These wildly digressive, absurdly technical ruminations of a former archaeologist turned tour guide isolating himself in a cave serve up a brief, bewiThese wildly digressive, absurdly technical ruminations of a former archaeologist turned tour guide isolating himself in a cave serve up a brief, bewildering square of Chevillard’s patented absurdism, with fewer hilarious moments than in the barmy marvels On the Ceiling or Demolishing Nisard. The prose is as well-buffed as usual, with the translator chipping in a witty footnote as a cheeky garnish....more
An amuse-bouche of short fantastical tales depicting vaguely sensual encounters with gentlemen of various professions. The stories are all prefaced wiAn amuse-bouche of short fantastical tales depicting vaguely sensual encounters with gentlemen of various professions. The stories are all prefaced with or inspired by (more interesting) quotes from Baudelaire, Zola, and other Gallic Greats, and in tone are the very epitome of très charmant, mademoiselle. Bland and uninspired prose wrapped in an Oulipian kimono—this is super-lightweight fare from the once-peerless Dalkey Archive....more
The last of Queneau’s minor works to be Englished, Journal intime was originally published pseudonymously by Sally Mara, written for the risqué publisThe last of Queneau’s minor works to be Englished, Journal intime was originally published pseudonymously by Sally Mara, written for the risqué publisher Éditions du scorpion for much-needed cash, in the vein of his earlier hard-boiled parody We Always Treat Women Too Well. This being a Queneau production, the pseudonym hilariously fails to disguise the quirky Queneauness of the novel, as all the hallmarks of the writer of Zazie are here—the playful solecisms and bilingual puns, the reams of absurdist dialogue zinging across the pages, and the broad parody (in this case of the Irish in homage to Joyce).
Sally Mara is an Irish virgin composing her “intimate” diary in an error-strewn French. She chronicles her screwball interactions with young suitors and her frequently violent and promiscuous family in an Ireland that is entirely a surreal contrivance of the impish Oulipian. The novel’s erotic content is precisely zero, with our heroine spending most of her time rebuffing her suitors, and the sexual interactions themselves are described in excessively precise scientific terms (to much hilarity). The novel has more in common with the wondrous realm of Flann O’Brien than Joyce, and Queneau’s understanding and appreciation of the Irish language lifts his humour above the base level. The bulk of the novel is fairly extempore, carrying the reader aloft on the waves of mad dialogue—in equal parts riotous and exasperating....more
The early chapters of this barmy novel from a female Oulipian evoke, as the translator describes, Zazie in the Concrete (sic), with its playful punnagThe early chapters of this barmy novel from a female Oulipian evoke, as the translator describes, Zazie in the Concrete (sic), with its playful punnage and uproarious comic mangling of the language as the teenage narrator unfurls her bizarre non-story about her father, her sister, and a concrete mixer. As the novel progresses, the punning and frantic toing-and-froing down digressive cul-de-sacs makes the non-story harder to non-follow, and fatigue soon arrives. As the translator Emma Ramadan writes in her afterword, the original French text was so densely allusive and polylingually punnilicious that translating the subtleties of the author’s humour was always going to be a monumental task, and on this occasion, the singular oddity of the work fails to flame into English. ...more
What is stopping you from writing that opus set in the 1980s about a midshipman who marries someone with such an uncanny resemblance to Sissy Spacek tWhat is stopping you from writing that opus set in the 1980s about a midshipman who marries someone with such an uncanny resemblance to Sissy Spacek that he ends up lusting after the real Sissy Spacek, ending in restraining orders, seven-year San Quen stretches, and eventual redemption in the arms of a looky-likey Ally Sheedy? Désiré Nisard. What is stopping you from making your millions by inventing an AI called BrightBot that builds the user’s confidence by sending them constant messages about how wonderful they are, how adored they are, and how splendidly singularly hoo-momma they are, more so than the other twelve million subscribers? Désiré Nisard. What is stopping you from combining paprika with shortbread to invent the world’s least likely soaraway snack sensation that takes South Korea by storm? Désiré Nisard. This 19th century hack, with his dismal opinions on the state of French literature, really is the reason you’re so impotent, hideous, morbidly obsessed with bunions, and captivated by the music of HAIM. You need a total and complete Désiré Nisard demolition, my friends, and Mr. Chevillard is the man who will save you. Nisard will be demolished....more
I started reading the Rougon-Macquart sequence on 14 October 2011 (I have Goodreads to thank for the precision—the novel was The Drinking Den), finallI started reading the Rougon-Macquart sequence on 14 October 2011 (I have Goodreads to thank for the precision—the novel was The Drinking Den), finally completing the 20-strong epic on 18 June 2023. Reading this phenomenal sequence of classics over a long period was the most pleasurable way to tackle Zola, for patience and doggedness is required to wrestle with the more verbose, overblown elements of the Gallic Goliath’s oeuvre. Doctor Pascal concludes the epic with a codependent love story between an uncle and his niece, featuring a scheming mother, a pious servant, and a handy summary of the preceding nineteen works. The character of Pascal is a frustrating contradiction—supremely intelligent when magicking up vaccines in a pestle, too thick to shelter his manuscripts outside his own home away from his mother whose only wish is to destroy them. An exasperating, melodramatic end to an exasperating, magnificent, epochal cycle of classics. How would I rank the cycle from 1-20, you never asked? Let me tell you.
