EDWARD GAUVIN

Among this novel’s many stunning delights: A cruise ship turned into a Maoist reeducation colony. A deliberately mad-scientist embryonic growth accelerator. A lobotomized mangrove. A utopian crusader with bodyguards who grew up reading her exploits mythologized in comic books, and a failed Ph.D. candidate (philosophy) who commits adultery with a clone of Joan of Arc: these two, locked in a Pygmalion-and-Galatea romance, trading places as maker and made. Largehearted and savage, untiringly surprising, a book that seems at once to flaunt its erudition and not to take it seriously: an ideally beguiling combination.

“Intrigued by the lurid poster, I suggested that we sample Motherhood Comes to the Holy Father. We slipped into the theater, taking care not to annoy the actor or disturb the other audience members, and assumed our seats. I quickly became absorbed in a situation of transcendent tastelessness. Through the machinations of a Wiccan sisterhood, Pope John Paul II had awoken one morning to find himself burdened with an unsolicited uterus and a concomitant unplanned pregnancy. Happily for the supreme pontiff, his silk robe billowed so broadly that his condition, like the fifteen Rosary mysteries, remained obscure. I could not imagine how Londa had obtained the tissue sample, and I did not want to know. The present scene was set in a Vatican clinic. Having dropped beseechingly to his knees, the pontiff was begging an audio-animatronic doctor to give him an abortion. A queasiness spread through me—political theater was one thing, feminist Grand Guignol starring reincarnated ecclesiastics quite another—and I politely told Londa that I wished to see no more. As we exited the theater, the Vatican physician presented the pope with a brochure touting the virtues of adoption.”

This Thursday at the West Village’s Cornelia St. Cafe, as part of their monthly reading series, the French Publishers’ Agency will be featuring, from the collection Le Kiosque et le tilleul (The Pavilion and the Linden), Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s short story “Icare sauvé des cieux” (“Icarus Saved from the Skies”) in the original and my translation, which first appeared last year in Fantasy & Science Fiction. If you’re in NYC, a great chance to grab a glass of red in a nice ambiance and get acquainted with the author’s work before Small Beer debuts his book.

French Night Series at Cornelia Street Cafe
Please join us for an hour of contemporary and classic French literature, read in translation and in the original.

Dimanche by Irène Némirovsky
Le Kiosque et le tilleul by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud
Saisons Sauvages by Kettly Mars

Thursday, 22 April from 6-7 pm
Cornelia St. Café (29 Cornelia St. between Bleecker and West 4th)
$7 cover includes one drink

Lucinda Karter, host

Publishers Weekly gives the upcoming A Life on Paper these nifty kudos:

These 22 curious tales verging on the perverse will strike new English readers of Châteaureynaud’s work as a wonderful find. Beautiful prose featuring ingenuous protagonists and clever, unexpected forays into horror are the hallmarks of these mischievous stories. The husband of the title tale, reeling from the untimely loss of his much younger wife, tries to capture her essence in their daughter, whom he photographs obsessively. By the time of the daughter’s untimely death, there are 93,284 photographs. “The Pest” chronicles the narrator’s tireless attempts to rid himself of his odious doppelgänger, even setting up his own suicide. A doctor interviews a decapitated head in “La Tête” and vows to help put it out of its misery. Châteaureynaud is tremendously skillful at setting up disorienting stories with convincing details and characters, as evidenced in “The Styx,” narrated by a dead man who assists at his own burial ceremony a little too importunately, until he’s pushed out of the moving hearse. Translator Gauvin does a fine job of harnessing the nervous, thrilling feel of these tales. (June)

There are actually 23 stories in the collection: in the ARCs, one was missing (“The Pest,” in fact) from the table of contents. This tickles me, as though some subtle perceptual discrepancy that rights itself on scrutiny only to sneak into error again the second that, satisfied, we look away. Not to be recognized by the table of contents is somehow to have vanished into a pocket of nonexistence. Some part of me wishes we could release a limited flub run, if only to puzzle and challenge, but perhaps such a book sounds more like Perec. When I bought the hardcover of The Corrections (first printing), there was an erratum slip tucked into the title page to the effect that two pages in the four hundred thirties had swapped places.

You’ll catch me spinnin’ and scratchin’ at that hotspot of contemporary translation matters, Open Letter’s Three Percent, also known as “the threep.” First post is live. Ch-ch-ch-check it, yo.

