booklit

When Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was named laureate for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, I was like many others in wondering who? His standing in English speaking nations, save for a couple of low profile translations in the States, was practically non-existant. And this is an author who has published over forty books since his 1963 debut. It’s been a frustrating wait, then, for publishers in the UK to rush release some backlist titles into print. No doubt translators up and down the country are soldiering away at more of his works.

The citation of Le Clézio, by the Swedish Academy, described him as “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”- a soup of intrigue, hinting at so much while retaining a cryptic aura. Having looked at the rereleased titles, Terra Amata (1968) seemed to best fit the citation. In fact, it doesn’t so much fit as describe it.

Terra Amata concerns itself with life on earth. It’s the story of Chancelade, looking at his unremarkable life and capturing all the detail and adventures he overlooked.

You’d never done playing all the games there were. A prisoner on the flat face of the earth, standing on your two legs with the sun beating down on your head and the rain falling drop by drop, you had all these extraordinary adventures without really knowing where you were going. A pawn - you were no more than a pawn on the giant chess-board, a disc that the expert invisible hand moved about in order to win the incomprehensible game.

The narrative drops by special points in Chancelade’s life, following from young boy to old man, then pushing beyond. We see the young Chancelade playing in the garden, God to a number of beetles. (”When the boy realized that he was the potato-bugs’ god, with absolute power of life and death over them, he decided to act.”) and teaching them a lesson. We experience his father’s death, follow his sexual development, witness him becoming a father, and ache with his old age.

Le Clézio’s delivery is a hyperreal tour de force, lush and dense, designed to obverload the senses. His focus is on the minute, regularly picking up on grains of sand, pebbles on beaches, and insects in their nests, inverting the microscopic worlds they inhabit to cosmic concerns. Questions of life and death occur, Chancelade occasionaly wrestling with his own mortality, echoes of which appear in the cigarettes he regularly smokes:

It was a perfect action, beautiful as a play. A tragic action. It had a beginning, when the spurting flame met the cigarette. A development, with unity of time, place and action. And when the cigarette was finished, the same hand that had lit it put it swiftly to death, crushing it against the side o the ashtray. And it was really rather as if you were dead yourself, extinguished, suffocated in your own ash, your inside quietly spilling out of your skin of torn paper.

What’s interesting about Le Clézio’s prose is that he is able to capture a new slant on looking at things. In life, everything is an adventure to be embraced full on. He sees objects strewn around as potential communiques between other entities - between men, animals, and the inanimate forces of nature. There’s a language in everything, and we see Chancelade explore this idea in some brief, yet tedious, episodes of Morse code, sign language, and a babelian stew of words.

While much is made of our time on earth, and how little we fully appreciate it, Le Clézio goes beyond humanity, exploring tens of thousands of years ahead to an enjoyable section in a museum, speculating about how we will be remembered, surprisingly quashing humankind’s achievements in favour of guesswork from archaeological digs, much like the conjecture about the real Terra Amata site in France.

Maldec man seems to have lived in communities, in tall concrete houses divided into rooms. His was essentially a working and fetishist civilization. Wars were frequent and deadly, as is proved by certain burial-places recently discovered. These wars were probably due to to racial or religious differences. The civiliation of Maldec man was also ritual, nationalist, and based on the family. It thus belongs to the polymorphic pre-desertic period, which lasted about 5,000 years. It may be that Maldec man was contemporary with the beginning of the great drought which occurred at that time and which caused his civilization to disappear.

Terra Amata, while living up to the aforementioned citation, is perhaps overlong. At just over two hundred pages, it easily feels like three or four hundred. The detail Le Clézio plunges into is often startling and wondrous, but there’s the feeling that he’s retreading the same ideas on occasion, just presenting them differently. There’s a metafictional thread running through the novel, especially evident in the prologue and epilogue, which brought to mind Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, but doesn’t really bring much to the story itself.

