February 2022 – Monsieur Miller

2022-02-22

Vocabulaire de L’anomalie (part 1)

As I read Le Tellier’s L’anomalie, I made note of words that either I didn’t know, or knew but felt I wouldn’t recognize out of context. There was roughly one every couple of pages, sometimes more, sometimes less. I’m going back over the list and finding definitions of them. Here’s the first crop from the first 100 pages or so. The expressions in the first column are hyperlinked out to Linguée:

Expression	Contexte	Definition
geindre	Le chien n’est pas mort, il geint, on dirait la plainte d’un bébé.	Gémir d’une voix faible, inarticulée sous l’effort, la douleur, etc.
les parages	Il est arrivé des heures avant, à surveiller les parages.	Région environnant un lieu quelconque, voisinage
un postiche	Il apprend à se poser des postiches pour se déguiser	Qui remplace certaines imperfections physiques ou qui est ajouté artificiellement
un lotissement	un parking que surplombe le lotissement.	Morcellement volontaire d’une propriété foncière par lots, en vue de construire des habitations. Terrain ainsi construit.
un reliquat	Blake touche le jour même le reliquat	Ce qui reste (d’une somme à payer, à percevoir).
bariolé	l’invisibilité barioléé du joggeur.	Coloré de tons vifs et variés.
foulée	Blake court, à petites foulées, sans hâte	Enjambée de l’athlète en course
tressauter	Il tire trois fois sur Franck, qui tressaute à peine, tombe à genoux, reste affalé contre la balustrade.	Tressaillir; . Être agité de secousses
une douille	Blake ramasse les six douilles dans le sable.	Étui contenant la charge de poudre d’une cartouche d’arme à feu.
torréfier	Un bon café est un miracle né de … un excellent grain, ici un Nicaragua fraîchement torréfié …	Réaliser la torréfaction d’un produit. (torréfaction = Opération qui consiste à traiter par la chaleur, au contact de l’air, certains produits alimentaires (café, cacao), le tabac, pour les déshydrater, développer certaines qualités aromatiques et faire apparaître la couleur brune.)
sécher (un repas)	Il sèche le déjeuner, car il a fixé un rendez-vous à quinze heures.	S’abstenir de participer, d’assister à quelque chose
dru	Ses cheveux drus peuvent évoquer Kafka	Qui pousse vigoureusement et en épaisseur.
tapageusement	… un train burlesque ou des escrocs sans ticket s’installent tapageusement en première ave la complicité de contrôleurs incapables …	De façon tapage (tapage = Bruit confus accompagné généralement de criailleries, de querelles)
de but en blanc	on ne va pas déclarer à la personne qu’on l’aime, comme ça, de but en blanc.	adv. Directement, de façon directe, sans correction liée au contexte.
lénifiant	Le commandant tient des propos lénifiants, mais personne ne doute qu’il va s’abîmet en mer.	adj. Apaisant ; qui endort la vigilance.
ballotter	Il ferme les yeux et se laisse ballotter en tous sens, sans tenter de retenir son corps.	Faire aller alternativement dans un sens et dans l’autre.
faire la cour	Il lui avait fait une cour discrète, et ell avait compris qu’il craignait moins le ridicule que de l’embarrasser.	Tenter de séduire quelqu’un pour s’en faire aimer.
de passage	un chirurgien anglais de passage	Qui ne fait que passer, qui ne s’arrête que pour un court moment (dans un lieu ou dans la vie de quelqu’un
porté sur l’alcol	un bibliothécaire assez porté sur l’alcool	qui boit trop d’alcool
en trombe	Un camion passe en trombe devant elle.	ce qui va très vite, qui est brusque, soudain et souvent peu contrôlé
les collants	cette jupe-là est trop courte, mais je mettrai des collants …	un sous-vêtement ou vêtement moulant qui couvre les jambes des pieds à la taille
un mandat d’amener	Nous avons un mandat d’amener, je le glisse sous votre porte. Ouvrez, s’il vous plaît.	Un ordre donné à la force publique de conduire immédiatement devant lui la personne à l’encontre de laquelle il est décerné.
carmin	… des rideaux carmin de velours épais …	Colorant d’un rouge profond tiré en général de la cochenille du chêne kermès
la goulete	Paul glisse une capsule dans le percolateur, pose une élegante tasse italienne sous la goulette …	Conduit ou couloir incliné qui sert au transport par pesanteur de différents matériaux (gravats, charbon, métal, liquide…
l’intestin grêle	La tumeur que tu as sur la queue du pancréas, à l’opposé de l’intestin grêle, est une tumeur mailgne.	portion la plus étroite de l’intestin, comprise entre le duodénum et le cæcum
impavide	David se lève, marche quelques pas. Tout son corps se refuse à rester impavide.	Qui n’éprouve ou ne montre aucune crainte.
suinter	«Dieu, que la connerie suinte de l’esprit religieux.»	Produire un liquide qui s’écoule goutte à goutte.
à l’aune de	Elle relit «L’Anomalie», à l’aune du désastre qu’il annonçait.	En considération de ; en mesurant par rapport à ; à la mesure de ; à la lumière de.
le pilon	Clémence réimprime … «Les montagnes viendront nous trouver», dont les ultimes examplaires en stock étaient menacés de pilon.	Les exemplaires des livres ou des publications sur papier destinés à être détruits; la « machine » théorique destinée à cet effet.
tanguer	Ugo Darchini tangue et titube, et lorsqu’un peu de champagne s’échappe de sa coupe pour tacher le parquet … il s’excuse …	Remuer par un mouvement alternatif d’avant en arrière.
tituber	Ugo Darchini tangue et titube, et lorsqu’un peu de champagne s’échappe de sa coupe pour tacher le parquet … il s’excuse …	Vaciller sur ses jambes, aller de droite et de gauche en marchant.
éraillée	… il s’excuse d’une voix éraillée et avinée.	Dont la surface est écaillée, rayée; Qui est rauque, voilé
avinée	… il s’excuse d’une voix éraillée et avinée.	Qui a trop bu de vin.
quadrillage	Sa première vision de Lagos … des millions de toitures en tôle rouillée, un quadrillage anarchique, …	Ensemble de lignes, de bandes droites qui se coupent de façon à former des carreaux, des carrés égaux juxtaposés.
héler	La consule repose son verre, et hèle une grande jeune femme …	Appeler de loin.
ne pas en revenir	… sa chanson Yaba Girls a dépassé le millard de vues [sur YouTube]… Slimboy n’en revient toujours pas.	Vivre un étonnement ou une surprise hors du commun.
épuration (f)	un station d’épuration …	Action de rendre pur, plus pur, en éliminant les éléments étrangers.
abreuver	toute une population qui les rejette, avec repugnance et détestations, abreuvée de haine et de reumeurs par les évêques …	Arroser, imbiber en profondeur.
rajeunir	Hélène, connaissez-cous l’histoire de l’espion américain en mission en URSS – ça ne nous rajeunit pas – …	Rendre une certaine jeunesse à (qqn).
un.e barbouze	Les barbouzes n’ont pas bougé d’un pas, ils n’ont d’yeux que pour Slimboy.	Agent secret (police, espionnage) (m ou f).

