Éric Plamondon recasts the American western frontier into a surreal, timeless place of industrial invention, Hollywood glamour and acid-washed hedonism. A novel for the Wikipedia generation

Éric Plamondon, Mayonnaise: A Novel, Trans.by by Dimitri Nasrallah, Véhicule Press, 2018.

Writer Richard Brautigan was a counter-cultural icon of the 1960s. In Mayonnaise, the second novel of Éric Plamondon's 1984 Trilogy, narrator Gabriel Rivages pieces together Brautigan's life starting in Oregon, where he was born, to San Francisco, where he became a poet and satirical novelist, and on to Bolinas, California, where he committed suicide in 1984. Sifting through the ruins of Sixties idealism, Plamondon recasts the American western frontier into a surreal, timeless place of industrial invention, Hollywood glamour and acid-washed hedonism. Originally published in French, Mayonnaise was a finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal.


"When I read this book for the first time, I thought, Wow! Every time I reread it, I have the same response." –Chantal Guy


Here is an excerpt from the recently-published CNQ 50th anniversary issue!
"Plamondon has a knack for taking an interesting but seemingly unrelated fact, bringing it round to some meaningful aspect of Brautigan (or Rivage's) life, and turning it into a polished narrative jewel."
 "While Mayonnaise is emphatically not a realist novel, its grounding in life's minutiae, along with all its random, deeply pleasing connections, ends up feeling like a kind of alternative to realism. These diverse fragments might not emulsify in the manner of mayonnaise, but they do combine into a powerful and intelligent meditation on the meaning of existence." - http://vehiculepress.blogspot.com/2019/01/making-mayonnaise.html


I also found a lovely little review in French and ran it through google translate and the result is wonderful: (The words made bold by me)
“Eric Plamondon knows the secret of mayonnaise.
I woke up sweating like a child emerging from a nightmare werewolf. In the dream I had just been expelled, Eric Plamondon and Richard Brautigan participated in the issuance of the Cook rebel. An episode on the preparation of a perfect mayonnaise. As Plamondon and compared their leader tattooed tournemains, Brautigan, American writer mythical confined to the left end of the frame, above éclusait whiskey whiskey.
Last scene view: before going to a commercial break, Mr. Rebel requires the collaboration of Brautigan to elect ze best mayo. The last beatniks and complies dips his aquiline pif in each bowl before his face from cracking a smile equivocal same that appears on the cover of his novel Abortion.
Composed of 113 fragments, Mayonnaise, second volume of the trilogy “1984” Eric Plamondon (Hungary-Hollywood Express was released last year Johnny Weissmuller showbiz limbo), is primarily the story of Gabriel and Shores his obsession Brautigan, mirroring his own shortcomings and his own anxieties. Mayonnaise is also an exhilarating way to explore the narrative as a constant zapping between different subjects (fishing, divorce Shores of the invention of the typewriter, the minutiae of life Brautigan, his suicide) , different eras and different genres (a poem can follow after a press). With the casualness leaders maniacally meticulous cutting and Plamondon ordered fragments whose complementarity is not always immediately apparent. And yet … Josée di Stasio probably speak of a “food product”.
Zapping between different subjects, then, but it still almost encyclopedic tone, which repudiates all lyricism. So when Plamondon leaves a vaguely emotional momentum, the effect grabs: “On the Internet, I found a copy of The trout fishing in America dedicated to hand Brautigan dating from 1971. It for sale for seven hundred and fifty dollars. Much better than a color TV. “
For my part, I found the day after my sleepless night, through a chance visit to a bookstore or confused visionary, a copy of Mayonnaise ensardiné in “cookbooks” between good porridge Jamie Oliver and Pepsodent smile Ricardo. No joke!”
I am now about to write an email to Eric Plamondon. - https://thebrautiganbookclub.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/french-sauce/











Éric Plamondon, Hungary-Hollywood Express, Trans. by Dimitri Nasrallah, Véhicule Press (Esplanade Books), 2016.