Where Terra Amata succeeds is in holding up a candle to the possibilities of nature, to the potential of life. You may as well use it since you are going to lose it anyway, is the message. Big questions are asked, with no answers forthcoming. Who needs answer, though, when the possibilities are endless? So endless that…

… on the other side of infinity there may be a world just like this one only as if reflected in an enormous mirror: a world where light is black and ants are white and the earth is soft and the sea hard as a slab of marble. A world where the sun is a sooty dot in the sky and volcanoes belch torrents of muddy ice. A world in which you start by dying and end by being born, with the clock-hands all turning frantically backwards. And somewhere in the middle of a big town built downwards into the earth there lives a man perhaps with eyes that look inwards into his head. And perhaps this man has a strange name that can only be said by stopping speaking. Edalecnahc.

While Terra Amata can be reduced to two words - carpe diem - it works because it carries with it the force of infinite experiences. Le Clézio may be an “author of new departures” but he’s also the author of new arrivals on my book shelves.

One of the most famous works by the French writer, Raymond Queneau, is Exercises In Style (1947), a fiction with the slightest of plots. So slight, the whole story can be summarised in a few sentences, and it wouldn’t be a spoiler to say that the narrator boards the ‘S’ bus, spots a minor conflict between one man - noting particularly his long neck and odd hat - and another passenger, spotting him again two hours later getting advice on a button for his overcoat. Yes, that slight.

It’s not, however, the story that matters as much as the conceit of the book. As the title implies, the book is a series of experiments, taking the same story over and over and presenting it in no less than ninety-nine different ways. To other writers it seems there’s a certain attraction to it, what with some well known writers translating and adapting the book to their own tongue, notably Umberto Eco (to Italian), Patrik Ouředník (to Czech), and Danilo Kiš, to (Serbian).

In her foreword, the translator Barbara Wright notes that the idea came to Queneau after attending a performace of Bach’s The Art Of Fugue. (”What particularly struck Queneau about this piece was that, although based on a rather slight theme, its variations ‘proliferated almost to infinity.’ It would be interesting, he thought, to create a similar work of literature.”) She also notes that although he stopped at ninety-nine exercises, a later French edition went on to list a further 140 potential exercises.

Each exercise comes with a title descriptive of the stylistic challenge. These offer up a range of different ideas, many representing linguistic ideas such as parachesis, with others forcing more wide ranging constrictions, such as the consistent use of metaphors, colours, or medical terms. One such exercise, Retrograde, tells the story in reverse:

You ought to put another button on your overcoat, his friend told him. I met him in the middle of the Cour de Rome, after having left him rushing avidly towards a seat. He had just protested against being pushed by another passenger who, he said, was jostling him every time anyone got off. This scraggy young man was the wearer of a ridiculous hat. This took place on the platform of an S bus which was full that particular midday.

In the production of so many variations Queneau has obviously had a great deal of fun and the humour flows through the whole book. The premise of Precision has the story told with an over the top level of detail (”In a bus of the S-line, 10 metres long, 3 wide, 6 high, at 3km. 600m from its starting point, loaded with 48 people, at 12.17 p.m…”) while the brilliance of Homeoptotes is in the repetition of a single sound (”On a certain date, a corporate crate on which the electorate congregate when they migrate at a great rate, late…”).

When the exercises work with a simple idea the effect can be witty and varied enough to maintain interest. However, there are times when the exercise looses any sense of coherence and it becomes hard to wonder at the benefit of writing in that particular style. A series of exercises presenting the story in permutations of letter seems meaningless and undecipherabl, like in this opening paragraph using permutations of two letters:

Ed on to ay rd wa id sm yo da he nt ar re at pl rm fo an of us sb aw is ou ay ma ng ho nw ne se wa ck oo st ng lo dw an wa ho ea sw ng ri at ah th wi la ap ro it dt un sa he me.