The Chattahoochee Review, Dunwoody, GA
Excerpt from The River Will Kill the White Man by Patrick Besson (Fall 2010)
France Fiction, New York, NY
Excerpt from First Love (Le premier amour) by Véronique Olmi (April 2010)
PEN America, New York, NY
Excerpt from A Game for Swallows (Le Jeu des Hirondelles) by Zeina Abirached (forthcoming)
Tin House, Portland, OR
“The Baker’s Son” (Le fils du boulanger) by Maurice Pons (December 2010)
Words Without Borders, New York, NY
“Retour Imaginaire” by Atiq Rahimi (April 2010)

Archaia Comics is back in action–well, they have been for at least a year, and batting a thousand, as this recent Publisher’s Weekly article proves. I am told I am in no way sharing breaking news by saying the three series I translate–Hub’s samurai and demon hunting Okko, Matz & Jacamon’s hit man noir The Killer, and Pecau & Kordey’s epic arcane conspiracy The Secret History–are back on track. I just spent the last few days wrapping the first half of Okko: The Cycle of Air and Book 11 of The Secret History. I’ve also just delivered the first four issues of the new series of The Killer.  (For Matz-Jacamon fans, there’s also a new series of theirs in the works that’s in my to-do pile.) These aren’t the spoilers you’re looking for… move along. Soon enough these fine books will be available in stores near you.

Ça déborde un peu par ici.

Bless the crew at Small Beer, who are holding a wee giveaway of Advance Review Copies of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s A Life on Paper. For anyone just tuning in, this book of stories spanning the career of this major French fabulist, selected and translated by yours truly, is due out in May. Only your enthusiasm can make it the event the author merits. Head on over to Small Beer’s Not a Journal blog; it’s easy to enter: “post something interesting about you, France, French things (not Freedom Fries, but anything else goes) in the comments and in a week or so we’ll randomly pick five and reward them with an advance review copy which we hope you the happy winner will dive into and enjoy the way we have and maybe even go on TV and rave about it in a bouncing-on-the-couch-aliens-told-me-to-do-it fashion that gets talked about for years after. Ok? Ok!”

by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levy, and Charles Osborne (1967)

“Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving.” ~ Coleridge

On Hamlet: “There is a fatality in public taste which, faced with an author so ineffably great that he cannot be ignored, often contrives to pick on and treat as ‘central’ his weakest or nearly weakest work.”

On “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”: “The reason Wordsworth writes of daffodils and clouds as though he had never really set eyes on either of them is that he is an essentially baroque artist, to whom flowers are invisible unless transmuted into precious metal and to whom clouds are merely what sweep apparitions down on the astounded beholder.”

On Pickwick Papers: “Pickwick Papers appears to have been written in a series of jerkily spasmodic bouts of inane euphoria.”

On Walt Whitman: “Footnote: Was it not Walt who posed for a photograph of himself with a butterfly lovingly fluttering on his index finger? The butterfly was discovered to be a dead one, mounted on a ring the poet was wearing.”

On Mark Twain: “It is a vision which can be achieved only by that ruthless dishonesty which is the birthright of every sentimentalist… With these literary standards there really is no hope for sivilization.” » Read the rest of this entry «

Unlike the year before, I compiled the 2009 list less from hope of starting conversation than for reasons of internal housekeeping. Last year’s list is really pretty thin, less than a book a week on average and many of them short; I’ve already read half as many books in the first two months of this year. I can’t account for this meagreness, except to hope I read a lot of short stories I didn’t keep track of, and to cite six summer weeks where I read only the work of Clarion contemporaries. Yet again, I’ve been less than scrupulous about listing graphic novel reads, though a few are grouped at the bottom.

Again, the rules: this doesn’t count books I re-read, books I read ¾ of and abandoned, or essay and story collections I dipped into once, twice, or repeatedly, but failed to finish cover to cover. Nothing’s here unless I read, for better or for worse, every word. That means excluding many fine books I wanted to pore over more closely, and at greater length, prolonging the pleasure so to speak, and collections where, for one reason or another, I left a few stories unread. Similarly, however, if I began reading a story collection the previous year, but didn’t finish it until this year, it appears here. » Read the rest of this entry «