2022-02-212022-02-21

L’anomalie, Roman de Hervé Le Tellier

This holiday weekend I finished reading the novel L’anomalie by Hervé Le Tellier, winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt, one of the biggest annual literary prizes in France. I learned of the book from a New York Times article in late November, 2021, which announced the publication of the English translation of this work. The article noted that the original work had been a smash success in France, selling over 1 million copies despite (because of?) being published in August 2020 amidst the various confinements and disruptions of Covid. I figured it was worth a read and so got a hold of a French copy. It sat on my shelf for a while, but I picked it up early this month and polished off its 327 pages in a couple of weekends.

The book is interesting in and of itself; but after I finished it, I read some reviews, looked up the author’s background, and listened to an interview with the author, all of which gave another dimension to the book that I had missed in my ordinary reading. The book begins with a vignette of a professional hitman: his back-story, his methods, and the double life he leads. In the open he’s a successful entrepreneur with a small international chain of vegetarian restaurants, a wife and two children, and a bourgeois Paris apartment. But behind it all he’s a killer for hire with a second apartment, secret bank accounts, multiple passports, a presence on the Dark Web, and any number of lethal toys. This duality gives us the theme of the book right from the outset, though hardly in a way I expected at the start.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first part we meet character after character, one or two per chapter, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Some live in France, some in New York, one in Nigeria, another in New Jersey. What eventually becomes apparent is that they were all on the same Air France flight from Paris to New York in March 2021, a flight which encountered violent turbulents shortly before landing safely at JFK airport. As the first part ends, we learn that a second instance of this airplane – and its full complement of passengers – somehow also appears in June 2021 just after the violent turbulents and tries to land as well. Air traffic control goes nuts at the sudden appearance of the airplane and then they and the military Air Force get very confused as the pilots insist over the radio on their identities and the plane’s designation. All the physical evidence backs their claims, and they are eventually escorted to an Air Force base in New Jersey.