Even if an exercise confuses, and some certainly do, the brevity of them ensures that a new idea is just a page turn away. One of the longest, Opera English, presents the story in two acts with all the pomposity of the art, while one of few flirtations with poetic forms sees, in Haiku, the story told in the most concise of details:

Summer S long neck

plait hat toes abuse retreat

station button friend

The exercises in this English translation sometimes adhere to the French originals, while others deviate from the mould. It would, as Wright notes, be a futile task to translate to English, an exercise already in English, and in this she is also party to the fun, freely lifting, as she admits, from Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners for an exercise in a West Indian dialect. As an example of Oulipo, it’s no wonder that Exercises In Style was the work Queneau most wanted to see translated - the potential for literature like this, in any language, helps achieve the proliferation almost to infinity that he initially set out to do.

In writing Exercises In Style, the hurdle in how to end it, to ensure a robust ninety-nine, must surely have been entertained by Queneau. After repeating the same story for page after page, be it as a sonnet, antiphrasis, or the triptych of prosthesis, epenthesis, and paragoge, it needs an acceptable conclusion and Queneau delivers a welcome twist, just the thing for an exercise titled Unexpected. Understandably, the book doesn’t add up to much, but as a document of how tackling a subject from myriad angles opens up a story to countless possibilities, it is indispensible.

It has been a couple of years since I first read Italo Calvino, picking up his wonderful if on a winter’s night a traveler on a whim and being captivated by its self-referential opening sentence. In the time since I’ve had a couple of half-hearted stabs at reading more (Invisible Cities and Mr. Palomar) but I’ve never really engaged with anything else. So, picking up The Castle Of Crossed Destinies (1977), I had my fingers crossed that it would be third time lucky for a resurrection in my Calvino interest.

The book is formed from two previously published collections, one named after this book, the other named The Tavern Of Crossed Destinies. In each Calvino delivers a series of short tales inspired by the laying out of tarot cards in horizontal and vertical patterns, interpreting them into the story, and with a print of each card, as they are evoked, running down the margins. It’s a wonderful idea, but despite its innovation I was never fully hooked.

The book is told within the frame of a disparate bunch staying a night in a castle and telling their stories through tarot cards, for they are mysteriously mute. The first series are based off tales, as Calvino thankfully notes in the afterword, from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which I would never have guessed. As it’s a literary experiment, the first two were solidly structured, while those that followed were given up to fate. After all, what matter the cards that fall? Especially when, as Calvino expertly illustrates, each of the seventy-eight tarot cards offers up a multitude of interpretations:

The narrator, in fact, had begun arranging other cards in a new row, beside the first, on the left; he set down two cards, The Empress and the Eight of Cups. The sudden change of scene disconcerted us for a moment; but the solution quickly asserted itself, I believe, to us all, and it was that the knight had finally found what he had been seeking, a wealthy bride of high lineage, such as we saw depicted there, a crowned head, indeed, with her family shield and her insipid face - also slightly older than he, as the more malicious amongst us surely noted - in a dress all embroidered in linked rings as if to say, “Marry me, marry me.” An invitation promptly accepted, since the Cups card suggested a wedding banquet, with two rows of guests toasting the couple at the end of the festooned table.

So what this first set brings to the page is a gathering of Renaissance archetypes - the alchemist, the knight, etc. - and in the end all these stories overlap, leading to a larger number of permutations of the cards as yet untold. The second section follows suit, this time interpreting the cards as they land on the table as a palimpsest of classic tales: of Faust; of Oedipus; de Sade’s Justine. And from there, onwards, as Calvino tries to tell his story, and further still into an entertaining take on Shakespeare’s tragedies - Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth - all told from the same cards.

As an experiment, the concept works well and brings innovation to fiction, but as a work of fiction, despite the lovely translation by William Weaver, it’s a lack-lustre affair. The wow factor has gone by the end of the first collection and one can thank the fates that the author didn’t make good on his notion to pen a third installment. But it’s great to see how Calvino works his way from a single image and ascribes several meanings to it, as if he’s tossing a coin and calling tales every time.