Rougon-Macquart RANKED (Best to Worst):
1. The Earth (La Terre) 2. The Drinking Den (L’Assommoir) 3. The Belly of Paris (La Ventre de Paris) 4. Germinal 5. The Debacle (La Débâcle) 6. The Beast Within (La Bête Humaine) 7. Pot Luck (Pot-Bouille) 8. The Masterpiece (L'Œuvre) 9. The Kill (La Curée) 10. The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) 11. The Dream (Le Rêve) 12. The Bright Side of Life (La joie de vivre) 13. The Fortune of the Rougons (La Fortune des Rougon) 14. The Conquest of Plassans (La Conquête de Plassans) 15. Nana 16. Money (L'Argent) 17. A Love Story (Une page d'amour) 18. Doctor Pascal (Le Docteur Pascal) 19. His Excellency Eugene Rougon (Son Excellence Eugène Rougon) 20. The Sin of Abbé Moret (La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret) ...more
This is Zola’s Dunkirk—a compelling, sensorily bruising depiction of the brutality of war for the losing side, a blood-spattered howl of despair from This is Zola’s Dunkirk—a compelling, sensorily bruising depiction of the brutality of war for the losing side, a blood-spattered howl of despair from the depths, where starved soldiers struggle through the mud for days and weeks to have their limbs blown off on behalf of power-crazed halfwits and brigands. One of the most vividly composed and historically accurate accounts of warfare ever written, a challenging, compulsively readable novel, one of the best in the Rougon-Macquart cycle....more
On a purely shallow level as a reader increasingly brainwashed by ten-part hour-long Netflix serials—one who craves the melodrama and propulsive plot On a purely shallow level as a reader increasingly brainwashed by ten-part hour-long Netflix serials—one who craves the melodrama and propulsive plot shenanigans of other Zolas—this instalment is a little more patience-testing than the others, a complex exploration of mid-1800s court politics where the machinations of the corrupt aristocratic political class are dissected with Zola’s trademark obsessive attention-to-detail....more
This is the twelfth instalment in the series I have pledged to complete by the end of the year every year since 2011. Pauline is whelped in the seasidThis is the twelfth instalment in the series I have pledged to complete by the end of the year every year since 2011. Pauline is whelped in the seaside house of various ailing hysterics, where her unassailable nature condemns her to a life of Agnes Wickfield-strength self-sacrifice as she struggles to prop up the lives of the least fortunate family in France. From the restless Lazare, who suffers from depression (not diagnosed in this novel, but apparent in 2022), and becomes obsessed with the encroaching void, to the love-rival Louise, who later participates in a breeched birth that would make the cast of The Knick squeamish, to the gout-ridden Uncle Chanteau whose agonising screams resound for the entirety of the novel, to the cash-strapped Auntie Chanteau, who is the second character to thrash around in bed in the throes of illness for 20+ pages, to the cat and the dog, one of whom gets out of the novel alive, this is Zola on steroids. One of Zola’s more personal, smaller-scale works, no less stuffed with melodrama and enormous howls of unrelenting human suffering, in Pauline Zola has a character whose zest for life makes the title seem less like a darkly comic joke, and reminds us how brilliant it is to be born in the age of effective medicine....more
Surreal corporate satire wherein a powerful French company is undermined by circulars excoriating their operandi. A deadpan farce that exposes the polSurreal corporate satire wherein a powerful French company is undermined by circulars excoriating their operandi. A deadpan farce that exposes the polite menace lurking beneath predatory capitalism. This is René-Victor Pilhes’s only work in English translation. ...more
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