Anne GarrétaKirja-arvosteluja

Clever wordplay without anything else snot literature to me, hens I'm happy to run away from this thing toot sweet. And I'm snot too sure its all that clever, either.

¡Nel tajo! cuenta, desde la mirada infantil, el caos progresivo provocado, en una familia popular, por un padre amante del bricolaje. Su mujer, afligida por las obsesivas empresas modernizadoras del patriarca, cocina y mantiene limpias a las hijas que hacen de peones en la obra. Ese padre es un puto desastre, se electrocuta continuamente, casi mata a la madre cayéndosele encima, destroza la hormigonera y derrama toda una carga de hormigón sobre su hija menor, la Pichoncita. Imaginará cincuenta soluciones para enderezar la situación pero, finalmente, abandona a las niñas para buscar socorro. Con estos mimbres, la autora lleva a cabo una perturbadora radiografía de nuestra sociedad actual en la que la familia se vuelve una estructura rígida, imposible, bastante grotesca y sin alternativa. Del mismo modo, acaba mostrándonos los mecanismos de su construcción y del posible derribo de sus fortificaciones sociales, físicas, públicas, políticas e íntimas.
¡Nel tajo! es pese a todo una novela hilarante en la que reina ese humor negro, absurdo, esperpéntico, que tanto nos recuerda a Alfred Jarry o Samuel Beckett. Es también un artefacto altamente explosivo lanzado contra esta sociedad fraguada en hormigón cultural de la peor calidad; un artefacto mediante el cual Anne F. Garréta denuncia ácidamente la brutalidad de nuestra cultura y de sus formas de dominación del inmigrante, el homosexual, el negro, el huérfano, el desheredado...
¡Nel tajo! nos ofrece además un festival pantagruélico de juegos literarios y pirotecnia verbal: bailan juntos los más variados registros y los más diversos guiños culturales, desde las canciones populares a la más alta poesía. La traducción busca reproducir en nuestra lengua-cultura la fuerza de la singularísima escritura del original en francés que golpea todas las convenciones literarias y sociales. Las entusiastas críticas que recibió esta última obra de Anne F. Garréta la relacionaron con la fundacional Zazie en el metro, de Raymond Queneau. Como en Queneau, aquí el lenguaje bulle, se resiste a la inmovilidad y arremete contra la parálisis de nuestras estructuras lingüísticas y, por extensión, de la sociedad occidental.

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.½

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 think 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.

A solid book and funny with its play on words. I am sure that I didn’t get everything that I was supposed to get from this book but overall I liked it. I’d like to know more about these sisters and their life.½

There is fun and clever wordplay in this novel which appeared on the 2022 Tournament of Books shortlist, but there was not much of a plot, and some of the jokes got tiresome quickly. Fortunately, it was a short book, or else I would have bailed. The part I liked best was the translator's notes at the end which I found especially interesting.

This is a novel made up almost entirely of wordplay, leaving no room, really, for a plot of any kind. And because the original wordplay was in French and the translated wordplay is in English, I suspect that the original and the translation are perhaps two very different books. I also suspect that there's some commentary here about rural France and, as indicated by the translator's note, about feminism that I'm just not catching. My loss?½

Why is translated fiction usually so weird? I can't puzzle this one out, plotwise. Some reminiscences while a girl's sister is stuck in a concrete pouring mishap because her family works with concrete. Why are children working with concrete? Is this a metaphor I'm missing? I liked the 'let's get medieval' barn battle... and stopping to greet the country dogs. Overall, this is a weird, fun, quick book but I can see the love for language here. As this is written in the Oulipo style, I'm sure many layers went over my head (but I would still like to see this book take down Sally Rooney in the upcoming Tournament of Books.) This book reminds me of a few... though when I mention other books it's usually to guide other readers to some other books they might like -- not really to directly compare them. Books to set on a shelf next to each other, if you will -- 'The Hearing Trumpet' by Leonora Carrington, 'Milkman' by Anna Burns, 'Oreo' by Fran Ross...maybe even 'The Tin Drum' by Gunter Grass. Just a few bizarro wacky favorites.
*Book #121/304 I have read of the shortlisted Morning News Tournament of Books competitors