Read an excerpt here


When Gabriel Rivages recounts the life of Olympic gold medalist and silver-screen heart-throb Johnny Weissmuller (1904-1984), he brings to life a vibrant patchwork of America’s 20th century, from its athletic exploits to its literary underground, from its cinematic glory to its obscure failures. Burroughs sells pencil sharpeners, Einstein crosses paths with squirrel hunters, we play golf in Cuba, JFK becomes an airport, the world record for the 100m freestyle swim is broken, Tarzan saves Jane, a corrupt accountant runs away with the savings, the Second World War makes waves in Lake Michigan, and a living legend wraps up a storied career as a host in a Las Vegas restaurant.
Hungary-Hollywood Express is the first novel in Éric Plamondon’s 1984 trilogy. The second and third volumes, Mayonnaise and Apple S, turn their lens on the poet Richard Brautigan and Apple founder Steve Jobs respectively. Esplanade Books will publish them in 2017 and 2018 translated by novelist Dimitri Nasrallah.

“A portrait and kaleidoscope of a character who is truer than life.” –Josée Lapointe

“A novel for the Wikipedia generation.” –Dominque Tardif

“[Plamondon] demonstrates that we can approach drama without falling into pathos or cynicism.” –Judy Quinn


“There seems to be something urgently contemporary about Plamondon’s wikipedic approach. The modern West might be generally sceptical of grand narratives or broad metaphysical accounts of the world, but it also a society with a hitherto unimaginable amount of data at its fingertips. Faced with large amounts of information, we humans have always had a desperate need to organize, to establish connections, to see meaning in the random. Express gives us the pleasure of knowledge and the teasing challenge of puzzling out order, but it also provides a gentle warning about reading too much into the chaos.” –André Forget


Hungary-Hollywood Express is the first translation from Dimitri Nasrallah, a well-respected Montreal-based author who made his name with two award-winning novels: Niko (2011, Esplanade Books) and Blackbodying (2005, DC Books). This background makes for an interesting translation, raising a completely different set of questions than those explored elsewhere on this site in more typical translations by the likes of Donald Winkler, Lazer Lederhendler, and Sheila Fischman, the current household names of Canada’s translation scene.
There are two sides to literary translation: 1) understanding and being faithful to the French and 2) bringing it across nicely into English. Some of the least successful literary translations I’ve read have been written by authors. Authors who live outside the province and appear to have no more than a shaky grasp of its way of life, let alone its culture, subtleties, and slang. Esplanade Books appear to be only too aware of this danger: all the authors who will be translating their books in the future live and work in Montreal. They know the city’s history, the province’s culture. But they are authors first and translators second.
Dimitri Nasrallah falls into this category. It is a massive compliment when I say that Hungary-Hollywood Express reads very much as though it was written in English. Plamondon’s lists are every bit as mesmerizing in English as they are in French, building momentum, and moving from the mundane to the scarcely credible to the impossible:

“I’ve owned a Texas Instrument 99/4A … I’ve learned how to use Windows, Outlook, Word, Excel, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash … I’ve done layout, brochures, posters, books … I’ve also been a soldier. I’ve cut off cocks, heads, and arms. I’ve raped young girls and run over women with a Hummer. I’ve blown up embassies, I’ve gone AWOL. I saved lives, bandaged wounds, and fed children … I’ve seen Genghis Khan’s elephants cross the Mongol Empire … I’ve seen Mount Vesuvius destroy Pompeii … I stabbed Caesar.”

It’s all about rhythm and changing perspective as Nasrallah goes about his work deftly and diligently, effortlessly shifting from the eight-page list of the narrator’s accomplishments that makes up Chapter 1 to the six-line paragraph that is Chapter 2, moving from dry details to external conditions to intimate thoughts. It is, on the face of it, the story of Johnny Weissmuller (1904-1984), “an Olympic champion … an Apollo of the movie house, an Adonis with a glistening torso that millions of women around the world have dreamed of holding in their arms,” but there are also captions and descriptions for photos we can’t see, anecdotes, poetry, cameos by Al Capone, and “the story of a poor guy who sold pencil sharpeners in Chicago, 1991” as Plamondon takes an unexpected approach to each subject. The delivery and timing are exquisite, each vignette a satisfying work of art in miniature. Whole passages read like the best Wikipedia articles ever, the essence of a character distilled into a few sentences, dates, and places of birth, fleshed out until they become literature:

“Gabriel Rivages was conceived in May 1968 in the backwoods of a Canadian forest. In Paris, they called it the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. His mother, a waitress at the only hotel on a wildlife reserve, had succumbed to the charms of a foreman. Gabriel was born in February 13, 1969, the same day the Quebec Liberation Front detonated a bomb at the Montreal Stock Exchange. The president of the exchange noted the event with irony: ‘Today, you might say that the market went up!’”

