, biting humor, nested story lines, tangled interior worlds, portrayal of the drift towards madness or death.” And Volodine’s books present a further difficulty for summary: they belong to a fictional-yet-real literary movement named (by Volodine) “post-exoticism.”
In a “post-exotic” novel, the plot usually begins long after the defeat of an unnarrated “world revolution”; the characters are often revengers or revolutionaries, now imprisoned,  or mad, or dead; and the narrative voice shifts among narrators and “surnarrators,” in books-within-books ascribed to various heteronyms—these last are fictional post-exotic writers who sometimes also publish books in our world. (Volodine’s heteronyms with autonomous literary careers include Manuela Draeger and Lutz Bassmann.) Their battle lost, these fictional post-exotics have not conceded defeat or renounced their beliefs; instead, they’ve taken up writing—but post-exotic writing is a lowly, risible act, often consisting merely of tapping on pipes in prison cells, or murmuring or sighing or coughing out words that come to nothing in the end.
Given this complexity, Volodine’s books may sound difficult, to a degree that belies the rapt experience of reading them. And in Writers, the writer-characters struggle with a Beckettian difficulty: how to come to the end of writing. However, even as they try to reach silence, the writers in Writers go on writing—in gripping, poetic, hallucinatory images—after the end of revolution, after defeat or betrayal. Volodine has said that it is revolution’s defeat—“the disfiguration of that generous dream”—that makes his characters suffer. We readers, too, are living on after the disfiguration of just such dreams, and because we live in what looks more and more like end times, the problem of how to come to the end is not solely a concern of “the guild of difficult authors” (as one of the writer-characters in Writers puts it).
To phrase it as a pull quote I may well regret: Writers is like Beckett’s The Unnamable crossed with The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, at once dismal and absorbing, shifting between static friezes and gripping tales, as if Beckett’s titular character had changed his mind about “relaps[ing] into picaresque” (as he puts it), abandoning his sere modernist world and “slipping toward… the resorts of fable.” Reminiscent of Beckett, the writer-characters in Writers try to stop going on writing, but they do so in intricate, fascinating, terrifying worlds—worlds riven by an absolutely just yet absolutely shattered dream of revolution: 
The post-exotic writers weren’t mere scribblers of rubbish, they were armed and engaged in politics, they had taken the road of secrecy and subversion, and with no fear either of madness or death, they threw themselves into a battle that they had but the faintest chance of winning, an infinitesimal chance, and thus they found themselves soldiers and loners, laughably few at the front of a war in which, combat after combat, they lost everything. It even happened that they lost the certainty that one day the wretches’ children would open their eyes on a world not filled with shadows, not ruled by the mafia, and not unequal.
It’s like the St Crispin’s Day speech as retold by Ulrike Meinhof. But Shakespeare’s Henry V spoke just before battle; the war in Writers is long since lost. In defeat, the book’s exhortations are cut adrift; they cannot be put into operation, neither in the post-exotics’ worlds nor in our own. Writers has no statement to make about our present historical conjuncture or the possibility of a renewed revolutionary movement. For all its hortatory furor, this is a littérature that is strikingly désengagée. Underneath the vociferations of Writers lies something silent.
This silence might frustrate a reader who comes to Writers looking for “encrypted messages about action or insurrection” (Volodine, in another interview). In one chapter of Writers, the leaders of a doomed rebellion in an insane asylum are confronted with a fellow inmate’s obdurate commitment to writing; the rebels “don’t really know, in the end, whether he’s an ally to convince, or an enemy.” They want the writer-inmate, one Bruno Katchatourian, to declare himself, “whether by admitting that he’s been, for a thousand years, a clandestine leader of dark forces, or by tracing for them a strategy that could lead them to final victory.” But Katchatourian, although he too is a revolutionary who has “stood up to the police with weapons and explosives,” is ultimately devoted to aims that seem orthogonal to both revolution and writing. The writer Katchatourian wants to stop writing, and he wants to do so by ending both his life and his literary oeuvre with the word “end.”
The chapter of Writers that is devoted to Katchatourian’s desire to come to the end of writing does, in fact, end on the words “it will end.” It is a complex involution: the end is invoked just at the moment it goes on in the future tense, and the words “it will end” belong both to the book we hold in our hands and to a book that is being composed in Katchatourian’s mind. Moreover, this chapter of Writers, entitled “Begin-ing” [sic], contains fragments of an interpolated, archival text: a childishly misspelled story, a text we are to suppose was written by the fictional character Katchatourian at five years of age. In fact, as Volodine says in in this interview (at about forty-four minutes in), the quotations come from the first story he ever wrote, at age five or six, the auspiciously and awkwardly titled “Comancer.” The presence of “Comancer” in Writers—as chapter title and interpolated fragment—is not just a reward for fans who assiduously parse Volodine’s interviews, and it is not the only metafictional gesture in Writers. The end of the book also includes archival material: the fictional writer-character Nikita Kouriline researches the day of his birth, in Moscow on June 27, 1938, and he comes up with a list of those executed on that day in Butovo, near Moscow, for counter-revolutionary crimes. The names of the dead, their alleged crimes, their proletarian occupations (“typesetter,” “cart driver,” “laborer in pit No. 57”)—all come from Volodine’s research into Soviet records of mass executions (as Volodine attests in the above-mentioned interview at about fifty-two minutes in).
