The Bible’s Job, “a perfect and upright
man,” suffers so much that he regrets the
day he was born. Platitudinous friends tell
him that there must be a reason he is being
punished, yet he steadfastly rejects their pious
rationalizations in a dialogue that occupies
most of the Biblical narrative. Joseph Roth’s
Job proposes a 20th century version of the Biblical
parable of loss and restoration, and Ross
Benjamin’s graceful new translation of this
80-year-old work makes an excellent reason
to revisit it.

Roth’s protagonist, the Russian Jew
Mendel Singer, also falls into despair as he
gradually loses what is most precious to him,
but he spends little time debating with
friends. Instead Singer goes about his impoverished everyday life in the shtetl, which Roth describes with documentary scope and in
vivid details that appeal to all the senses.
When Singer, his wife, and daughter leave
Russia for New York’s Lower East Side, their
troubles worsen to the point that Singer loses the will to live.

In the end Job receives from God twice as
much as he had before in sheep, oxen, and
camels, as well as ten children. Mendel
Singer, by contrast, finds contentment
through an emotional fulfillment that he
never could have imagined. Biblical parallels
aside, Roth’s story stands on its own as an
affecting tale of a humble man’s loss, displacement, and final contentment.
The novel’s final pages include one jarring
incident. A pious man, Mendel Singer
has kept his head covered all his life. Now
that he finds himself unexpectedly at peace,
he deliberately takes off his cap and stands
bareheaded in the sun, an act that is entirely
out of character. Perhaps Joseph Roth consciously
or unconsciously was anticipating his own conversion to Catholicism, which took place not long after this book was first published.

Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Archipelago; $20). At one point in this sweeping novel of twentieth-century Poland, Szymek Pietruszka lies in a presbytery attic, recovering from three German gunshots: “The doctor just shook his head like he couldn’t believe I was still alive, while the priest kept checking to see if it wasn’t time for last rites. It made me so mad that in the end I started making nice with the priest’s housekeeper.” Pietruszka sustains this irreverent defiance across a life of unbelievable hardship and uncountable women. Born into a peasant family, he rejects farming to join the local resistance during the war, then works as a functionary in the newly established Communist government, only to return, eventually, to the family farm. Pietruszka, with winning candor, narrates his life story in a stream of meandering and sometimes overlapping anecdotes that chronicle the modernization of rural Poland and celebrate the persistence of desire.

A gate in the field

By Benjamin Paloff

Wieslaw Mysliwski

Stone Upon Stone

Translated by Bill Johnston

In his native Poland, the distinguished career of Wiesław Myśliwski dates back to the 1960s. He is not well known in he world of English letters, however, and Stone Upon Stone, the second of his books to be translated into English in the past twenty years, looks dauntingly big in this edition. Yet the reader who moves past these discouragements will discover a marvel of narrative seduction, a rare double masterpiece of storytelling and translation.

 

The story is simple enough. Szymek Pietruszka, an ageing, average Jozef who serves as both narrator and protagonist, has decided to have a tomb built for his family, himself included. But Szymek’s calculations of how much space is needed to accommodate the remains of everyone who will rest there become a rangy meditation on what remains after it. One brief reflection spins off the next in an infinite regress, so that we gradually come to see the construction of the tomb as more than just one stone on another.

 

Myśliwski’s prose, replete with wit and an almost casual intensity, skips nimbly from one emotional register to the next carrying a dramatic force far beyond the little that actually transpires in the course of the novel. In this he invites comparisons to other Central European masters of digression, such as Jaroslav Hasek or Bohumil Hrabal, thoughMyśliwski’s affective repertoire is far broader than Hasek’s, and his anecdotes weave together on a much larger scale than Hrabal ever produced. Like Hasek and Hrabal, Myśliwski regales us with a motley parade of his hero’s vocations and avocations over the course of a lifetime, from farmer to soldier to resistance fighter to policeman to bureaucrat and back to farmer. His sustained passions are dancing with women, getting into brawls – “A real church fair is either when the bishop comes, or there’s a fight” – and cutting hair, which in fact makes Szymek the closest thing this novel has to a novelist. “You don’t go to the barber just to get your hair cut or get a shave.”, he informs us, “you go to sit and have a chat and listen to stories.”