In the second part of the novel we see a lot of U.S. and then world government officials dealing with this unprecedented situation. There are DoD and NSA and CIA meetings. There are mathematicians and physicists and philosophers. There are religious leaders and world presidents. And of course there are the passengers themselves, whose “March-landing” instances we have already met in the first part, and whose “June-landing” (who are 3 months younger and still think it’s March) counterparts we follow in the makeshift camp / prison that the military has set up in a giant hangar. The experts offer various explanations for what has happened, along with citations of which work of science fiction has already illustrated the phenomenon, but come to no conclusion. Meanwhile global intelligence services coordinate a round-up of the March-landing versions of each passenger and bring them to a separate part of the Air Force base. Finally, word leaks out to the public of what has transpired. In a somewhat unbelievable plot twist, the authorities decide to introduce each passenger to their double, provide them with counseling services and economic assistance, and release them back “into the wild”.

The last part of the novel is surprising in that it drops the whole science-fiction bit entirely. Who knows how these people got here, they are here. Once again we are treated to a parade of episodes, each chapter following another character. We get to see ten different ways that this “meet your double three months in your past/future” plays out. Some meetings are violent, others are venomous, some are blassé, others joyful, and some are painful (the cancer didn’t go away, so now the children have to bury their father twice). There are apartments to be shared – and jobs, and husbands, and children. The situations described are very awkward, though the writing is quite good. There’s some slight surprise twist at the end that is left unexplored, but does a nice call-back to the philosophical and science-fiction aspects of the middle part.

So there you go, a traditional if somewhat intricately structured modern French novel with a lot of American flavors running through it, right ? Not sure why it caught the eyes of the Prix Goncourt jury, but surely a decent book, glad I read it. Come to find out (with an hour or two of post-book web surfing) that I missed some fairly major bits. First of all, each chapter in the first part is not only treating a different character, it is written in a totally different style: noir detective pastiche, hackneyed romance, psychological introspection novel, Africain exoticism, littérature blanche. Sure, I got all the settings and the stories, but the exaggerated stylistic changes went over my head completely. Next, it turns out that the author is a mathematician, linguist, journalist, and since 2019 the president of the International Oulipo Society.

What is Oulipo you ask ? Ah, that could be a blog post all of its own. In brief, a group of intellectuals who liked thinking about pushing the boundaries of creation and expression started meeting regularly in 1960 and subsequently founded a literary / philosophical movement they called L’Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (the Workshop for Potential Literature) or Oulipo for short. Its most famous members have been the writers Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, and Georges Perec. Although some members were authors, their goal wasn’t so much to produce literature as it was to produce new forms that had the potential for yielding interesting literature. It was very meta, and many of the participants had far more interest in the forms than in the actual literature that could come from them.

Getting back to L’anomalie: the author explicitly pitches it as a work of the Oulipo genre, in the tradition of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (I haven’t read it, but there’s a main story involving international book thieves, and then 10 intruding chapters which are the opening chapters of 10 different novels). There’s an obscure final 20 lines of text that are masked versions of some underlying text, with the masking getting more disruptive as the text flows down the page in the form of an hourglass. The last escaping grains of sand spell out «fin» (“End”), while earlier lines have winks to other Oulipo works. And the three major parts of the book are named with lines from poems by founding Oulipian Raymond Queneau (who wrote: “Oulipians: rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”). Needless to say, this was all lost on me, but it helps explain why the Prix Goncourt jury would have been more inclined to take the book seriously: Oulipo has a proud place as an off-beat but home-grown literary genre.