With the inclusion of this archival material, it is as though meditating on the end had affected post-exotic narrative’s farthest border: the border between the fictional and the real. The revolutionary strategies in Writers cannot be put into operation in our world; just so, it’s said of a novel by the fictional writer-character Bogdan Tarassiev that its “narrative world refers to nothing but itself. It is closed, constructed with a familiar reality so distorted that it is no longer transposable. It must be recognized as such rather than seeing in it a shifted description of our own.” Nonetheless, Writers never stops opening its closed fictional worlds onto real ones. Hence, the chapter called “The Strategy of Silence in the Work of Bogdan Tarassiev” concludes with a metafictional Mobius strip. It revolves around the fictional Tarassiev, an author of novels much like Volodine’s: they allude to, without depicting, a class war between les miserables and les heureux du monde. It is both the strength of Tarassiev’s art and the weakness of his craft that he cannot or will not represent “those who govern the planet” in his novels: “with the sentiment that such a representation would be mentally and literarily impossible, Tarassiev never worries about activating any sort of believable image of the rich, even at the moment when they’re killed, even at the moment when he, as the author, kills them.” At the end of his life, Tarassiev actually does kill several of the rich and powerful at a charity function, just before turning the gun on himself. In the pocket of Tarassiev’s jacket is found a note that could be interpreted as enjoining its readers to cross the border from fiction to act, to go from hortatory revolutionary novel to political assassination, or from writing to suicide; but this lapidary note—ending with the words “do as I do”—is signed, not by the writer Tarassiev, but by one of his fictional characters, Wolff. This signature puts a loop in the just-concluded passage from the fictional to the real, and Tarassiev’s suicide note is assimilated, not into the annals of history, but into a marginal, disregarded literary oeuvre, where it is henceforth known as Opus 25.
If Wolff’s incendiary opus fizzles rather than ignites, Writers is nonetheless not just a critique of revolutionary passion, a sentimental education that would teach its readers to abjure such follies. Just as the rebels in the “Begin-ing” chapter cannot get Katchatourian to confirm that he is either an enemy or an ally, that his writing either conspires with dark forces or contains a path to victory, so, too, is it difficult to put the ending of Writers squarely in line with a liberal condemnation of revolution. In the last chapter, the fictional writer Kouriline shamanically recites the names of those who were executed on the day of his birth. These names come from an actual archive of Stalinist executions, but Writers is not just a coda to The Black Book of Communism. However tragic revolution’s vicissitudes, Writers does not use them to warn us off revolution. The catastrophe is merely presented in its terrible beauty: “somber and tattered, traversed by extraordinary images and hallucinations.” With all the ambiguity of Bolingbroke’s “[I] love him murdered,” Writers loves the revolution in ruins.
As with the insertion of the character Wolff’s suicide note into the jacket pocket of the writer Tarassiev, the inclusion of archival material in Writers is destabilizing. To reiterate: it affects narrative’s farthest border, that between the fictional and the real. In saying this, I don’t mean that the difference between reality and fiction collapses; rather, the fact of fictionality does not absolve the fictional writers in Writers, and neither does it absolve us, Volodine’s readers. We, too, find ourselves implicated in these narratives of the end. My review copy of Writers starts with a brief interview between Volodine and an unnamed interlocutor (this text is absent from Dalkey’s published edition, and it does not appear in the original French, either). The interviewer might have been Writers’ able translator, Katina Rogers, but the effaced name and the undated context grant the proceedings a spooky similarity to a typical Volodinian fictional situation: before nameless or fictional interlocutors, a writer is called to account for the fictional literary movement known as “post-exoticism.” In this interview, Volodine remarks: “One of the fundamental tasks of the post-exotic writers is to accompany these exhausted characters in their suffering, to be with them in sympathy and even empathy.” The fictional Kouriline’s list of the names of the dead; the fictional Linda Woo’s speech about the post-exotic writers; and the words of one “Maria Three-Thirteen,” a post-exotic writer, newly dead, who attempts to recount the dream of another post-exotic writer—all these are fragile attempts, on the part of writers, to sympathize with beings in their suffering. What else is the reading of fiction? What else, in a novel, are the names of the real dead—“‘Dedyonok,’ he calls, ‘Dedyonok Mikhail Ermolayevich!”—but the names of suffering beings from distant worlds? Like fictional characters, the dead at Boutuvo elicit our sympathy while remaining beyond our aid.
Nothing guarantees that the undated interview at the start of my ephemeral copy of Writers is not itself a work of fiction. But the fictional is not the false. In this eventually suppressed interview, Volodine quotes the fictional writer-character Maria Three-Thirteen, speaking about the silence underneath post-exoticism, a silence more profound, she says, than post-exoticism’s revolutionary vociferations. Maria Three-Thirteen says: “In the end, and when I say it’s the end it’s really the end, only the image counts.” But in Writers, in the end, it may be that no one comes to the end of saying the end. And of Maria Three-Thirteen’s silent image, it is as Beckett says in The Unnamable: “it is solely a question of voices, no other image is appropriate.” The longed-for silence—the end—can neither be seized nor averted, and so the writers in Writers go on. - Diana George