 

In his translation Bill Johnston navigates Myśliwski’s modulations with skill and the lightness of touch that is generally the face of profound labor. Over nine long, meandering, hypnotic chapters, the text comes to resemble the sprawling farmland where Szymek spends his days, the only place he believes where his labours in this life can have any lasting value. Unlike his three brothers, all of whom drift off “away” or “there” – that is, to the city, where modernity has long since forgotten village life – Szymek believes that sticking to the land affords more contact with the eternal than one might find in God, country, or Communism, none of which gives back as much as it takes. Not above poking a little fun at his reader, Mysliwski also has Szymek wonder why anyone would bother with so many words:

 

You read and you read and you read, and in

the end it all went into the ground with you anyway.

With the land it was another matter. You worked and

worked the land, but the land remained after-wards.

With reading, not even a line, not a single word, was

left behind.

 

Szymek’s penchant for elaborate metaphors – “The moon was like a cow’s udder, if

You’d pull its teats we’d have been covered in streams of moonlight” – brightens his tales of battle, feuding neighbors, family disintegration and lost love. Even his portrayal of the many deaths here, which are frequent and often brutal, tends towards a grotesque levity. This may be Myśliwski’s most consistently gratifying accomplishment: he manages tone so finely, orchestrating a perfect continuity between the tragic and the comic and, ultimately, between life and death. As Szymek tells us, on one of the occasions he has been shot: “I didn’t know which world to believe in, this one or the next. Truth be told, I didn’t really feel much like coming back to this world. But the next one just seemed a continuation of this one . . . . I felt like I’d died in the next world and come to this one to live”. If life has taught Szymek anything, it is that building a tomb is no different from building a home. Late in the novel, he even contemplates furnishing his tomb with a gateway, similar to the one that used to belong to an old manor house, though the fence itself has gone: “The gate is actually still standing today, except it’s in the middle of fields and it doesn’t lead anywhere”. He might be talking about death, and in a sense he is. But he is also just mentioning a rusty old gate.

“The Turkish Ulysses. . . . Tanpinar’s great novel also unfolds over 24-hours, but in Istanbul on the eve of World War II. Turkey is torn between East and West just as Mümtaz, an orphan and aspiring writer of historical fiction, is torn between a decaying tradition and his love for the older, divorced Nuran, whose failings and attractions are entirely modern.”

Finally, finally, an imposing work of fiction, which rises like a cliff from the flatness of Icelandic poetry and fiction of recent years!  Iceland has gained a new master novelist, and we are certainly bound to admit that with joy.  Halldór K. Laxness wrote this novel in his 24th year.  I doubt that it happens once in a quarter century that a writer so young composes as brilliant a work as this saga of his.  It has never before happened at latitude 64 degrees north.

The Great Weaver from Kashmir is no masterpiece but its style is rare and elegant.  It has its faults in many places, but in general it is more robust, passionate, spiritual, alive, inspiring, wild, true, and youthful than any other Icelandic novel.  The development of the Icelandic novelistic style has taken a half-century leap with this book of H.K.L.  At times its character descriptions are amateurish and unconvincing, but overall they are incredibly well done.  Steinn Elliði, Diljá, Madam Jófríður, Örnólfur, the Ylfingamóðir, into all of these characters the writer has blown a warm and human living spirit; their faces are clear, picturesque, memorable.  The novel’s spirit is in some places affected, false, overworked, the metaphors flavorless or foul… but this is caused by the writer’s fallible taste, and not by his infertile imagination.  His work is in fact ripe with outstanding poetic ideas, that burst forth as if from nowhere and witness to his genius.

H.K.L has been influenced strongly by they style and world-view of many of the main writers of Europe of recent times such as Tolstoy, Strindberg, d’Annunzio, Hamsun, Wilde, Jóhannes V. Jenssen and others.  He has also learned from younger, less known French writers and from and the style and form of Þórbergur Þórðarson.  This is no surprise:  even the most unlearned writers in the world have benefited from the rich influence of older writers.  As a whole his work bears witness to an independent and awesome personality, a copious intelligence, a great cultivation of his own talents.