Despite all these hidden oddities, the book is perfectly easy to follow, at least if you are practiced at reading speculative fiction where a situation is revealed little by little. I haven’t read the English translation yet, but I will have no hesitation recommending it to my English-speaking friends. Come to think of it, I think I’ll go out and purchase a copy for that friend who introduced me to Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes …

2022-02-06

Jacques et son maître, par Milan Kundera (à Diderot)

Yesterday I read the play Jacques et son maître: Hommage à Denis Diderot en trois actes. The play was written (in French) in 1971 by Czech writer Milan Kundera. It is a «variation – hommage» on a novel that I haven’t read, Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, which was started in 1765 and published in installments from 1778 to 1780. The novel is apparently a series of philosophical dialogues between a servant and a master, including numerous digressions, bawdy stories, and presentations of new fables (e.g. La Gaine et le Coutelet).

The play is much the same, although Kundera fiercely corrected anyone who called it an “adaptation” of the novel. Instead, it honors Diderot’s original but uses modern theatrical devices like breaking the fourth wall from the opening lines, having characters openly question the talent of the (absent) playwright who is scripting their lines, and staging multiple plays-within-a-play. For all that, though, it remains light-hearted and easily accessible, more entertainment than social commentary. At a guess, it has updated the dialogue of Diderot and dropped most of the philosophy.

To the extent that is philosophical investigation remains, it centers on whether our destinies are our own to shape, or whether «ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas est écrit là-haut». If our fates are already written, then what sense does it make to hold others responsible for their actions, good or bad? In the case of Man and God, this question has one import, but of course Jacques and his master consider it in the context of Character and Playwright, where the answer is (perhaps?) more clear. However as his master asks, «est-ce que tu es un salaud parce que c’est écrit là-haut ? Ou est-ce que c’est écrit parce qu’ils savaient, là-haut, que tu étais un salaud ? Quelle est la cause et quel est l’effet ?» Kundera doesn’t offer much by way of answer, but the audience doesn’t really care.

The bulk of the play is telling and retelling variations of the same story of love triangles (well, really lust triangles) gone wrong: man dallies with woman, then manipulates his friend into marrying his pregnant mistresses; woman is spurned by man, then manipulates her former lover into marrying a disguised prostitute; man offers to help friend hide a secret tryst with a woman, then sleeps with her himself; man offers to arrange a night of debauchery for his friend, then tips off the authorities to expose friend in compromising position. Throughout it all, Jacques tries to tell his master the story of how Jacques lost his virginity, and how that lead to his falling in love with a different woman. There’s lots of ribald details about the sizes of the women’s breasts and butts. It’s a little cringy, but the women are triumphant and the men ruined often enough that it’s still possible to produce this play in 2021 (Théâtre Montparnasse) without attracting too much opprobrium.

The play reminded me a bit of Fin de Partie by Beckett, which was written 14 years earlier. Each has the central dynamic revolve around a servant and a wheelchair-occupying master. Each has a lot of recurrent bits of dialogue and stories that are lengthened each time they are told. And each questions what controls and is controlled by the world we see on stage. But Beckett’s work is far more brooding and gloomy while Kundera’s is whimsical and ironic. None of Kundera’s characters take themselves all that seriously. Moreover, the Kundera dialogue is far more familiar and free than Beckett’s, which is turgid and formal. Perhaps it’s just easier for a Czech to write in French than an Irishman?

Some Vocabulary I Learned

There were a number of words and colloquialisms I learned while reading the play:

faire la noce – faire une partie de plaisir ; mener une vie de débauche.
un bambocheur – Personne qui aime faire la fête.
se toquer – Avoir brusquement un vif engouement pour quelqu’un ou quelque chose
un ardillon – Pointe de métal d’une boucle de courroie, de ceinture.
un tendron – Très jeune fille (d’âge tendre).
une grue – Populaire. Femme de mœurs faciles et vénales ; prostituée.
se fourrer – S’engager dans (une situation embarrassante).
une crécelle – Moulinet de bois formé d’une planchette mobile qui tourne bruyamment autour d’un axe.
- voix de crécelle – aiguë, désagréable.
une raclée – Volée de coups.
- filer (= donner) une raclée à qqn.
pouilleux – Misérable et sale.
une jante – Partie circulaire à la périphérie d’une roue de véhicule.
un essieu – Pièce transversale d’un véhicule, dont les extrémités entrent dans les moyeux des roues.