Next year we’re going to be publishing Antoine Volodine’s Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons: Lesson Eleven, a book that I’m super excited about, and which help explain (somewhat) Volodine’s crazy-awesome project. If you’re a regular listener to the “Three Percent Podcast”: you’ve probably heard me go on and on and on about how interesting Volodine’s work is—in particular, Minor Angels and We Monks & Soldiers, both of which are masterfully translated into English by Jordan Stump. (Also worth noting is Naming the Jungle, which New Press published way back, but which I have yet to read.)
As with everything Volodine does, that last statement needs to be unpacked. See, We Monks & Soldiers is written by Lutz Bassmann, one of Volodine’s heteronyms.
Actually, that’s not entirely true either. See, Volodine is a heteronym as well for a French schoolteacher who writes this truly weird, incredibly knotty, endlessly fascinating books under a host of heteronyms. He’s like the French Fernando Pessoa, but more obsessed with the apocalypse.
So, over the past twenty-some-odd years, Volodine, along with counterparts Lutz Bassmann, Elli Kronauer and Manuela Draeger, has written some 40 books (mostly novels, but also some young adult novels, and poetry, such as Bassmann’s Prison Haikus, which will make more sense in a second), many of which inhabit one shared universe. Of sorts.
I can’t claim to know nearly as much about Volodine’s wildly imaginative—and revolutionary—project as J.T. Mahany (author of this review of Bassman’s Les aigles puent and this one of We Monk & Soldiers, and is the translator of Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons: Lesson Eleven), but basically, in Volodine’s collective world, shit has gone wrong, or is just about to go horribly wrong. Humanity is on the decline, the spiders are taking over the interior, and capitalism—that dirty bitch—is still unstoppable and fucking is all up.
And all the post-exoticist writers are in jail. Dying.
What is post-exoticism exactly? Well, you can read our forthcoming book (of which I’ll post a sample in just a minute), but in short, it’s a literary movement that employs certain techniques to evade censorship, convey secret messages and ideas of thought, and change the world. In other words, it’s dangerous shit. Hence, the jailing.
To tie together a few of these threads: Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons: Lesson Eleven is written by Volodine about Bassmann’s last days in prison. It explains a lot of the tenets and techniques of the post-exoticist movement (so far as they can be explained . . . for example, Lesson Five, “Let’s Talk about Something Else,” is a list of things the post-exoticists have and haven’t done. They make these long lists to deter the enemy . . .) and is a great starting point—or continuing one—for anyone entering Volodine’s world.
One interesting post-exoticist story: On the jacket copy of Minor Angels, it references the fact that Volodine doesn’t believe the meaning of the book can be found in the text itself, but rather in the dreams that the reader has while reading it. I’m prone to really strange shit entering my dreamstate, so this book was like LSD for my unconscious. But better yet: While J.T. was reading this book he woke up one winter night outside in his pyjamas having sleepwalked himself right out of his apartment. Unfortunate for him, this was a bittercold night and he had locked himself out. See! Dangerous shit.
Anyway, the main point of this post—aside from delaying the bookkeeping and database work that I should be doing right now, and giving me a chance to wax enthusiastic about one of my favorite forthcoming books—is that J.T. found the interview below with the three main Volodine heteronyms and I really wanted to share it.
Also worth noting: We’re planning on following up our Volodine book with a Bassmann one and Draeger one. Bassmann’s been published by the University of Nebraska, but Draeger has yet to be published by a nationally distributed press. Hopefully we’ll be able to do all three books within a 12-14 month window so that there’s not too much of a delay—once you get sucked into Volodine’s world, you’re going to want more . . .
Here’s the “interview,” which, to be honest, will make more sense if you’ve read Minor Angels, We Monks & Soldiers, and Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons: Lesson Eleven:
Your main character trait
Antoine Volodine: Stubbornness.
Lutz Bassmann: Rigidity.
Manuela Draeger: Passion. More exactly, the lucidity at the heart of passion.
Your favorite animal
Antoine Volodine: Tigers. But not paper ones. And also Iponiama Oshawnee, who lives at 17 rue des Soeurs-Tchouvanes, in Valkoumeï.
Lutz Bassmann: Robins. And also cats when they’re not eating robins.
Manuela Draeger: Elephants. No, actually, wooly crabs, trying to float as high as the moon. Or no, rather, eggs. Eggs in general. They’re the promise of an animal. Last but not least, Lili Niagara, the batte, with whom I used to be madly in love.
The defeat, historical or otherwise, you consider the worst
Antoine Volodine: The collapse of the Soviet Union.
Lutz Bassmann: The New Economic Policy instantiated by Lenin in 1921.
Manuela Draeger: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Your favorite slogan
Antoine Volodine: Two or three: DON’T DREAM UNSTRAGE DREAMS! IF MISFORTUNE ARISES, YOU MUST DIE APPROPRIATELY! YOU ARE A WINDOW PANE, NO FLY CAN IMAGINE YOU!
Lutz Bassmann: I will give several: GOLDEN DRUMS, THEN SILENCE! IF YOUR FACE IS CLEAR, CUT OFF YOUR MASK! IF THERE ARE STILL RUINS, DEMOLISH THEM! IF THERE ARE STILL CRUMBS, BURN THEM!
Manuela Draeger: I think I might give a few: BLACK WAVES, SCREAM, BREAK! CHANANES’S DAUGHTERS, SING, REGROUP, ATTACK! A THOUSAND SECRET MASTIFFS IN EACH ONE OF US!
Your most oft-recurring dream
Antoine Volodine: Flying while sitting like a fakir, but without a flying carpet, about fifty centimeters off the ground, at a hopelessly slow speed.
Lutz Bassmann: I am walking around a house on a deserted coast. It’s raining, I’m taking shelter under a giant umbrella. I make a complete turn around the house. I am silently exorcising it. From time to time, people that I know try to leave, through the windows, through the doors, but they collapse before they can get outside. I know the house is going to burn. No words are spoken. Everyone is terrorized, and I continue tracing circles as I walk in the damp grass.
Manuela Draeger: I am speaking with other prisoners, with dead friends. We are on the shore of a lake at daybreak. The vegetation is luxurious. The landscape is extremely beautiful. Instead of contemplating in silence, we talk. From time to time, one of us leaves our group and approaches some wavelets. She stays unmoving, petrified, then she returns and reintroduces herself into the conversation. We talk feverishly about a clinic where you can get memory transplats. The deabte is on the sorrow provoking the transplants. I don’t know why, we know we should stop and admire the water, the light, the trees, but we keep reluctantly chatting on subjects that don’t interest us.
Your favorite landscape
Antoine Volodine: The Hoggar Tassili.
Lutz Bassmann: An urban scene. For example Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong.
Manuela Draeger: The ice field when bears walk across it.
The ritual you would like to perform
Antoine Volodine: Knocking three times before opening the shutters.
Lutz Bassmann: The last cigarette.
Manuela Draeger: Does Bolcho Pride from Eleven Dreams of Soot count as a ritual? If so, I’d like to participate in it.
The quality you appreciate most in a combattant
Antoine Volodine: In a female soldier: her coming back alive. In a male soldier: his knowing to run when all is lost.
Lutz Bassmann: Silence after the battle.
Manuela Draeger: Knowing how to walk with eyes closed until the end. Knowing how to die, knowing how not to die. Knowing how to walk with eyes open until the end.
Your favorite hero or heroine in the real, historical, or fantastical world
Antoine Volodine: The stalker in Stalker.
Lutz Bassmann: Chow Yun Fat in The Killer.
Manuela Draeger: Louise in Thelma and Louise.
What you hate the most
Antoine Volodine: Hypocritical reformism, friendly nationalism, warrior nationalism, a speaker’s bad faith, bony fish, the Russian mafia, spiders.
Lutz Bassmann: The self-satisfaction of social democrats, capitalism in all its forms, the obscene insolence of traitors. Swallowing oysters. Hearing the prison guards’ antisemitic jokes.
Manuela Draeger: Barbarism. The imbecility of barbarians, their humanistic and democratic proclamations. And also dishes with chicken gizzards. And in literature when I’m thought of as a clone of Antoine Volodine.
The fault you indulge in the most
Antoine Volodine: Sympathy for sympathizers of the ninth stinking category (intellectuals).
Lutz Bassmann: Excessive severity towards enemies of the people.
Manuela Draeger: Assassinating assassins.
What keeps you from going mad
Antoine Volodine: Having seen madness up close. The pills they give me. I don’t know what they’re called.
Lutz Bassmann: [no response]
Manuela Draeger: The fear of going mad.
The music you would like to hear when you slide into the Bardo
Antoine Volodine: Naïsso Baldakchan’s Third Golden Song.
Lutz Bassmann: If there are musicians, I would like them to try to play a quartet by Brahms or Kaanto Djylas. If there is no one, I would like to hear Grodzo tapping on the pipes and grills.
Manuela Draeger: Like in Eleven Dreams of Soot, I would like to hear at the last minute the voice of the Soviet songstress Liudmilla Zykina. The song doesn’t matter, but one like the girls were listening to in the fire: a very melancholic, very simple song, of unspeakable beauty. The first two words in Russian are “Sronila kolietchko.”
The present state of your mind
Antoine Volodine: After having the idea to listen one last time to Naïsso Baldakchan’s Third Golden Song, I’m a little worried.
Lutz Bassmann: I’m waiting.
Manuela Draeger: I’m looking at the barred window, the sky darkened by twilight, and I’m thinking that I will never see the Aurora Borealis again. - Chad W. Pos