Nasrallah is part of a welcome new generation of translators who is prepared to step back from the French long enough to render “grand vide” a “deep-seated emptiness,” who writes “I’m particularly fond of that photo” when the French says “J’aime bien la photo,” and who isn’t afraid to slot in an “Mm-hmm” when the “Oui” of the original would have fallen impossibly flat, who calls “un boulot de serveuse” a “waitressing gig.” Expressions involving familiar idioms are fluid in English: “On a été un peu dans le jus mais pas trop” becomes “We were in over our heads for a little while, but not by much,” for example, while “Poisson avait raison” is “Poisson was onto something” in Nasrallah’s version, not the instantly forgettable “Poisson was right.” And “nous sommes obligés de” is—mercifully—translated as “we’re compelled to” as opposed to the forced-sounding “we are obliged to,” a phrase that seems only to appear in translations into English.
Divergences from the French begin to appear when the English is compared to the less familiar idioms of the French original. (And, let’s be honest here, how many reviewers are likely to do that? There is even an argument, I suppose, that this might be a little underhand or unnecessary, opening the car’s hood to look at how the engine’s running, when we can step back and give the tires a perfunctory kick instead.) But, for me, writing about a translation doesn’t just involve writing about the book as it now reads in English: to judge a translation we need to look at how the translator read and understood a French sentence and rewrote it in English.
The “je viens d’avoir” construction is translated two or three times, including in the novel’s first line, as “I’m about to” although it refers to the past. It means, in the case of the first line, “I just turned 40” not “I’m about to turn forty.” “À la fin de l’année de mes quatre ans” means at the end of the author’s fourth year, which should of course be translated more idiomatically, but translating it as “for four years” is to say something different in English. “Au Québec” is repeatedly translated as “in Quebec City” when Plamondon is referring to the province, not its capital. Bankruptcy as “the drop of water that overflows the vase” seems to stick unnecessarily close to the French idiom when we can more naturally say it’s “the last straw” in English, an argument that gains weight when we consider that similarly exotic-sounding idioms in French have been given their idiomatic equivalents in English (“ça met du buerre dans les épinards” becomes “it’s his bread and butter,” for example). And “ignorer” is translated, ironically enough, several times as “We’ll ignore that” when it means we don’t know something.
There are slips in meaning. The bikini is banned “sur plusieurs plages” in France, Plamondon writes, while Nasrallah has it banned “from all beaches.” In English, Weissmuller is “the best paid-actor in Hollywood”; in French, he’s “one of the best.” “Un ultime souvenir” is translated as “the ultimate souvenir” and a character “qui revient d’une visite avec son fils” is “dreaming of taking his son for a visit” as revenir is misread as rêver. There are also a handful of French sentences that were overlooked, or set aside, and didn’t make it into English. Finally, on the face of it, “when I want the whole world to go to shit” seems to be a nice translation for “où j’envoie chier tout le monde” but do they really mean the same thing?
We can do two things here. We can give our translator the benefit of the doubt or we can ask ourselves what does it really matter. Is the English translation a standalone work or should it reflect the French as faithfully as possible? My natural inclination is to want my cake and eat it, to preach faithfulness provided it doesn’t get in the way of style. It would appear that Nasrallah’s focus is very much on the writing, on wearing his writer’s rather than his translator’s hat—something I look forward to exploring further with him in a future interview.
It’s easy to nitpick, easy to stumble over a word choice (should those members be limbs? should that viaduct be an overpass? shouldn’t Tintin’s Milou be Snowy?), easier still to ignore a sentence that glides on by effortlessly, without pausing to notice what makes it work so well in the first place. In cases like this it’s easy to see Nasrallah’s background as a writer as his ear for a smooth turn of phrase comes through, particularly in dialogue.
Take this example:

“America, an event. Beyond the West, in need of a new conquest. That’s where Hollywood comes in.”