Kristján Albertsson, Vaka 1927, review of The Great Weaver from Kashmir

Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Archipelago; $20). At one point in this sweeping novel of twentieth-century Poland, Szymek Pietruszka lies in a presbytery attic, recovering from three German gunshots: “The doctor just shook his head like he couldn’t believe I was still alive, while the priest kept checking to see if it wasn’t time for last rites. It made me so mad that in the end I started making nice with the priest’s housekeeper.” Pietruszka sustains this irreverent defiance across a life of unbelievable hardship and uncountable women. Born into a peasant family, he rejects farming to join the local resistance during the war, then works as a functionary in the newly established Communist government, only to return, eventually, to the family farm. Pietruszka, with winning candor, narrates his life story in a stream of meandering and sometimes overlapping anecdotes that chronicle the modernization of rural Poland and celebrate the persistence of desire.

 

Only when I was living in Krakow about ten years ago and saw a production of Beckett’s “I’ll Go On” in London did I suddenly see Ireland and Poland as doubles—small countries with beleaguered pasts, a history of failed uprisings, proclivities for
Catholicism and drink, and a preternatural talent for dark absurdist humor, gift of the gab, and, whether despite or because of all the aforementioned, damn great literature.

But as much as I’ve grown to respect Polish literature, I hesitated before embarking on Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone, a 500-plus-page commitment of a novel described as “peasant literature.” It’s not that I didn’t trust the novel insomuch as I didn’t trust myself, a self-described city girl whose closest positive encounter with nature was admiring “The Gleaners,” François Millet’s 1857 painting of three peasant women gathering grain after the harvest, housed at the Musée D’Orsay.

Myśliwski—twice the recipient of Poland’s highest literary prize, the Nike—is known for vividly rendering the physical, cultural, and linguistic landscape of the rural Poland he grew up in, as well as the hardships and challenges, both practical and existential, that were presented first by war, and later by modernization under communism. Stone Upon Stone opens in mid-twentieth-century Poland with the building of a tomb, and goes on to relay various degradations of peasant life amidst war and hunger, including a great love lost. But this is not a dark tale. Szymek Pietruszka, the protagonist-narrator of this flowing and continually digressing monologue, was “always more interested in living than in dying.” As the embodiment of strength and ingenuity and an enduring and quite sizeable lust for life (women and drink included), Szymek muses, “Who knows, maybe living is the eleventh commandment that God forgot to tell us.”

Szymek, the least likely of four brothers to take over the family farm, constantly causes mischief as a child, to the point that his superstitious and God-fearing father almost hangs the young boy in a fit of rage for having eaten a hidden piece of stale Christmas bread meant to bless the spring soil. Recollections of his family and coming
of age, the dances and skirmishes of village life, his turns as a barber, policeman, wedding official, and government worker, are all interwoven with stories of his near death experiences as a resistance fighter during the war.

Despite the proximity of death, Szymek’s recounting of his wartime episodes contain an absurdist humor that rings Monty Python-esque. At one point, frustrated by a subordinate called “Prosecutor,” whose hand-written death orders are
consistently too long—“I can’t tell if it’s a sentence or a sermon”—Szymek tells him, “Try writing a couple more. Make up some bad guys. You’ll get the hang of it, you will.” Other defining aspects of Szymek are his call-it-as-he-sees-it irreverence and a paradoxical mix of hard living and brutality combined with pockets of empathy and a poetic eye for natural beauty. Imagery, traditions, and cadences of the old peasant way of life, slowly giving way to the new, are filtered through his acute gifts for observation and storytelling. The village farmers line up, angrily waiting to cross a new asphalt road, cars whizzing by. They wonder why people are in such a hurry, given “the sky’s the same everywhere and no one can get away from their own destiny, even in a car.” In Stone Upon Stone, Myśliwski has created a breathing monument to language, to the power of oral storytelling as a lived art. After Szymek meets the parents of his true love for the first time, her father tells the girl, “Listen, do you know who Eagle was?” and then goes on to recount what he knows of Szymek’s heroic wartime legacy. “Here Eagle disarmed so-and-so, there he led an attack, here he set up an ambush, there he was surrounded but he got away. He just confirmed every once in a while that that was how it had been. That’s how it was sir, am I right? And though in some cases it was completely different, I just nodded, because the way he told it was truer than it actually was.”
There’s no irony lost here on the fact that this oral telling is in written form, since part of what the book represents is a lament to a dying peasant way of life; as illiteracy in the countryside diminishes with the coming of economic and technological progress, so does the reliance on one’s memory to pass on stories from generation to generation, the bedrock of a lively oral tradition and folk literature:

And what if along with the people the dogs and cats went quiet, and all the other animals, and the birds stopped chirping and the frogs stopped croaking. Would there be a world? Even trees talk if you actually listen to them. Each kind has
its own language, the oaks speak oak, the beech trees speak beech. Rivers talk, corn. The whole world is one big language. If you really listened carefully to it, you might even be able to hear what they were saying a century back, maybe even thousands of years ago. Because words don’t know death. They’re like seethrough birds, once they’ve spoken they circle over us forever, it’s just that we don’t hear them.

Dualisms are woven throughout this work of life as memory—life and death, earth and sky, land and God, godlessness and faith—pulling our consciousness forward, picking up various threads or tracks when the narrative shifts course, the way minds tend to do. This representation of consciousness and speech is reminiscent of Beckett, though Myśliwski convincingly demonstrates a greater faith in nature and tradition, language and the possibility of human connection. The fact that the novel makes you feel as if you’re in the actual presence of Szymek, who’s verbally recounting his life story to you, testifies to the talents of Myśliwski as well as to the translator of this masterwork, Bill Johnston.

Szymek’s own “gift of the gab” serves others throughout the novel in almost priest-like fashion. People would set their work aside to come hear his speeches during his three years as a wedding official, when even the open window would be “lined with people listening outside, like flowerpots.” In recollecting one speech that brought almost everyone to tears, containing a fable about a king unable to dream—“It was like he was only half living, he lived in the day but he died at night. Imagine dying like that for years and years, when even dying once is so hard”—he confesses, “Where I got it all from I have no idea.” And, later, while in the hospital, his narrative skill gives comfort to his dying neighbor. Szymek leads him with words, “the way you take a child’s hand to lead him across a footbridge over the river,” to a pastoral image of “lying on hay, in the meadow, by the river, in the shade of a tree,” to just “melt away in that noise, among the springs and the bees and the clouds and . . . be carried away by the tired, tired earth.” The novel is a hymn to life, and also an elegy.

 

“The Marquise of O.,” one of Heinrich von Kleist’s best-known novellas, tells the story of Julietta, a respectable widow, who feels obliged to advertise in the local paper that “she had, unbeknownst to her, been gotten in the family way; that the father of the child that she was about to bear had best make himself known; and that, for family considerations, she was resolved to marry him.” Some months previously, the citadel her father commanded was attacked by Russian troops: the castle was stormed, and the Marquise dragged off by a gang of Russian soldiers. She is rescued by the commanding officer, the dashing Count F., who, like an avenging angels, strikes down her assailants, before decourously offering his arm and leading her to safety.

As her pregnancy progresses, the Marquise alienates her family by her stubborn refusal to reveal the father of the child, and, worse, her continuing protestations of ignorance and indeed innocence. While her family, maddened, eventually turn her out, Count F. asks for her hand in marriage and distinguishes himself by his unfailingly gentlemanly conduct. Needless to say, it turns out that it was Count F. who had taken advantage of her, and naturally, the Marquise refuses him, at least at first: as she explains, he wouldn’t have seemed like a devil to her, had he not, the first time she saw him, appeared like an angel.

In the figure of the Marquise the divide between the uncompromised ideal and the reality of an imperfect world is patched over; this otherwise unbridgeable chasm is one into which Kleist’s figures stumble with unerring regularity. In the story “Michael Kohlhaas,” the eponymous horse-trader, cruelly ill-treated by the local nobleman, pursues hi rightful case with the Kleistian inflexibility that refuses to accept the flawed state of the world. In his crusade for justice, parts of the town of Wittenberg are burnt down and Martin Luther himself has to intercede before his horses are restored and Kohlhaas’s honour is satisfied – even though he knows that he will have to put his head on the block for breaking the law of the land.