 “Use of a pseudonym unites a taste for masks and mirrors, for indirect exhibitionism, and for controlled histrionics with delight in invention, in borrowing, in verbal transformation, in onomastic fetishism. . . .
“The pseudonym habit is very much like the drug habit, quickly leading to increased use, abuse, even overdose.”— Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation[1]

However much the Formalists and New Critics insisted on maintaining an analytic gap between the work of literary interpretation and the life circumstances of authors, readers and reviewers generally expect a modicum of information about the author to come along with a book. Where such information is counterfactual, as in the case of pseudonymity or heteronymity, the situation is a little different, but fundamentally the same. The impulse toward biographical candor is not wholly dodged, as one might first think, but rather reinforced through a teasing gesture that only appears to oppose it. Pseudonymity calls attention to authorship and identity in ways that more conventional forms of attribution do not, and it generally has the effect of intensifying the curiosity and mystique which sometimes surrounds literary authorship.
In other words, textual signification is never only intrinsic to the text, but on the contrary always also framed by what information is known about its composition and provenance. A famous Borges story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” pivots on this interplay between authorship/attribution and signification. The central character, a writer called Pierre Menard, develops an ambition to “produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” When the narrator of the story compares Menard’s fragments with the corresponding passages from Cervantes, he is awestruck by the differences of style that arise from attributing the text to either Cervantes or Menard. Where Cervantes’ style radiates “naturalness,” Menard’s style is “archaic,” “affected,” and the narrator ultimately deems Menard’s fragments “infinitely richer” than those of Cervantes on the basis of their radical anachronism. The point, for my purpose at least, is that a text’s attribution encodes its meaning. Attribution matters in a big way.
This is a revelation so commonsensical, so mundane that it rarely merits discussion. But an author who signs his texts exclusively with pseudonyms (four, to be precise, although even that is a little unsure) and who withholds his real name creates a situation that needs an introduction. As contemporary literature’s premier pseudonymist, Antoine Volodine creates a conundrum whereby no one can refer to him independently of his inventions. (This situation is perhaps the polar opposite of the autobiographical memoir genre, where there is an illusion of seamlessness between author, character, and narrator.) Whereas readers can choose to speak of either Isidore Ducasse or of the Comte de Lautréamont, or to speak of Samuel Clemens or Mark Twain, for now readers can make no such distinction with regards to Volodine. (That is, unless they wish to parse the technical difference between “Volodine” and “the writer known pseudonymously as Volodine, Draeger, Kronauer, Bassmann.”)
With the pseudonym, we are already well into the domain of the paratext—that dimension of the book that precedes, qualifies, and otherwise mediates our reading and interpretation of the text at hand. It would not be entirely wrong to say that the defining feature of Volodine’s work is the systematic disturbance of paratextual conventions, those “fringe[s] of the printed text which in reality [control] one’s whole reading of the text.”[2] Titles, authorial attribution, footnotes, epigraphs, prefaces, afterwords, and the like—all are variously deployed in Volodine’s work in deceptive, provocative, paradoxical, and interesting ways. His latest book to be published in English translation, Writers (trans. Katina Rogers, Dalkey Archive; original publication: Écrivains, Éditions du Seuil, 2010) is no exception. But as this book reflects the idiosyncrasies of its prolific author, before reviewing it I would like to draw on my knowledge of Volodine to provide something of an overview of the particular tendencies, problems, and oddities that are specifically characteristic of his work.
Let’s start again by talking about paratexts. An excellent illustration of this mania, and probably one of Volodine’s better books, is Le Post-Exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze (Gallimard, 1998). The title signals a ruse, a false affiliation with a genre to which the book doesn’t actually belong, the pedagogic manual. The book is nevertheless divided up into numbered chapters called “lessons,” through which its characters, who are political prisoners incarcerated in a penitentiary, speak and offer pedantic descriptions of the sui generis literary forms (shaggås, romånces, entrevoûtes, etc.) which they compose and secretly circulate among themselves samizdat-style. The book’s inside title page lists eight different persons as authors, and the book is only brought to its conclusion by a fifteen-page bibliography (“lesson ten”) consisting of a bibliography of 343 works “by the same author in the same collection.” Most titles are imaginary and unpublished (like Ranting at Arthropods (Harangue devant les arthropodes)), but interspersed in chronological order throughout are Volodine’s own published works up to the year of publication—Fabulous Hells (Des Enfers fabuleux, 1988), for instance. Titles of stories that Volodine would not publish until a dozen years later, such as “Tomorrow Will Have Been a Beautiful Sunday”—the final story in Writers—also appear here. The universe of Volodine’s books is thus strongly oriented around paratextual conventions, and is highly reflexive, creating links between narrators, literary works (sometimes published, sometimes imagined), and heteronyms. All these qualities indicate the metafictional character of Volodine’s work.
The sum totality of Volodine’s fictions fall into a category given the name of “post-exoticism.” The term was first introduced in relation to Volodine’s fifth book, Lisbonne, dernière marge (1990) somewhat extemporaneously. By Volodine’s own account, it was intended to be “provocative, to affirm a difference of a kind, a voluntary distinction, a refusal to be confused with seasonal literary production. It was unclear and acquired value only gradually over time, as the books illustrated it, fleshed out its principles and allowed its nuances to take shape.”[3] In this candid remark—“to affirm a difference of a kind, a voluntary distinction, a refusal to be confused with seasonal literary production”—we can perceive the logic of marketing, and see to what extent “post-exoticism” constitutes, at its origin, what marketers call a “brand”—an easy-to-recognize emblem, a stamp of singular identity. The tenets of post-exoticism[4] may state the core concerns of Volodine’s fiction, but it’s useful to remember also how fundamentally the significance of post-exoticism resides in the usefulness of having a particular -ism associated with one’s work. The significance of post-exoticism remains, first and foremost, to distinguish it from the morass of contemporary literary production.
* * * * At just over a hundred pages, Writers (2010) is a thin volume comprising seven stories that are essentially vignettes, brief literary/biographical sketches designating seven writerly personae. The use of “biography” as a literary pretext can be traced back to Volodine’s debut novel, Biographie comparée de Jorian Murgrave (Denoël, 1985). As is typical of the post-exotic writers, the characters in Writers are political dissidents suffering in extremis, often on the verge of death.
The first story in the collection, “Mathias Olbane,” establishes this grim scenario with little complication or embellishment. A writer suffering from an obscure disease that lends him a gruesome appearance, who has passed half his life in penitentiary for the crime of “assassinat[ing] assassins”—a writer with two published but entirely commercially unsuccessful books to his name—takes up his pistol nightly and presses it to his head as he counts toward a number signifying “the date of his paternal grandfather’s death at Buchenwald.” His most remarkable work as an author was conceived of during his years in captivity, and it remains unpublished. It’s a colossal list of approximately one hundred thousand imaginary terms designating plants, places, exterminated persons, mushrooms, and rivers. The story concludes with Olbane’s decision to defer suicide for yet one more night. That’s pretty much the whole story: a dark, brooding mood piece that recalls the tales of Borges with its biographical orientation and a synopsis of a vast conceptual literary undertaking. It lacks, however, the precise qualities for which Borges’s work is so meaningful and so universally admired. There is no branching complexity here, none of the compounding metaphysical ramifications for which we read (and re-read) Borges’s stories.
The strongest story in the collection is without a doubt “The Strategy of Silence in the Works of Bogdan Tarassiev.” It takes the form of a short capsule biography of Tarassiev, who toils away in illness and obscurity for much of his lifetime, only to attain posthumous infamy. Late in his career, thanks to a successful television appearance, he’s “discovered” by the public and invited to a gala for a “quasi-governmental” humanitarian organization:
Tarassiev’s universe, whether in his fiction or in his real life, has never intersected with the sphere of luxury, has never approached the social strata that swarm with the smiling faces of the happy people of the world, those who govern the planet and who, supposedly in passing, imagine that their governance is good and generous. . . . His heroes are often killers, men and women who preach pitiless elimination of “those responsible for misfortune,” but, aside from a few murder scenes that are more fantasy than realism, the narratives don’t explore the concrete spaces where the powerful prevail.