This is a playful, word-bending comically absurd novel by French author Anne Garréta, and brilliantly translated by Emma Ramadan. Two girls living in the countryside with their shambolic father and timid mother have adventures, mostly involving their father's activities with laying cement. What is important aren't the hijinks, but the wordplay, which is rapid and full of references and allusions. It's a very clever book. I was delighted with this book as I started it, but as I continued to read, I eventually just got tired of it. There's no substance behind the gloss and I could only read so far before longing for some sort of emotional substance.½

The narrator here is a 12-year-old girl, who talks of life in Paris with her parents and younger sister during the school year, and then out in the French countryside with her grandparents in the summers.

But this book is less about the story than it is about the wordplay. The wordplay is amazing. The misuse of similar-sounding words, the use of a slight misspelling to serve two purposes ("gramma" in one sentence can be read as "grammar" or "grandma", for example). Spellings changed slightly to make the sound of another word inside a larger word. So many ways to play with words, and they are here. It is often funny as well as being smart.

But this is also a book in translation, from French. That this could be translated at all fascinates me. There is an 8-page note from the translator at the end, explaining how they approached it. Due to the sounds of French, there is a lot of basic sound wordplay that is missing. The translator worked closely with the author to understand the multiple layers of play within some of her sentences, and then tried to replicate the most within the English. I do wonder how alike the English and French really are? Why was this not longlisted for any translation prizes? Because this is amazing--unless it is actually very different?

So while this book is really quite funny, it is also rather sad in some ways.

While the girls are loved, their father is a bit of a piece of work. He is constantly doing construction projects, and tends to have "mishaps" due to his lack of knowledge about electricity, his inability to plan anything, the desire (or need?) to never buy anything, and his "good enough" attitude. He regularly runs out of gas in his car, shocks himself frequently, and so forth. Their mother sounds frustrated by this and tends to leave them alone. The grandmother sounds like the most stable person in their lives. The girls love their father's projects, and he includes them in everything. But it is like having a child in charge. He is sloppy and dangerous, as shown in the main plot point of the story. But the narrator also explains their father's background.

Also--won't concrete burn you if it cures/dries on your skin?

It was really good, but now I want to read it in french. Not because the translation was bad, or anything, but because I didn't realize just how much the constraint the author placed on herself shaped the story and now I'm curious for the details on how she did it. It's a shame almost everyone who reads this is going to have the constraint spoiled, I imagine it would be very surprising to realize what's going on.

between 1.5 and 2 stars. this was not what i expected, and i did like it better than i thought i would, but i'm still generally unimpressed. it's not awful or anything, and the writing throughout is good (and i do particularly like the use of all the parentheticals - so many it was hard to keep track sometimes) but it feels entirely a writing of vanity and something that will not stick with me at all. i've already forgotten most of the vignettes, even the ones i actually enjoyed (and there were a few of those). i do think it's impressive that a book about desire has so little sex in it. (but then funny that she says she was trying to satisfy "today's readers [who] demand entertainment, less philosophy and more boudoir." because really this is more philosophy and less boudoir, which is not what i expected, and which i thought i'd appreciate.

in the end this was both well done and entirely too flimsy for me. the second person perspective didn't work at all at all at all for me and probably colored my entire reading of the book. something like that can ruin an otherwise decent book and that might be the case for this one. (the explanation in the afterword of what the second person was supposed to have done also doesn't work for me. it's just wrong in this book. i wonder if i might have actually liked this had it been written honestly, and in the first person.) i am not turned off by her writing, she does have talent, and i'd be curious about what else she writes. but she might not be for me.

i do think, similarly, the idea of writing with constraints, that the oulipo group is apparently famous for, is also really interesting, and probably not for me. but i would be curious to see how more of their writers use those structures.

