Ivan Goncharov, most famous for the slacker classic Oblomov, spent his twilight years reeling against Ivan Turgenev, a colossus of the Russian canon wIvan Goncharov, most famous for the slacker classic Oblomov, spent his twilight years reeling against Ivan Turgenev, a colossus of the Russian canon who needs no introduction. In this acid-tongued portrait of unhinged literary rivalry, Goncharov accuses Turgenev of cribbing almost the entirety of his most famous works from his own (then-unfinished) novel The Precipice or Malinovka Heights, extending the accusation across Europe to Flaubert, who (allegedly) pinched enough scenarios from Goncharov to render Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education works of egregious literary brigandry. There is more than a kernel of truth to Goncharov’s grievance, according to the scholars, in the sense that Turgenev’s artistic development occurred in tandem with Goncharov’s and certain structures and scenarios will have occupied similar narrative space (as with all Russian novels of the period), and the ambitious Turgenev was keen to succeed sooner than his rival. But this is a tale of two monumental egos at war, with Goncharov emerging the loser—An Uncommon Story finds him a paranoid, persecuted loner, cut apart from the literary scene in which he was never comfortable, seeking to inflate his own position in the canon and take down some titans in the process. Published posthumously in 1924, the work is a fascinating little peep inside the mind of an isolated, embittered writer consumed with burning professional envy. This new Alma Classics edition is translated seamlessly by Stephen Pearl....more
The last of Queneau’s minor works to be Englished, Journal intime was originally published pseudonymously by Sally Mara, written for the risqué publisThe last of Queneau’s minor works to be Englished, Journal intime was originally published pseudonymously by Sally Mara, written for the risqué publisher Éditions du scorpion for much-needed cash, in the vein of his earlier hard-boiled parody We Always Treat Women Too Well. This being a Queneau production, the pseudonym hilariously fails to disguise the quirky Queneauness of the novel, as all the hallmarks of the writer of Zazie are here—the playful solecisms and bilingual puns, the reams of absurdist dialogue zinging across the pages, and the broad parody (in this case of the Irish in homage to Joyce).
Sally Mara is an Irish virgin composing her “intimate” diary in an error-strewn French. She chronicles her screwball interactions with young suitors and her frequently violent and promiscuous family in an Ireland that is entirely a surreal contrivance of the impish Oulipian. The novel’s erotic content is precisely zero, with our heroine spending most of her time rebuffing her suitors, and the sexual interactions themselves are described in excessively precise scientific terms (to much hilarity). The novel has more in common with the wondrous realm of Flann O’Brien than Joyce, and Queneau’s understanding and appreciation of the Irish language lifts his humour above the base level. The bulk of the novel is fairly extempore, carrying the reader aloft on the waves of mad dialogue—in equal parts riotous and exasperating....more
Adam Biles—French translator, podcaster, and novelist—burped onto the scene with Feeding Time, a wild and unhinged black comedy inspired by the work oAdam Biles—French translator, podcaster, and novelist—burped onto the scene with Feeding Time, a wild and unhinged black comedy inspired by the work of B.S. Johnson, particularly the typographically innovative House Mother Normal, which used sparse prose and blank space to chilling effect in the tale of a murderous attendant in a nursing home. His latest is an ambitious reconceiving of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the allegory reworked to the populist present, mirroring the last ten years in British politics in particular. Taking on Orwell—whether through sequels or homages—can be an ill-advised task. The last novel to plop itself on Manor Farm was David Caute’s Dr. Orwell and Mr. Blair, a fictionalised account of Orwell’s stay at the farm that provided the inspiration for his blockbuster swipe at Stalinist tyranny. Anthony Burgess’s 1985 was less successful—a strange right-wing revision of 1984, where Britain is transformed into TUCland, a terrifying artless dystopia where trade unions are the true oppressors.
Anyone familiar with contemporary UK politics will speedily recognise the events being allegorised in Beasts of England—all farmyard life is here, from the tubthumping attack-dog populists (Nigel Farage—a violent mutt named John-Bully), to the lying rabble-rousers promising the moon on a stick (Boris Johnson—a porker named Jumbo), to the upheaval of Brexit (Britain leaving the European Union—the Wealden Union of Farmers) to the appearance of the Covid pandemic (the unfortunately named Wufflu). The cumulative crowbarring of these political hot topics and the occasionally eye-rolling monikers (terriers named Dunning & Kruger, a goose named Haw-Haw), means, as entertaining as the mild-mannered comedy is, the novel becomes an exercise in truffling out parallels and references to the now, rather than pondering the broader points about how swiftly our comforts and freedoms can be ripped from us. Masking well-known recent events in farmyard allegory form means the universality of Orwell’s original is not mirrored—not least as the outcome of the novel is heavily telegraphed by the events being allegorised.
Satirists in the post-truth era have struggled to ridicule politicians whose absence of shame or self-awareness make them self-satirising entities, impossible to humiliate into oblivion with the hot poker of withering wit. Biles’s approach, while infinitely more subtle a satirical depth charge than a Twitter comedian impersonating the babble of a vapid Tory politician in a viral video, serves merely as a farmyard précis of the zeitgeist strained through an Orwell homage. The strongest parts of the novel are found in the homage—as with Feeding Time, the intertextual tips-of-the-hat are artfully done and pleasurable for those familiar with the source—while underpinning the antics themselves is a quiet voice muttering “yeah, tell us something we don’t already know.”...more