At the gala this changes once and for all, as he assassinates three state officials with a revolver, then shoots himself. A brief note in his jacket imploring others to do “like he has done” is widely reported in the media, and considered his final work, “Opus 25.”
If this story succeeds, as I believe it does, it’s because it reads convincingly as an article written in the style of a literary/biographical encyclopedia, with a suitable tone and structure. Despite this formal conceit, it achieves a high level of narrative drama through Tarrasiev’s acute class consciousness, which provides the motive for the violent climax. It’s this unexpected eruption that makes the story aesthetically satisfying, more so than the rest of the stories in Writers, where the stakes are lower, the outcomes more predictable.
In general, Volodine’s special talents seem less suited to traditional story development or drama, and more suited to conjuring sinister atmospheres of otherworldly stasis. (Sometimes these are “post-apocalyptic,” other times they involve psychic migration through an afterlife state.) “Speech to the Nomads and the Dead” and “The Theory of the Image According to Maria Three-Thirteen” are prime examples of this aspect of Volodine’s work, as they involve writers—one in prison, the other in metaphysical limbo—who recite post-exotic principles in bizarre locales. In both stories there’s an element of mysticism or trance-state, which provides a touch of interest, but the stories ultimately go nowhere. The final story, “Tomorrow Will Have Been a Lovely Sunday,” suffers for similar reasons. In it, a Moscow writer discovers that the moment of his birth coincided with a nearby massacre in an adjacent forest, a discovery which permits him to become a conduit for the names and stories of the victims, which he recites to an audience of figurines he assembles from “rags” and “bits of iron or bits of wood.” The extreme pathos of genocide is presumably the raison-d’être of this story, but due to a lack of narrative development and/or conflict it fails to be compelling. The slight appeal to these weaker stories is their element of novelty (post-exoticism, and bizarreness), and their short length, which makes them rapidly consumable.
The major disappointment of Writers is thus that its tales pale so dourly in comparison to the elaborate metafictional gimmicks and paratextual pyrotechnics that prop up Volodine’s books. In numerous passages, Writers uses metafictional, reflexive commentary in ways that suggest paradox and that are slightly amusing, but which fall short of true philosophical or metaphysical depth.
I think that what we have here . . . is a literary procedure intended to problematize the limits of creativity in fictional works, but which also indicates an active disdain for writing itself, a sort of self-mutilation intended to ridicule and degrade the notion of the book, the notion of the author, and the false values that are associated with them; we must take it as a demonstration of hostility in which are mixed equal parts disgust with writing and hatred of the official publishing world.
This is Tarassiev commenting on one of his books, but we might also read it as Volodine commenting on (and perhaps against) his own literary production. Despite the palpable irony, this auto-commentary risks devaluing the reader’s assumption of the writer’s good, because it insinuates that the book we are reading is degraded, and even characterizes the writer’s relation to his material as tainted by an attitude of “disgust,” “hatred.” Beckett has visited this territory, but much more successfully than in above citation. Whether we keep in mind the separateness of author and character (Volodine / Tarassiev); or whether we read this passage naïvely, as though it simply meant what it implies about Volodine’s project: either way, this auto-commentary reflects poorly on the seriousness with which Volodine’s books are crafted.
* * * * To Volodine’s credit, it should be noted that the present translation, by Katina Rogers, fails to capture the distinctive flair with which his sentences and paragraphs unravel.
One signature mark of Volodine’s prose is its penchant for the occasional odd word that lies beyond the reader’s immediate recognition. This is an important part of of Volodine’s program, given by him as a tenet of post-exoticism: “to write foreign literature in French.”[5] Sometimes the unusual words are archaic or simply obscure, and other times they play on certain aural and/or etymological associations. The occasional use of difficult or abstruse diction produces an effect not unlike the strangeness of coming into contact with loan words from another language, a quality that might well be seen as stemming from Volodine’s work with Russian-language texts.[6] The first sentence of Écrivains, might serve as a perfect example:
Toutes les nuits, à l’heure la plus pénible, l’écrivain Mathias Olbane quittait le lit où il avait saumâtrement somnolé depuis le soir, assaili de rêves et de désespoir, et, sans allumer, il allait s’asseoir devant le miroir de la chambre.
There’s an odd word here that very few French readers will be able to read without some difficulty: saumâtrement. The word is rarely used in French, and nor is the adjectival form (saumâtre), which serves as the basis for the neologism. It means something to the effect of either brackish or briny (as the etymological link to seawater attests), or bitter, disagreeable, nasty. No one but Volodine would coin an adverb from this adjective, and, in an otherwise nondescript sentence, it serves as his calling card. In Katina Rogers’s translation, the crystalline singularity of that sentence, which hung on that one weird word, is lost, when it becomes just fitfully.
Every night at the bitterest hour, writer Mathias Olbane would get out of bed, where he had dozed fitfully since nightfall, assaulted by dreams and by hopelessness; without turning on the lights, he would go and sit in front of the bedroom mirror.
To state a generality, then, a challenge faced by Volodine’s translators is matching his unusual and difficult diction with adequate substitutes in the language of translation. As literal translations, brackishly or brinishly might work here, or they might not; but fitfully does not. For the feel and sound of Volodine’s prose to come through in translation, there would have to be some corresponding lexical strangeness—not necessarily in the same places, but present in roughly the same proportions. The present translation by Katina Rogers plays it safe, rendering Writers intelligible, but taking few liberties to match the unstable and unusual word choices that make up part of Volodine’s practice.
Numerous other instances illustrate how the flamboyance or directness of Volodine’s diction gets watered down in English. Where Volodine writes that:
Par expérience, je peux dire que cette interrogation suscite une montée du taux d’adrénaline dans le sang, quand on a encore du sang . . .
The translation by Rogers reads:
I can say from experience that this interrogation elicits an increase in the amount of adrenaline in the blood, when one still has blood . . .
The active verb, suscite, becomes elicits. This is a particularly weak choice, given that it most often connotes civilized discourse and interaction. Consequently, the body’s autonomous adrenaline response is rendered a little less fierce, less immediate and visceral. (Causes, incites, or provokes would be far more suitable for the terrifying experience of a formal interrogation.) These examples, in my opinion, attest to some of the particular and general problems of translation, and show how fraught the choice of a single word can be.
* * * *Which is not to say that I think a better translation could have made Writers worthwhile. Of the several books by Volodine that I have read, Writers is by a wide margin the least captivating and the most insubstantial. It seems to serve primarily as another occasion to pontificate on the post-exotic principles set out long ago. In this respect, I believe it occupies a similar position relative to its author’s career as Burroughs’s The Red Night Trilogy. These late-term works reflect deeply conceptual and even programmatic concerns developed decades earlier, but the story, plot, and language come across as rehashings of the works that made their names recognizable.
What’s most irksome, though, is the way that the ideological content of post-exoticism—in particular its political aspects, such as the recurrent scenario of interrogation, imprisonment, and persecution—are so well suited to the current historical moment, but remain underdeveloped and sequestered from the wide world. Despite the overwhelmingly intertextual quality of Volodine’s fictive universe, the intertexts and geographies refuse affiliation with both the unacknowledged precursor texts of post-exoticism (think, for instance, of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), Danilo Kiš’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976), or Jean Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits (1966)) and with the culture of interrogation and torture in place at Guantanomo Bay and at the numerous extraterritorial “black sites” situated around the globe. Volodine’s Writers depicts the future (often a distant one) or the past, suggesting “the long catalogue of the murdered and missing which makes up the record of twentieth-century Russian literary achievement,”[7] but, through its metafictional cues, suggests sequestration from, rather than affiliation with the present.
Writers is a book therefore for the completists. While it affords the semblance of engaging with very weighty, existential subjects—the struggle of the individual against a totalitarian regime, in particular—it shies away from plumbing their depths, employing them less for drama than for setting and allure. Readers enticed by Writers would be well advised to search out Volodine’s previous books in English translation, such as Minor Angels (trans. Jordan Stump, University of Nebraska, 2004) or Naming the Jungle (trans. Linda Coverdale, New Press, 1995), if they wish to have a better idea of Volodine’s powers. Or, better yet, wait for the forthcoming publication of Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, coming from Open Letter next year.  - Jacob Siefring


