I must have missed the part about a dying sister in my reading. I thought Lucie was the least interesting character and I skimmed through her sections. Well, apart from Blake who was just abhorrent.
Overall, I think it was a wild but enjoyable ride. I finished it in half a day as my library copy is due today and I didn’t have a moment to sit with it till yesterday.
The third iteration of the plane coming in to land was creepy but so also was the President’s decision. I was reminded of Groundhog Day, the same plane will continue to appear till something goes right? Was that Le Tellier’s intent? That moment as he describes in the end, is a scary concept for me.
I was also angry about what happens to the two young actress wannabes. It scares me that people are so willing to kill innocents for the sake of their beliefs.
The book made me think and made me worry about the future.
I liked the message on Professor Miller’s t-shirt ‘I Zero, one and Fibonacci’. That seemed to be the perfect way to describe him — clearly his physical presence wasn’t one that made an impression, as he reminds various people of various American actors.
The parting quip from the head of protocol as he hands Miller his autographed WH sweatshirt was pricelessly funny.
Don’t worry, Professor. We gave him a water-based pen, it’ll come out in the first wash
I didn’t understand the ending of the last paragraph, the words that had letters missing — I couldn’t read it all. Possibly it was just a stratagem to show us that that particular moment was critical, as in the moment when our future gets decided? Anybody have an explanation?
It’s a calligram - which is a wordplay in which the text is in a shape suggested by the words, in this case I think pretty clearly an hourglass. But it’s been made tricky, by leaving out some letters of the words to create the shape.
The French version according to the Wikipedia article thinks it probably reads (when you fill in the missing letters): “et la tasse à café rouge de marque Illy dans la main de Victor Miesel et le diamant noir sur la bague d’Anne Vasseur” (Literally the red cup of copy with the Illy brand in the hand of Victor Miesel and the black diamond on the Anne Vasseur’s ring." Then it gets pretty obscure. There are the letters u.l.c.é.r.a.t.i.o.n.s which almost certainly refer to a brochure by George Perec which was the first publication of the Ouilipienne writer’s group. It definitely ends sable fin (sand end) which is not quite the same as “barely perceptible white noise dust end”, but I think gets the same idea across.
A lot of people think that the world ended because of shooting down the third plane. Mankind failed the test and we were indeed a computer simulation. I think it’s also possible to just say that since the book we are reading might well be the book Victor Miesel wrote, that it’s just his way of playing games with us.
Wow, that is extremely helpful!
Thank you! Well done !
I kept thinking we might be reading victor’s book -
I knew the existence of a Chinese plane, would mean more planes were coming.
A relevant, timely part of the book was about humanity accepting these awful things, doing nothing. His example was “ climate change” - we assimilate this horror into our world. And, accept it.
All I could think about during that passage, was gun control, as a society we can’t do what clearly other countries have done !
Why America. Why can’t we act?
The hour glass means time is running out ? Again, the coffee- what is significant about the red Illy cup is it an iconic symbol to the French ?
“ Illy was the world’s first company to receive the Responsible Supply Chain Process (RSCP) certification of sustainability awarded by the Det Norske Veritas(DNV).[10]L
You know a great cup of coffee for me is truly a moment of bliss
That’s funny, I can think of verbal ways to suggest what is written on the page. Like getting quieter and quieter for example. Audiobooks do occasionally have their disadvantages, I remember reading a novel that was based on the author’s family history (Cane River), it turned out the paper version was full of photographs that I would have liked to know were there. It seemed to me they should have been included with the CDs.
@VeryHappy, I got a kick out of your comment, because you are exactly the reader that Victor’s editor was worried about!
The Anomaly that we are reading is Victor June’s book – but it is not the book The Anomaly that Victor March wrote. (This is some of the head-spinning fun that Hervé Le Tellier has with us.)
In the end it will have a short title, only one word. Sadly, The Anomaly is already taken. He doesn’t try to explain, but to bear witness in simple terms. He has narrowed it down to just eleven characters and senses that, unfortunately, even this is too many. His editor begged him, Please Victor, it’s too complicated, you’ll lose readers, simplify it, do some pruning, cut to the chase. But Victor did as he pleased. He opens the novel vigorously, with a Mickey Spillane-type pastiche about a character who remains a mystery to virtually everyone. No, no, it’s not literary enough for a first chapter, Clémence criticized, When are you going to stop playing games? But Victor’s more playful than ever (p. 385).
I really enjoyed the games, but I haven’t figured them all out yet!
I wonder what the one-word title is that Victor ultimately chose. I suspect the answer is buried in the story somewhere.
Since McGuire Air Force Base, Fort Dix and the Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst eventually merged into Joint Base McGuire–Dix–Lakehurst, maybe Le Tellier took an erroneous short cut or maybe it was Commander Markle’s error (since the Hindenburg thought is in his head).
I couldn’t get over how much of the novel was America-centered – everything from Princeton University to Central Park to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert to a Virginia Baptist church to the Oval Office. It’s a French novel that’s both a critique and a satire of American culture – and I can’t even be irritated because it’s spot-on in a lot of ways.
I know his reference is to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but for what it’s worth, Area 42 is the top secret government base in the video game, “Destroy All Humans!”
The June versions of Lucie Bogaert and André Vannier DO stay together!
The boy doesn’t mind that his “other” mother, Lucie June, is pregnant. The center of gravity of that Lucie’s life has shifted so far in the space of a few months that the unimaginable has become possible. Are you sure? asked André June, feeling happy and anxious in equal measure. Yes, she really is sure. It’s a new pivotal point, and a sort of revenge on this fate. She never called Raphaël again, and no other casual lover has taken his place (p. 388).