"...nothing ever happens to you except in remembering. You only grasp the moment in distant memory, once oblivion has given things, beings, events, the density that they never have in the broad experience of daylight."½

This was a satisfying read and I really liked how the use of language explored the nature of gender, though we get less about the actual relationship between the narrator and A*** than I was expecting--ultimately, it was more about the narrator and their whole process of being in this relationship and how they deal with the end of the relationship (I hope this isn't spoilers but it is a sad story). The afterword by the translator was also super helpful to me, a devout non-Francophile, for explaining what precisely the language is doing in the original, all working to illuminate why the narrator has a gloriously overblown vocabulary and bizarre syntax, even when talking about DJing in a Parisian nightclub.

One thing that stood out to me but didn't really develop very far in the story is how race influences the relationship. The narrator is white but somehow believes that their soul will someday become "black enough" for jazz and soul food. It was hard to say why this was important to the narrator--will it help them understand themselves better or will help them understand their beloved? All in all, not enough nuance on this topic at all. Gender is absent from the novel but racism isn't.

Anne Garreta's In Concrete is a deeply hilarious short novel from the point of view of a young teen who helps his father, along with his sister on various concrete pours. Garreta's novel is full of word play and allusions and the masterful translation by Emma Ramadam. The novel is, in part, a love note to language spoken and written. What Garreta and Ramadam have done here is, like Mark Twain, put the spoken word on the page. Garreta in her Oulipo-ian madness then takes the word play and language, from the point of view of the young narrator and embues him with literary superpowers. Throughout the novel is in equal parts: hilarious, touching, and a challenge. Challenge here to keep up with the translated puns and wordplay.

Most excellent. Highly recommend.

An experiment that could have easily been a tepid exploration instead soars, buoyed by electric writing that hurls the reader through the relationship as it unfolds.

A Blindness Brought on by Poststructural Theory

I found this book intensely annoying from the very first page.

Garreta is a member of Oulipo, and I understood from reviews that the book is experimental in an Oulipean sense. The reviews I read noted that she begins by setting out an Oulipean constraint, and then doesn't consistently follow it, which is a common Oulipean trait. Her subject is all the women she has loved or desired, and the self-imposed constraint is that she'll write about a different woman each day for the course of the project.

All that is common in Oulipean and other constrained writing, and I was curious to see how it played out here. She opens with an "Ante Scriptum," which begins with the dictum--common in poststructuralism, metafiction, and the Oulipo--that the project of writing is to "rid yourself of your self," meaning to demonstrate, in as many "intricate constructions" as possible, that the notion of the narrator is a fiction, and that the implied author is doubly so, that no self can be sleuthed behind the text. All these are commonplace beginnigs.

What was annoying was the way she positions herself (the author and the author) and her readers on that first page. She adopts a mock condescension:

"You [i.e., I] don't have the heart to tell them [the "few readers"] that no subject ever expresses itself in any narration. And besides, theywould refuse to believe this terrifying bit of news--we're still punch drunk on our little selves." (p. 3)

Notionally, the readers still posit Anne Garreta behind the texts signed in her name, and are still "drunk" enough on their vanities to go on desiring stories of desire. Bravely, she volunteers to put herself right in the center of the practices in which she has no belief:

"So you [i.e., I] have resolved... to pretend to step out onto the slippery slope that seems so natural these days and to subject yourself [myself, and my readers] to the discipline of confessional writing... You will play at a very old game that has become the hobbyhorse of a modernity balking at radical disenchantment: confession..." (pp. 3-4)

This is annoying because the pose here is that the author / narrator has entirely subscribed to "radical disenchantment," but she's going to "play" with the idea of narrating her desires, as if desires were the key to "our subjectivity," as if the narrator in the text that follows actually existed as a subject, not to mention a projection of the named author.

But this has to be entirely wrong. No reader I know, possibly excepting AI readers, is so thoroughly "disenchanted" that they do not see narrators as subjectivities, that they don't see representations of desire as attempts to elucidate subjectivity, that they don't understand narrators as intricately implicated with their authors. I like conceptual poetry as much--maybe after the fall of American conceptualism, more--as anyone, but I do not fit the portrait she paints so glibly and condescendingly.