This selection unites most of Kleist’s novellas (but regrettably leaves out “The Duel” and “The Foundling”), and supplements them with the best-known of his philosophical writings, “On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking” and “On the Theatre of Marionettes.” Peter Wortsman’s direct and fluent translation makes this an accessible introduction to Kleist for English readers; the afterword seems a missed opportunity, however, in that it is disappointingly short and adds little that is new.

 

Poet of Paradox

Heinrich von Kleist’s dark conjuring yields a strange, enlivening joy

Geoffrey O’Brien

Apr/May 2010

On the morning of November 21, 1811, Heinrich von Kleist and his terminally ill friend Henriette Vogel strolled to the shore of the Wannsee, near Berlin, and carried out a suicide pact. A passerby had seen them moments earlier, walking hand in hand, apparently in gay spirits. A few days before, the thirty-four-year-old Kleist had sent his cousin Marie a letter in which he described his life as “the most tormented that any human being has ever lived,” and on the morning of his death he wrote to his half-sister, Ulrike: “The truth is that no one could really help me on this earth. . . . May Heaven grant you a death at least half as happy and full of unutterable joy as mine.”

He must have seemed to himself the very type of the failed writer. He had written once to Ulrike: “Hell gave me my half-talents, Heaven grants a man a complete talent or none.” Few at the time would have disagreed with him. (Goethe found him too unhealthy a specimen: “His hypochondria destroys him both as a man and a writer.”) It would take decades for the magnitude of his achievement to become apparent. In eight years or so, he had written—along with a mass of essays, political articles, poems, and letters—eight plays and eight stories that mark the moment when European culture, or more precisely the European conception of what culture was, came asunder. As an artist he sought not to destroy but to build, yet his works unavoidably gravitated toward the contemplation of destruction. Outward catastrophes—earthquake, massacre, cannibalism, warfare, the iconoclasm of religious fanatics, the savageries of thuggish barons—mirrored equally terrifying forms of inward fissure. His protagonists were condemned to bewilderment, self-doubt, obsession. Yet this was a writer who in his early youth believed, or wanted to believe, that happiness consisted of “the pleasant observation of the moral beauty of our own selves.”

He came from an old military family, an aristocratic Prussian line of much pedigree and little money. A soldier from the age of fifteen, he fought against Napoleon in the war of 1792, came to despise army life, and resigned his commission in 1799 to devote himself to science and philosophy. There followed a prolonged period of wandering, a broken betrothal, various halfhearted attempts at earning a living, life plans mapped out and abandoned, works drafted and destroyed. Undertaking to fuse Sophocles and Shakespeare into a new form of verse drama, he wrote plays (among themPenthesilea, Little Katherine of Heilbronn, and The Prince of Homburg) that, while they found no audience in his lifetime, are without doubt the greatest of their period in any language: tortuously twined theater-poems of violence and desire that strain at the forms that embody them. The almost dungeon-like rigor of Kleist’s dramaturgy encloses a counterforce of rebellious fury. His plays, like his stories, are constructed with strands of legal argument and military strategy, each bit of linkage reasonable in itself, but leading to a point where the inexorability of human logic becomes an aspect of the world’s unappeasable irrationality.

The stories—of which six are translated by Peter Wortsman in his very welcome Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, along with a few brief but endlessly suggestive essays and fragments—were written in between the plays and in between the episodes of a life rapidly unraveling. Kleist spent nine months as a minor bureaucrat in Prussia’s taxation department and six months as a French prisoner wrongly suspected of espionage. He had a brief career as a newspaper editor and was fervent in the cause of German nationalism. His personal circumstances were dire. The stories offer no direct commentary on any of this. They are tales, supernatural incidents, mock-historical chronicles, exotic adventures, discreetly erotic comedies. None point to an obvious moral; in fact, they deviously confound attempts to locate any such thing.

Two of them—The Marquise of O . . . and the novella-length Michael Kohlhaas—seem to me pretty much the best stories ever written, and the rest are of nearly equal fascination. Yet there is nothing to which their manner and texture can really be compared. They are machines that, once turned on, move ineluctably forward: sometimes with the swift, destructive force of a military unit, sometimes with the lumbering, exhausting weight of a protracted lawsuit, sometimes with the maddening, hair-splitting insistence of a theological argument carrying with it the threat of some savage punishment, and sometimes like a joke spun out beyond normal bounds. We wait for a punch line, which, when it comes, plunges us deeper into mystery. The stories do not pause for breath; even less so in Wortsman’s translations, which seek to convey the intricately enmeshed patterns of Kleist’s syntax, so that, for example, the hundred or so pages of Michael Kohlhaas seem almost a single sentence. Once one engages with Kleist’s narration, its peculiar urgency forces attention even as the plot spins into unforeseen byways.