Antoine Volodine, Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, Trans. by J. T. Mahany, Open Letter, 2015.

excerpt in The White Review
Post-Exotic Novels, Nȯvelles, and Novelists: Part Two
Post-Exotic Novels, Nȯvelles, and Novelists: Part One

"The interconnected works of Volodine—think Faulkner, but after an apocalypse—constitute the most exciting project in contemporary French literature."—Maria Clementi
That is what we had called post-exoticism. It was a construction connected to revolutionary shamanism and literature. . . . It was an interior construction, a withdrawal, a secret welcoming land, but also something offensive that participated in the plot of certain unarmed individuals against the capitalist world and its countless ignominies. This fight was now confined solely to Bassmann's lips.

Like with Antoine Volodine's other works (Minor Angels, We Monks & Soldiers), Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven takes place in a corrupted future where a small group of radical writers—those who practice "post-exoticism"—have been jailed by those in power and are slowly dying off. But before Lutz Bassmann, the last post-exoticist writer, passes away, a couple journalists will try and pry out all the secrets of this powerful literary movement.
With its explanations of several key "post-exoticist" terms that appear in Volodine's other books, Lesson Eleven provides a crucial entryway into one of the most ambitious literary projects of recent times: a project exploring the revolutionary power of literature.

Volodine's books (Minor Angels, Naming the Jungle) aren't so much novels as bizarre games of alternate reality, chronicling the lives and works of the fictitious "Post-Exotic" writers, whose complex and challenging novels and poems have led to their being imprisoned, persecuted, or assassinated outright. This book begins with an account of the death of Lutz Bassmann, last of the Post-Exotics, then explores the origins of the movement in "revolutionary shamanism" and lays out a wonderfully baffling catalog of sub-genres that only vaguely resemble any real existing literature. Volodine introduces stalwart underground "mercenaries of speech" like the mad poet Ellen Dawkes, and provides excerpts from Post-Exotic romances, novellas, and critiques of titles like Mirrors of the Cadaver; there is also a list of invented techniques such as "narrative scansion" and the "under narrator," as well as an appendix listing all 343 known Post-Exotic works—several of which "Volodine" has actually published under a variety of pseudonyms. Taken as the sum of its parts, this book isn't much more than a curiosity, but as a primer for Volodine's fascinating career project, it's required reading. By redefining the role of writers in society and building a fantasy universe where they are both revered mystics and enemies of the state, Volodine carries literature into a realm that only the likes of Borges and Calvino could have anticipated. - Publisher Weekly

In novels, television shows and films, the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic genres have become commonplace if not cliché. It is astonishing, then, to discover post-exoticism, an imaginative and refreshing project that provocatively claims “the concentration camp system where we were locked up was egalitarian utopia’s ultimate impregnable fear, the only terrestrial space whose inhabitants were still fighting for a variant of paradise.” In Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, we read about the last days of Lutz Bassmann, one of the inhabitants incarcerated in this system. As the last spokesperson of the revolutionary literary movement post-exoticism, he is visited by Blotno and Niouki, two journalists from the outside seeking to document and report on the movement. They soon come to realize however that post-exoticism resists: Bassmann channels the voices of other post-exotic writers, life and death seem to become constructs of the world outside post-exoticism, prison cells add their own voice to the story, and what little information the journalists are able to retrieve is contaminated by a ciphered language of misinformation. All of this seems unreal and hyperreal. But this is a book signed by Antoine Volodine—and this is what we have come to expect of anything bearing his name.

Irreducible to any single literary genre, the Volodinian cosmos is skillfully crafted, fusing elements of science fiction with magical realism and political commentary. It is an unnavigable matrix whose inhuman face is pockmarked by linguistic and narrative black holes, which force the reader to critically rethink the boundaries of literature and language itself. There is an ominous lack of tangible reference to our world, the world outside this cosmos, and in refusing to directly reference our so-called reality, including “our” literary traditions, Antoine Volodine consciously accentuates the radical strangeness of his fictional world, highlighting its independence and its incommensurability with traditions, literary or otherwise. In this hyperfictionalized universe, “the true reader . . . is one of the characters of post-exoticism”; they are ferried elsewhere, towards the boundaries of writing where communication breaks down and language becomes radically other. According to Volodine, the contemporary world is absolutely unstable and dominated by the absence of all hope; this is the source of the radical otherness saturating his work, an absence-as-source, like a negative without referent. We live in this permanent rift, something, he says, that haunts him and drives him to write, to scream, to create something outside and beyond all this.

To write, to scream, to create something “outside and beyond all this” is the post-exotic project where narrator and reader, author and text, real and fictional, and even life and death become amorphous concepts at best, where “there is not the thickness of a piece of cigarette paper between the first-person and others, and hardly any difference between life and death.” If post-exoticism as a project refuses identification with literary tradition, language and communication also consciously refuse to participate in any standard practice that would normally enable and maintain their function. Language does not evaporate into a noncommunicative silence, but rather becomes overloaded with “a process of the literary lie [. . . which] plays with a truth hidden upstream of the text.” Volodine’s language is elaborate, a tactic that camouflages post-exoticism’s message or communication in language itself, so that it cannot be appropriated and to ensure that the message is only received by those sympathetic to the project. Against the hopelessness of this world, post-exoticism’s language revives the silenced voices of the past: the murdered, the imprisoned, those who have lost their voice in the fight. In doing so, it dialogically places hope “upstream” and sends an encoded message in anticipation of it falling on willing and empathic ears.

At stake in Volodine’s work are the expression of resistance—not to something, but in its bare form—and the very possibility of a revolutionary language/literature. Post-exotic narrators must use a completely other “voice”—if this term is still appropriate for describing post-exotic narration—since the speaking I is dissolved into a nebulous networked we composed of spokespeople that have never agreed “to write, to yell, or to say what was expected of us, preferring to invent.” “We,” proclaims one of the said spokespeople, “made our narration walk on transversal roads, we modified the inhuman shrieking in our throats and we turned it into a variation the enemy refused to read and did not even have the desire to decode . . . We have always talked about something else, always.” The use of the pronoun “we” here (and elsewhere in the text) is a subtle invitation to post-exotic ways of thinking and being, to let its cosmos enter our own as radical critique. This “something else” constitutes the delicate fibers zigzagging through the post-exotic cosmos, just keeping it together, while the enemy’s ubiquity poses a constant threat. Who or what is the “enemy”? Readers immersed in post-exoticism feel as though they can offer an answer, but they ultimately cannot because our language, this language, is not the language of post-exoticism; one is tempted to accuse the question itself of being the enemy, the question that, by using language the way it does, imposes a certain discourse of power. Talking about something else then becomes a tactic of misinformation, a disavowal to communicate with and within the official worlds that we expect to find in literature.

Creating a fictional cosmos and empowering it with its own name corresponds to the intent to misinform the enemy and the refusal to accept its world: post-exoticism sounds like a legitimate literary genre hatched by an overzealous scholar all-too-eager to baptize Volodine’s work in the murky waters of academia. We should not take the term post-exoticism, however, as seriously as our straw-man scholar does, or maybe we should take it seriously in a different way, since it is a neologism that really isn’t one: a hybrid mockery that frustrates and evades the very process of labeling and classification. Volodine has repeatedly said that he came up with the term post-exoticism because it sounds really good, it sounds scientific, official. He is able to gather the work under an autogenerative label that has the advantage of being empty and therefore being filled by the texts that will give it meaning. It is a kind of preemptive gesture that saves his oeuvre from the critics while at the same time downplaying his role as Author (he prefers the term “spokesperson”).

But what exactly is post-exoticism, and for whom is Volodine the spokesperson? Dominique Viart has suggested that by combining the prefix “post” and the radical “exoticism,” Volodine operates at the junction of time and space, and thus offers a new map of historical representation, perhaps even a new way of thinking about history and representation. But the very premise of post-exoticism is that it refuses any external categorization, it defines itself from within as an experiment rather than a genre, a project built on the aborted hopes of failed revolution; it is born out of a refusal. Who then are the voices it claims to speak for? If there is an answer to this question, it may be hidden in Volodine’s claim that he practices literature like a martial art, writing foreign literature in French. A literature foreign to its own idiom requires language to counteract itself, or at least lie to itself, and that is what we witness in post-exoticism. Volodine considers his own project as a calculated execution, at once militant but not overtly aggressive, a radical and auto-sacrificial rethinking of the possibility of language’s communication. Post-exotic fiction as such becomes the true spokesperson, speaking to and for the writers of the resistance in a muted code of defiance and survival.

