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 …
