Wednesday, March 27

Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly Review: High Concept Thrills | Fiction in translation


In the first chapter of this novel, a hitman says to himself: “Nobody realizes how much hitmen owe Hollywood screenwriters.” But how does the author know? The throwaway joke, coupled with a shameless obsession with verbally reenacting and naming the real-time television drama staging, is typical of the effervescent joy of the book. Hervé Le Tellier, after all, is the current president of Oulipo, the French “potential literature workshop” whose previous teachers included Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec. And what he has done here would delight his ancestors with its paradoxical nature: He has written a bestseller of Oulipan, a Prix Goncourt winning novel that has already sold a million copies on the continent.

Each chapter in the first section of the book features a different cast member, primarily French or American, in a different novelistic or television style (cleverly handled in Adriana Hunter’s clever translation). After hitman Blake, we meet a writer, Victor Miesel, followed by film editor Lucie, architect André, musician Slimboy, six-year-old Sophie and her pet frog, lawyer Joanna, and mathematicians Adrian and Meredith. Victor’s story is a hilariously deadpan satire on the Parisian literary scene: his two unsuccessful novels boast the titles The Mountains Will Come to Find Us and Failures that Missed the Mark, while also “translating entertaining bestsellers into English. that reduce literature to the status of minor art for minors ”. (He begins work on a book called The Anomaly, because of course he does.)

Other paintings are both funny and poignant: Slimboy is a Nigerian pop star who wonders if he can come out as gay; David is diagnosed with aggressive cancer; André and Lucie were once an element, but not anymore. Adrian and Meredith are flirting drunk at a college party at MIT, where “there’s some tequila in the Turing room, in the closet behind the markers.” Here’s Meredith considering Adrian: “For a statistician, he’s a dreamer. He has green eyes that make him look like a number theorist, though he has long hair like a game theorist, and he wears the little steel-rimmed Trotskyizing glasses of a logician and the old holed t-shirts of an algebraist. “

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It has been a bravery of 100 pages of introductions and emotional or comic complications before the conceptual inciting event occurs. Air France Flight AF006 from Paris to New York emerges from the turbulence of an unexpected storm in the face of air traffic control baffling, and is redirected to a secret military base. Why? Because it is exactly the same flight that already landed at JFK after emerging from a storm three months ago. Not just the same flight number, but the same plane, with the same people on it. And guess what unites all the characters we’ve met so far. There are now two copies of Blake, Victor, Lucie, Joanna, and everyone else except Adrian and Meredith, who are instead brought in to consult the American government on what this might mean, while the intruders are kidnapped in a movie from Hollywood. hangar.

Ultimately, the confidence of the assembled brains (you would cast Jeff Goldblum in one take) decides that the most likely explanation is that we all live in a simulation. Not like The Matrix, where humans are real but enslaved by machines; instead, we ourselves are nothing more than computer programs running in a grand simulation overseen by an alien civilization of unimaginable technological capacity. The geeks explain this with reference to the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “Simulation Plot”, although something very similar was a pangalactic religion known as “The Truth” in the science fiction universe of Iain M Banks.

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However, if it is true, what does this sudden doubling of a plane full of people mean? Maybe it’s a test, the characters suppose. How will humanity know if it has failed? While the intelligence and military types discuss the draw, the rest of the novel follows the characters as, in different situations, they meet their stuntmen. Would you share your life with the person who also thinks you are? Would you claim them as a long lost twin? Or would they have to disappear?

After a suitably playful ending, we are left with a secondary echo, a feat of fiction informed by other fictions. Le Tellier describes a world flattened by the unbearable lightness of representation (where some still remember a time “when too many photos had not yet killed photos”). Are you cunningly saying that the great god Netflix has become the default way of interpreting the world? In any case, it seems appropriate that the film adaptation rights to the novel have already been sold. The Anomaly has emerged from television; to television must return.

Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, translated by Adriana Hunter, is published by Michael Joseph (£ 14.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Shipping charges may apply.


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