The cast of the post-exotic cosmos includes, among others, writers, visionary shamans, semi-mortal humans, mutants, animals—who are all able to interact with the so-called “human” world—and perhaps most interestingly, the murmuring voices of those who have lost an unnamed revolutionary war, confined to high-security cells in a post-apocalyptic world. These prisoners are the writers in the post-exotic canon, deemed by the enemy as marginal figures or mentally ill. Three (four if we count Volodine himself) post-exotic writers stand out among the rest: Elli Kronauer, Manuela Draeger, and Lutz Bassmann. All three are recurring characters in Volodine’s early work. In 1999 however, the children’s book publisher L’École des loisirs published the first of five books written by Elli Kronauer; in 2002, again at L’École des loisirs, Manuela Draeger’s first book was published—as of this month, there are now a total of thirteen—and finally, in 2008, Lutz Bassmann published his first novel, followed by three more. Not counting a possibly invented translation of Maria Soudayeva’s Slogans, there are now a total of forty-two post-exotic novels published between these four spokespeople.

By publishing under the names of people in the post-exotic cosmos, Volodine reminds us of Pessoa’s multiverse of heteronyms, which the Portuguese writer used throughout his life. Like Pessoa, Volodine prefers the term heteronym to pseudonym since the former underscores the independence of the figure: Lutz Bassmann is a post-exotic spokesperson in his own right, and not a literary trope or mask behind which lurks a conniving Volodine. The post-exotic cosmos truly is radically estranged from our own world, a universe that questions the very idea of voice, of living or real, and the idea of literary agency. When we take into account the fact that “Antoine Volodine” is also a heteronym, identity and identification, the substrata of literature (at least in the Western tradition), are reduced to an empty silence: post-exoticism’s response to culture that has become its own enemy.

How then does one begin to write or think about post-exoticism? Maybe a good place to start would be Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven. Published in French by Volodine in 1998 and now available to an English audience thanks to J. T. Mahany’s translation, the book, as the title suggests, “explains” post-exoticism. However, those seeking a step-by-step guide to understanding this fictional cosmos will be distracted by the pedagogical promise of the title, which remains unfulfilled. There are, of course, statements throughout the text offering cryptic definitions of what post-exoticism is: “a literature coming from elsewhere and going elsewhere, an alien literature”; it maintains bonds “with magic and theories of magical, shamanic voyage,” and uses notions “such as cyclical fate, non-death death and non-life life, transmigration, and reincarnation”; and has “invented concepts of mute voice, under-narrator, fictive speech, counter-voice, dead voice, sub-realism, polychrony, narrative apnea, etc.,” to name a few. But all of these definitions are enveloped in what Volodine calls post-exoticism’s “limpid hermeticism” formed by a muted collective solitude whose “voice sang in a style totally devoid of incoherence or dependence.” These clues loosely defining post-exoticism become more and more frequent as the text progresses, until, in the last paragraph of Lesson Eleven (the text itself), just before Lesson Ten we read that “post-exoticism ended there.”

The curious structure of the text complements both the hermetic quality of the lessons and the interrupted or suspended nature of post-exotic discourse. Ten lessons are distributed throughout the narrative of Lesson Eleven, punctuating an oral history of post-exoticism with lists, examples of sub-genres, and anecdotes of some of the movement’s events. Lessons One, Seven, and Ten for example offer lists of “Fragmentary Inventory of Deceased Dissidents,” “Specific Terms” (a lesson signed Lutz Bassmann), and no less than 343* entries under “By the Same Author, in the Same Collection.” Lessons Three, Four, and Six offer explanations of three post-exotic subgenres: the Shaggå (signed by Ingrid Vogel), the Romånce (signed by Iakoub Khadjbakiro), and Novelles or Interjoists (signed by Erdogan Mayayo). These three lessons offer more detailed explanations of post-exotic texts: the Shaggå “seems to address a reader who is in close ideological and cultural connivance with the author [. . . but] the text delivers no significant message. The only thing communicated is the form of the message it could have taken if it had been transmitted and encrypted”; the literary domain of Novelles or Interjoists “opens onto the infinite: it becomes a travel destination, a haven for the narrator, a land of exile, tranquil exile, for the reader, out of the enemy’s reach, forever out the enemy’s reach.” All post-exotic texts have in common “a record of difference with the outside,” a will “to accentuate the gap with the real world,” yet like all borders and identities in the post-exotic cosmos, the defining boundaries of these genres are vague and easily traversed.

As such, we read in Lesson Four that the Romånce “rests entirely on a conception of opposites where opposites merge [. . . and] the logic of non-opposition of opposites has always marked post-exotic thought.” Lesson Four is the most detailed of the ten lessons. It outlines seven qualities particular to the Romånce genre: Unity of Blood, Non-Repentance of the Narrator, Death of the Narrator, Non-Opposition of Opposites, Formalism, Orality, and finally Presence of the Reader. We learn that while it is similar to the novel, the abovementioned traits distinguish the Romånce from novelistic texts. In addition to the admittedly pedagogical mood of Lesson Four, Lesson Two (“Maria Clementi’s ‘Minor Angels,’ romånce, 1977”) summarizes an important post-exotic romånce. Unlike Lesson Four, however—which is the most lesson-like of the ten and as such can be read and understood more directly that the others—Lesson Two hurls the reader into the delightfully disorienting reality of post-exoticism. Readers familiar with his oeuvre will recall that Des anges mineurs was published by Volodine in 1999 (and published in English as Minor Angels in 2004), one year after the initial French publication of Post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze. The lesson becomes a paradigm, and the fallout of post-exotic spokesperson-ship begins to radiate on the entire project: the published works, the unpublished ones, and the ones that are too far removed from our reality to be published but exist nonetheless, thoroughly immersed in their own world. During this lesson we sense (or at least begin to dream) what is at stake in post-exoticism and by extension in the possibility of literature:

a vocal distortion and the confusion in the actual name of the givers and takers of speech. Behind the book’s author, spokesperson, and signatory, and behind the voice of the narrator or narrators staged in the book, one must replace an overnarrator who voluntarily erases himself and who, in a process of intimate camaraderie, forces his voice and thought to reproduce the melodic contour of a disappeared voice and thought. Thus comes this insistence of the narrator to pretend he is already dead: perhaps this is the sole literary lie onto which he can hold without unease.

This is one of the reasons why, as previously mentioned, post-exoticism “ended there” (near the end of “body” of the text—Lesson Eleven—before the “catalog” of Lesson Ten); “there” is where Lutz Bassmann dies. In fact the space of Lesson Eleven is circumscribed by this event, since the book opens by discussing Bassmann’s death, which blends into the shadowy (im)mortal inhuman cosmos of post-exoticism where is it “difficult to establish a border between the sounds of water made by the deluge, Bassmann’s death rattles made by Bassmann, and the simulacrums of memory made by the photographs of those who had been our overnarrators.” Lesson Eleven, and with it post-exoticism, “ends” because Bassmann was the last spokesperson, as we learn early on in the book. However the text itself ends with the following: “There was no longer a single spokesperson to come after. So I am the one who  ”. Ending the text with a narrative “I” affirming its singular being seems to side with and ratify post-exoticism’s enemy; the following emptiness, however, (no period nor ellipses after “who”) reemphasizes both the impossibility of identifying or characterizing the narrator and the inability/unwillingness of post-exoticism to disclose what it can and will do.

