SPHINX
ANNE GARRÉTA (tr. Emma Ramadan)
Deep Vellum
$14.95 trade paper, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.
A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.
Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist and LGBT literary canon appearing in English for the first time.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: First-novel longueurs are here, but they are eclipsed by the astonishingly ambitious project that it represents. It's not a spoiler, or if it is it's already occurred in the blurb above, to say that a sexy novel about lovers written without any gender markers is a very different challenge in English than in French, a very strictly gendered language.
Translator Ramadan took a trait that eased Author Garréta's trajectory to accomplish this complex feat, the use of a grammatical tense that English does not have and that makes the speaker sound ever so pretentious, and then she runs with its effect on the prose.
Soul heavy from too much knowing, body tired from feeling pensive and powerless at the same time, so riven by this obsessive ennui that nothing, or almost nothing, can distract from it anymore. Back then, if I recall correctly, I used to describe the world as a theater where processions of corpses danced in a macabre ball of drives and desires. My contempt and ennui did not, however, keep me from observing how this dance dissolved into an amorous waltz. Languid nights at the whim of syncopated rhythms and fleeting pulses; the road to hell was lit with pale lanterns; the bottom of the abyss drew closer indefinitely; I moved through the smooth insides of a whirlwind and gazed at deformed images of ecstatic bodies in the slow, hoarse death rattle of tortured flesh.
That is, I thiink you'll all agree with me, pretty mannered writing. I like it, but then I would; the semi-colons, the layering of clauses...well! My Christmas came early with this read! It felt like I was reading a good translation of Proust.
Yes, that is so a compliment.
What shines through in this croquembouche of a story is the way that eliminating the simple fact of gender enables a love story, a passionate, consummated love story, to take on layers of meaning that otherwise wouldn't be available to readers. It enables the narrator to muse on the unsuitability of their fellow theology student, a man, as a target for a fling, a little light sexual fun...but because the fellow student is set on becoming a celibate priest, or because he is a man? It doesn't necessarily matter, but the two possibilities are very different even today. They were even moreso in the France of 1986.
And now we butt up against the one real issue I can see someone taking with this read: A***, lover of our narrator, is Black. It's a fact that we're made aware of, and that plays a significant role in the narrator's attraction to and arousal with A***'s body. I'm not quite convinced it's exoticization, in the fetishistic sense. It's present in the narrator's arousal, though I can't see that being any other way...after all, the object of one's lust is always possessed of traits and qualities that are arousing, including physical ones; and there is not a single thing about the narrator's other appraisals of A*** that suggest a less-than-genuine interest in all their facets. What is more troubling is that the ending is what it is. There is a racialized account of violence and the actions in question take place in Harlem. Granted that the book appeared in 1986 and that was a historically extra-violent time in Harlem, in New York, and in multiple other major US cities as the crack epidemic was reaching its peak.
Still, it's a thing that is present in the story and that could present a very different impression to a Person of Color. I give the information to you for your consideration. I lived in New York City at that time and was routinely very cautious for my personal safety, so it's permaybehaps down to my own familiarity with the milieu that prevents me from seeing it as anything but a reflection of the reality I lived here, and then.
I will say that what happened, and how it went down, knocked a star off my rating. My respect for the project of creating an ungendered love story that still contained passionate pleasure is undimmed. It's the manner in which Author Garréta chose to dismount the story-horse that did not meet with my whole-hearted approval.
Nothing is ever exactly as one would wish it to be, though, is it.
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IN CONCRETE
ANNE GARRÉTA (tr. Emma Ramadan)
Deep Vellum
$15.95 trade paper, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Garréta’s first new novel in a decade follows two young sisters who are dragged into one adventure after another when their father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to modernize every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sister, Poulette, is subsumed by concrete.
Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garréta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to modernize—or fundamentally undercut—the elasticity of communication.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I'm old enough to remember reading Zazie dans le Métro by Raymond Queneau during the early-1980s height of Valley-Girl speak. It was snortingly urged on me by an older film-school-attending friend, whose encounter with Queneau's 1959 breakout novel was prompted by seeing Louis Malle's 1960 film of the same title. He said that Queneau did it better than the Valley Girls. I was, after reading Barbara Wright's translation, inclined to agree.
So here's Anne Garréta pulling the same stunt as Queneau, her spiritual godparent and co-founder of Oulipo, to which organization she belongs, pulled sixty years before. Is that hommage or le plagiat? After chortlesnorting my way through In Concrete, I'll go with hommage and a darn funny one at that.
I'm not at all sure, to be honest, that our narrator is a sex-linked girl; there's nothing in the text that specifically says she is, and there's a certain je ne sais quoi to the narrative voice that leads me to wonder if she isn't trans. It just *feels* that way. And given Queneau's Zazie has impeccable gaydar, ascertaining Gabriel is queer in seconds flat and constantly offering him chances to own up to it (he's a married drag entertainer, so there's your ambiguity for you) which he declines repeatedly (it was 1959), it would fit well with Mme Garréta's presumptive model and her earlier project (see above) for this to be so but unsaid.
Anyway. Manic energy, fun little not-quite-right malapropisms in a precocious kid's foul mouth, a family life that (for once) is loving while still being supremely dysfunctional...and all just as French as bœuf bourguignon. Does that sound like fun? I did to me, and I'm delighted to report that Translator Ramadan delivers verbal pyrotechnics that land just right. I know they did in French, not from having read them...waaay too advanced for me!...but because they were lauded by French critics for their anarchic jubilance. Having them come anywhere close to the original is a major achievement. Though not a surprise, given the nature of her translation of Sphinx as a linguistic exercise in French coming through in English as well.
Here, try this piece:
Lucky, they say, are those to whom the favor of the gods—or if not the favor of the gods then paternal klutziness—grants the privilege of experiencing things that deserve to be scribed!
Lucky also, it seems, are those who are entrusted to scribe on the tablets the things that deserved to be recorded, such as paternal klutziness and lapidary scatastrophes!
And even luckier are those, like Poulette and me, who are given the double privilege of finding themselves encased in greasy mortar and feeding the koalas.
Yup, the koalas . . .
Don't ask me why koalas . . . Can't you see it snot a good time?!
As for klutziness, if you don't know what that is, let's just say to keep it short that it's the specialty of generals, of top brass and rulers. But snot just them. Klutziness worms its way into everything. No need to be a high roller to be swimming in it. Klutziness has no end, no limit, and it's within the reach of any ol' poodle.
Epic klutziness, imperial klutziness, the lurid panache of klutziness pushed to heroic apogee and even to entropic scatastrophe—I fear we're the last of the klutzes.
We're not the last, are we, but we might just be looking at 'em.