That’s translation at its best. Honestly. It seems perfectly straightforward, but taking a French sentence, no matter how well written, and ending up with an English sentence as natural, as unobtrusive, as that one is often anything but straightforward. And translating “il paraît que” as a laconic “turns out” (and “en fait” as “as it happens”) is inspired. Both seem perfectly simple, obvious choices in hindsight, but they fit with the tone perfectly here.
In this respect, the translation is perfect. The French, too, is straightforward at first glance. But a rhythm builds as paragraphs swell. The French never falls flat, and neither does the English. My quibble—and it is nothing more than a quibble—is that the English occasionally doesn’t say what the French says and not just for reasons of style.
That all said, it is inevitable that each translation be a compromise between representing the French and crafting a nice-sounding sentence in English. Esplanade looks to be onto something with this approach and, while I personally would have stuck just a little more closely to the French here and there, Hungary-Hollywood Express is a welcome step in the right direction for the future of literary translation in Canada. - Peter McCambridgehttp://quebecreads.com/hhex/


...Which is not to say we shouldn’t applaud a new English edition of Éric Plamondon’s Hungary-Hollywood Express (Véhicule/Esplanade, 168 pp, $19.95 translated by Dimitri Nasrallah), only to express some regret that we’re only now reading the first volume of a trilogy when all three volumes are already available in French — in fact, they’ve been gathered into a single volume, a mark of the standing they’ve achieved both critically and popularly.
With a title inspired by Richard Brautigan’s Tokyo-Montana Express, Plamondon’s novel bears a couple of marked similarities with Fortier’s: It, too, concerns a struggling writer, and jumps around in time, though in this case the trail is a lot more tangled.
Gabriel Rivages is a man in his late 30s whose biography overlaps in certain ways with the author’s; for reasons best left for the reader to discover, he has developed a fixation on Johnny Weissmuller, the Hungarian-born swimmer and actor who won multiple Olympic gold medals, achieved enormous but fleeting fame on the silver screen as Tarzan, then suffered a long and terminal fall from grace that ended with his penurious death in 1984.
The novel takes the form of 90 numbered and titled sections, most no more than a page, some as short as a few words. Historical lines both public and private are traced, their one common meeting point being Weissmuller: future Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs selling pencil sharpeners on the streets of Chicago; the bikini bathing suit being launched in 1949 at the same Paris swimming pool Weissmuller had inaugurated in 1924; the boy Weissmuller diving into Lake Michigan at the same moment Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914.
Plamondon’s broad net allows him to incorporate historical figures as diverse as Al Capone and Fidel Castro, as well as literary mavericks Herman Melville and Richard Brautigan. The meta levels can get a bit dizzying: At one point Rivages muses on two translators’ varying takes on a passage from Moby Dick, and it hits you that you’re reading a translation of a comparison of two passages that are themselves translations.   
One review in the French-language press called Hungary-Hollywood Express “a novel for the Wikipedia generation,” implying both good things and bad: a breadth of knowledge and references, but also a bite-sized approach that could be seen to pander to short attention spans. 
In practice, though, the effect is actually the opposite — yes, you’re skipping around a lot in time and space, but you’ve got to pay extra close attention to make the connections Plamondon intends. What keeps it all grounded is the man in the middle of it all: Somehow, despite being little more than a cipher in Plamondon’s design, Weissmuller emerges vividly on the page, his plight a thing of true pathos, his life’s arc no less painfully human for serving as an archetypal 20th century odyssey.
The second and third volumes in the 1984 trilogy, Mayonnaise and Apple S, revolve around Brautigan and Steve Jobs respectively. Given that the sandwich spread, the late writer and the late computer visionary are all mentioned in the first instalment, the whole thing, you suspect, will make a new kind of sense as a single entity.
Seeing exactly how Plamondon pulls it off promises to be a lot of fun. Even if you’ve already found out in French. - Ian McGillis montrealgazette.com/entertainment/books/dominique-fortier-eric-plamondon-well-served-by-new-translations





A leading voice of new Quebec fiction, Éric Plamondon's "1984" trilogy follows the promise of the American Dream through the destinies of actor Johnny Weissmuller (Hungary-Hollywood Express, 2016), writer Richard Brautigan (Mayonnaise, 2018) and tech guru Steve Jobs (Apple S, 2019). Mayonnaise was a finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal. Éric Plamondon was born in Quebec in 1969 and lives near Bordeaux, France.