This shift opens us to the idea that one’s destiny is not fixed. We may not be able to conquer the physical illnesses that plague us (e.g. David Markle’s cancer), but we can salvage our relationships if we have the right tools (in this case, some good advice from André March to André June).
Right you are @Mary13 !!! the bases merged in 2009, , I didn’t know!!!
. I was really dazzled with the author’s details, and depth of information about so many varied topics, it bothered me Fort Dix was commingled wiht Lakehurst in his novel ( maybe 20 miles apart) !
Thanks for pointing this out, didn’t even bother to fact check this detail.
“ Joint Base McGuire–Dix–Lakehurst (JB MDL) is a United States military facility located 18 miles (29 km) southeast of Trenton, New Jersey. The base is the only tri-service base in the United States Department of Defense and includes units from all six armed forces branches.
It was established in accordance with congressional legislation implementing the recommendations of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission. The legislation ordered the consolidation of the three facilities which were adjoining, but separate military installations, into a single joint base, one of 12 formed in the United States as a result of the law.”
Had to find out ore about the group oulipo, Herve is the president…………
Wiki
“ Oulipo was founded by a group of men in 1960 and it took 15 years before the first woman was allowed to join; this was Michèle Métail who became a member in 1975 and has since distanced herself from the group.[7][8] Since 1960 only six women have joined Oulipo,[8][9] with Clémentine Mélois last to join in June 2017.[10]
Queneau’s Exercices de Style is the recounting ninety-nine times of the same inconsequential episode, in which a man witnesses a minor altercation on a bus trip; each account is unique in terms of tone and style.
Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes is inspired by children’s picture books in which each page is cut into horizontal strips that can be turned independently, allowing different pictures (usually of people: heads, torsos, waists, legs, etc.) to be combined in many ways. Queneau applies this technique to poetry: the book contains 10 sonnets, each on a page. Each page is split into 14 strips, one for each line. The author estimates in the introductory explanation that it would take approximately 200 million years to read all possible combinations.
Perec’s novel La disparition, translated into English by Gilbert Adair and published under the title “A Void”, is a 300-page novel written without the letter “e”, an example of a lipogram. The English translation, A Void, is also a lipogram. The novel is remarkable not only for the absence of “e”, but it is a mystery in which the absence of that letter is a central theme.
Singular Pleasures by Harry Mathews describes 61 different scenes, each told in a different style (generally poetic, elaborate, or circumlocutory) in which 61 different people (all of different ages, nationalities, and walks of life) masturbate.
“ I wanted to write an entertaining novel in the noble sense of the term; I constructed it to provide the reader with enjoyment, playing with the codes of American best-sellers by Stephen King and Michael Crichton, although without poking fun at them.” Rarely has a book been so aptly named. Truly ambitious and devilishly efficient, this novel bound by discreet constraints blends metaphysics, science, and pop literature, making it an anomaly on the French literary scene.”
“ Hervé Le Tellier had the idea for this story starting in flight AF006 from Paris to New York. “This is a symbolic flight for the French people of my generation who were teenagers in the 1970s and 1980s, but it no longer has much meaning globally. I used it as a game, interplaying my own memories and the American collective imagination.” An avid reader since he was a child, as he recounts in All Happy Families , Hervé Le Tellier confesses to having a longstanding obsession with America and a closeness to the English language. “I have read a lot of Philip Roth, Richard Ford, and Jim Harrison; a whole generation on the brink of disappearing.”
An avid reader since he was a child, as he recounts in All Happy Families , Hervé Le Tellier confesses to having a longstanding obsession with America and a closeness to the English language. “I have read a lot of Philip Roth, Richard Ford, and Jim Harrison; a whole generation on the brink of disappearing.”
Well that explains why the novel is so America-focused. Almost sounds like he could have done the translation himself – but he and Adriana Hunter seem to work as a team; she has already translated five of his books.
This is a really interesting interview with them about the process (and pitfalls) of translation.
You participated in the “L’Auberge du lointain” at the International College of Literary Translators in Arles from May 10 to 14, 2021. Was the time you spent in discussion with your translators an opportunity to discover your novel from new angles?
Hervé Le Tellier: We had created a shared electronic document beforehand so I had already received a lot of feedback from the translators. They helped me identify certain inconsistencies I had not noticed, as The Anomaly is a highly constructed book, which multiplies the possibility of errors. Every time the shared document was revised, I modified the French version of the book that was doing better all the time, which meant there were regular reprints. This exercise reveals the extent to which a French author is French. Without actually realising it, we tend to include in our books a large number of things that are part of our culture. So I had to explain some parts of the text, or discuss certain forms that are present in the novel, although I wasn’t really aware of them. For example, we spent a long time discussing the first sentence: “Tuer quelqu’un, ça compte pour rien”, translated by Adriana as “It’s not the killing, that’s not the thing”, which has a large number of phonetic, rhythmic and syntactical characteristics that are specific to detective novels.
Adriana Hunter: With regard to the elements specific to French culture, it can easily get very complicated. Should you replace the French reference with a reference that would work better for English readers? Or should you explain the French reference? In the field of translation you constantly have to compromise.
Also, The Anomaly deftly circles the Oulipian style without plunging in:
Hervé Le Tellier:The Anomaly is not an experimental novel, otherwise I would have pushed the different genres to their limits. I wanted to focus on readability: the genres are visible, but not radically so. Adriana is right when she says the text has a certain hue, but it is not strongly coloured, in order to avoid dispersal and focus on the suspense.
He chose not to reveal the text from which he had gradually removed certain words, opening up possibilities for inve ntion for each translator, as for readers–a very Oulipian approach.
Zero, one and Fibonacci’. That seemed to be the perfect way to describe him — clearly his physical presence wasn’t one that made an impression, as he reminds various people of various American actors.
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