The narrator (or, if we are to believe the book’s title page, narrators) of the text tells the account of Bassmann’s last days in the high-security sector where he has been incarcerated for twenty-seven years after, like all members of post-exoticism, having lost the fight against and being caught by the enemy. There are a few passages in the book where one gleans a sense of the political slant of the post-exotic project, where the enemy (everything not sympathetic to the project) is a greasy cruel totalitarian system, the outside where barbarism has “triumphed on every level”: the environmental devastation, genocides and wars that have marked the history of the twentieth century. But perhaps what post-exoticism is trying to say is that the reactions against these atrocities result in their own kind of barbarism as well; we need, therefore, to rethink reactionary and ultimately binary responses. The inside/outside binary presented in the text did not always exist; there was a time when, “facing the essentially bipedal and essentially murderous population completely enchanted by capitalist bestiality, we [post-exotic writers] felt like bipeds and murderers, but also foreigners.” Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven relates the radicalization of this binary felt by post-exotic writers: the metamorphosis or involuntary leap from a foreigner identifying with the inside, to a radical outsider (the post-exotic as such) exiled to an extreme inside (high-security incarceration). This is the unspeakable rift where the post-exotic cosmos takes shape. While Bassmann, as spokesperson, is completely foreign, other, and radically outside of the enemy’s ways of being, language, and communication, he is now interned inside the very nucleus of the mechanism itself. The irony of the situation is underscored by Niouki and Blotno, two journalists who visit the high-security sector in an attempt to understand post-exoticism first hand, while it is still possible. Unsurprisingly, the journalists’ attempts to receive or translate into their own discourse an answer to the question what is post-exoticism? fails. The question is, after all, “an insolent question, very unwelcome on the day of Bassmann’s death.” What is the answer, then? Let us not be journalists and instead try to think differently, as the text would want, about literature. If there shouldn’t be a question, there is definitely no answer, and that’s the point: only post-exoticism can “understand” post-exoticism. We—that is we as readers—can’t help but feel a bit guilty, or at least complicit in the insolence, due to our search for an explanation.

The stakes of insider-outsider game are exponentially raised when we read that “the concentration camp system where we [Bassmann et al] were locked up was . . . the only terrestrial space whose inhabitants were still fighting for a variant of paradise.” The fight is determined, stubborn to the point of coerced suicide; there is no escape because the outside is death. The setting and circumstance of Bassmann’s incarceration recall Kafka, but on ketamine. This seeps into the language of the text as well, since “we [post-exotic spokespeople] must continue to speak in a way that denies the enemy any profit. We must do this even as we testify before a tribunal whose authority we do not recognize.” Sections of the text itself seem to use a language that abides by this proclamation of refusal, suggesting that perhaps the enemy is out here, among the readers. Accordingly, sentences throughout the text break off as if incapable of or unwilling to say more: “sympathizers, on the outside, have not . . .” or “there is no lack of examples, he said. Often . . .”

In his translation, Mahany conveys the incapable-unwilling hybrid of post-exotic language. He should also be commended for the English versions of difficult terms not found outside the post-exotic cosmos; post-exotic communication’s impasse has been dizzyingly translated into English, and this is exciting. The prospect of more to come excites as well. Volodine’s latest novel Terminus radieux was recognized in France last year with prestigious Prix Medicis. This will surely attract more national and international attention to his ambitious, lively project; a project that is one of the most stimulating in publishing today. Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven introduces readers to “the terminal rumblings, the ultimate punctuated throaty rasps of post-exoticism”; we must remember however that in this cosmos, the terminus is where everything starts. Determinedly, post-exoticism gently destroys preconceived foundations of what literature is and what it could be, and, like a revolutionary lover we didn’t know we had from a forgotten time to come, slides in like something so foreign it might just be real. - Nicholas Hauck 

Manuela Draeger, In the Time of the Blue Ball, Trans. by Brian Evenson, Dorothy, a publishing project, 2011.

"These stories introduce English-language readers to the detective Bobby Potemkine and his musical dog Djinn—and they come to us offering, among other things, mystery, romance, maritime-adventure, and a very angry noodle named Auguste.
Manuela Draeger belongs to a community of imaginary authors. Since 2002, she has published novels for adolescents."

“With the calm strangeness of dreams, and humor deepened by a hint of melancholy, these wonderful stories fool around on the frontiers of the imagination. All musical dogs, woolly crabs, children and other detectives of the not-yet-invented should own this book.” — Shelley Jackson

“Humane, impossible, homely and alien, Draeger’s extraordinary stories are as close to dreams as fiction can be.” — China MIÉVILLE

"Draeger (the pseudonym of a French writer) populates this postapocalyptic world with gleefully surreal creatures and ideas. In three short stories with a distinct Murakami vibe, hapless investigator Bobby Potemkine threads his way through his city’s meteor-shredded ruins to find out which of several women named Lili has really invented fire, what to do about an angry noodle named Auguste Diodon, and how to rescue the many baby pelicans that litter the roads. Every page introduces another curiosity in Draeger’s cabinet of wonders. Bobby’s dog, Djinn, marries “an immense polar ratinette,” an animal with the physique of a carpet, and he plays the nanoctiluphe, an instrument which, “as everybody knows, possesses rosewood cranks and nickel-plated pistons.” Bobby’s resignation sometimes rises to the status of philosophy, as when he revises his view of a child-eating tiger after remembering that Djinn once accidentally ingested a musically talented fly: “It can happen to anyone,” he muses, “to be eaten by someone, or to eat someone.” Fans of tightly plotted novels may chafe, but readers with a taste for the eccentric will discover a great many unexpected literary pleasures." - Publishers Weekly

"In the Time of the Blue Ball is the tip of an iceberg. Translated by Brian Evenson, this book is a collection of three stories from Manuela Draeger’s ten story catalog featuring Bobby Potemkine, a hapless quasi police officer assigned to supremely confused and exhausted cases. But Manuela Draeger is only the pen-name of author Antoine Volodine, and Volodine only the pseudonym for a French author who secrets his name away. Draeger is also a character in Volodine’s other books, “a librarian in a post-apocalyptic prison camp who invents stories to tell to the children in the camp.” Iceberg indeed.
As with Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss before her, Manuela Draeger materializes new phrases and places from nothing and inside of fresh and vastly imaginative stories. The reader is brought through these invented worlds via Potemkine’s investigator lens as he tracks the disappearance of the inventor of fire, the constantly reoccurring murder of a noodle named Auguste Diodon, and the case of the baby pelicans who, without mothers, quietly plague the cityscape:
A baby pelican is not cumbersome. With a bit of string, you can hang one around your neck. It will sway in rhythm with your feet, very well-behaved, very cute, without ever burping or whining or leaving any droppings. Therefore, there is no reason to complain about them. But in the end it’s rather unusual to find yourself taking care of this little pelican while its mother is elsewhere, off in who knows what mysterious elsewhere.
Draeger skips and hops language across the pages, drifting us underneath mounds of glorious new domains where woolly crabs house sapphire blue commas of hair on their bellies, all women are first-named Lili, all men Djinn, dogs talk, battes lead the way, flies play imagined orchestra instruments, and every creature, even Potemkin himself, has some “sadness to cultivate”:
I had finished my investigation, and I should have felt proud for having done my best, but at that moment, I had above all the impression of finding myself alone. Everyone was there, still within earshot or nearly, but I felt very alone.
Even in the plots of these stories Manuela Draeger can’t help but deliciously tinker words into newness: the inventor of fire was simply living elsewhere and convinces Potemkine to help destroy the last remnants of flame; Auguste Diodon is finally saved from the noodle bowl but is brash and ungrateful; and the baby pelicans, though they are happy with their new mother, leave Potemkine feeling empty and lost:
I started to move again.
For a moment, I walked in a circle on Soraya Gong, from east to west, under the moon, listening to the distant murmur of the waves. Djinn’s yelps, the laughter of the battes from incalculable heights. Then I went home.
We read because we are seeking extraordinary words, and Draeger’s words are exactly that, extraordinary. We are extremely lucky that this volume has reached us non-French speakers in the skin of the Dorothy Publishing Project and I am, as you will be when you read this book, absolutely hungry for more of all that is In the Time of the Blue Ball." - J. A. Tyler

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