For me, a first page like this one puts the author in question (and therefore also the narrator). I don't believe Garreta believes in the kind of disenchantment she claims. The truth has to be closer to what the reviewers have noted: this is a book about love and desire, and its degrees of fictionalization or constraint are not relevant to that fact. The reason Garreta sets rules for herself is to "play," as she says, but not in the way she intends it in the line I quoted. She's not "playing" by reconceptualizing old-fashioned narratives of desire as "intricate constructions." She's writing old-fashioned narratives of desire slightly deformed by playfully "intricate constructions."

I wrote all that before I read past the bottom of the second page. I thought it was important to register my absolute non-assent with regard to the opening voice of the book, and my possibly irreparate alienation from the narrative voice that the text s lightheartely and "playfully" proposes. I am an alienated reader from the outset.

*

Now I've read the entire book: twelve stories about desire, love, and love affairs; and a "Post Scriptum" in which the author again speaks for herself.

The "Ante Scriptum" continues with a surprisingly long list of self-imposed rules. In my enumeration:

1. "Not one day without a woman" (that is: each day she'll write about one love affair)
2. Strict fidelity the "the unwinding of memory" (no artificial composition)
3. Five hours per day, "no more, no less"
4. Seven days a week
5. Written in the order in which they come to mind
6. No pen (the book ends by acknowledging the Apple Macintosh)
7. No drafts or notebooks
8. No other rules, nothing other than memory
9. No fiction ("nor will you reconstruct [events] as they might have happened," p. 5)

The twelve stories ("Nights": ten women, a girl, and a Pontiac Grand Am, which she loves because its name reminds her of "grande ame" and "grande dame") are well observed, nicely composed, and entirely conventional. It is difficult to imagine a reader who could keep the "Ante Scriptum" in mind while reading about seductions, drinking, and nightclubs. The only traces of the "Ante Scriptum" are the titles (for example "B*," "D*") and the square-bracketed "Night" number at the end of each "Night."

But my annoyance returned in full force in the "Post Scriptum," not because it begins by excusing the author's lapses from her various rules (that is obvious early on, and it's announced on the back cover), and not because she admits at least one of the twelve stories is a fiction -- but because she returns to her idea of avoiding the fiction of subjectivity and "the idolatry of desire," and spends the last five pages on an unironic, convoluted defense of her complicity in the "empire" of desire. It turns out she remains serious about writing differently, not falling for the fiction of fiction's veracity or psychological truth, not being duped by the production of subjectivity.

What lack of self-awareness, what hypnosis brought on by a lifetime of literary theory, what confidence bolstered by uncritical praise, could produce this raw juxtaposition of poststructural theory and perfectly ordinary storytelling?

Een heel boek lang blijft onduidelijk of de verteller vrouw of man is, en of haar of zijn minnaar vrouw of man is. Een heuse meesterproef in het Frans, waar deze genderloosheid en de daaruit volgende noodzaak om op een bepaalde manier te schrijven - bvb. sommige werkwoordsvormen te vermijden en andere, minder alledaagse, te gebruiken - bepalend is voor hoe de verteller/vertelster praat, denkt en in het leven staat.
Dat komt er in het Engels - waar het gender van de personages minder en alleszins andere - eisen stelt dan het Frans - veel minder uit. De barokke taal van Garreta volgt uit de noodzaak in het Frans om een bepaalde werkwoordsvorm te gebruiken. In het Engels ontbreekt die noodzaak evenwel, want was 'Sphinx' oorspronkelijk in het Engels geschreven, de verteller/vertelster was een ander geweest, en de eisen die de Engelse taal had opgelegd hadden eveneens tot een ander - wellicht eenvoudiger - perspectief en andere - minder repetitieve - handelingen geleid. Dat leidt er misschien toe dat de Engelse vertaling van dit Franse meesterstukje minder indruk maakt dan eigenlijk zou moeten.½

Review originally posted on Goodreads.

2.5 stars

Anne Garreta wrote a love story without using gender specific pronouns. That is amazing. The story on the other hand, was just average. I didn't hate it, but I didn't quite enjoy it either.