He is the least quotable of great writers. Extracting a sentence from one of his stories is like taking a stone from a wall of Machu Picchu—every phrase is wedged into its context. Yet in Kleist’s paradoxical fashion, these sentences do not so much shore one another up as engage in low-level conflict. A meaning is asserted, only for an ensuing sentence to sabotage or undermine it. His unities are built out of internal contradictions. The Marquise of O . . . by its premise (a respectable and virtuous woman who inexplicably finds herself pregnant and sets out to discover the father of her child) might be the sort of elegant, ribald joke a Boccaccio or Aretino would have told. Yet as it moves from one psychological conundrum to another, the joke mutates by turns into a medieval saint’s legend and a kind of modern novel not yet invented. We guess what the solution must be, yet, even as the answer turns out to be as obvious as we supposed, new questions arise that make the joke mysterious and troubling. Who, after all, are these people? We know more about them than any simple jest could contain, yet what we know only leads further into the unfathomable. Between any two connecting points of Kleist’s remorselessly airtight structures lurks a potential abyss.

No Kleist text offers a simple reading. However neatly it works out—and there is no one like Kleist for elaborately logical explanations of improbable events—the import remains naggingly suspended. His art enacts a resolution and by the same gesture shows it to be impossible. “It is not we who know, but rather a certain state of mind in us that knows,” he writes in an essay included here, hinting at the dark recognition toward which his stories advance, an intimate and appalling apprehension that the abyss is where we already live. His parables reveal only reversible truths, as if there were always the possibility that everything might be otherwise, that love might after all be hate, justice deception, understanding madness. Everyone has their reasons, even the corrupt noblemen of Michael Kohlhaas and the vengeful revolutionaries of The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, and all their reasons fail to account for uncanny and savage manifestations of unearthly justice like the miracle that turns bullying religious bigots into howling madmen in Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music, or the visitation recounted in The Beggar Woman of Locarno, one of the greatest (and shortest) of ghost stories.

Michael Kohlhaas, the tale of how an upright horse trader evolves into a ferocious avenger because of a small incident involving the misappropriation of two horses, has often been seen as a somber parable of justice denied. Yet a dark hilarity runs through it as Kleist savors the chain of random circumstances that drags in, finally, the infrastructure of a society. At every point, an imminent solution is forestalled by yet another contingency, some accident (such as a messenger seized with cramps) or coincidence or overlooked minor law or privilege. The story desperately wants to conclude but cannot. Toward the end, the beleaguered hero entertains a notion to “ship off to the Levant or East India,” the sort of escape forbidden to anyone inhabiting the universe of Kleist. Then, when the tale seems closest to finding an exit, Kleist injects a subplot involving a Gypsy prophecy and the fate of the Electorate of Saxony, an interpolation some critics consider an aesthetic mistake but that yields a suitably hermetic closing image: the hero, just before his execution, swallowing a piece of paper so that no one will ever read what is on it.

Whatever death wish may have gripped Kleist throughout his short life, there is nothing the least morbid, ghostly, wan, or attenuated about his work. Although it can hardly be discussed without invoking despair and the erosion of self, that work is infused nonetheless with an enlivening energy that can properly be called joyful. It is a joy perhaps limited to artmaking, in a life otherwise intolerably conflicted and frustrated but nonetheless bursting out, bright and exhilarating, in every branching, relentless thrust of invention.

Geoffrey O’Brien is the author of The Fall of the House of Walworth, to be published in August by Henry Holt.

 

Palafox by Eric Chevillard

2005-02

 

Eric Chevillard’s Palafox exudes French-ness. From the book’s sleek, elongated shape to its thick pages of modernist/Paris-in-the-1920s/stream-of-consciousness prose, every aspect of this novel is evidence of its having been written in the land of baguette and beret. What other country, after all, could produce a text centered around an indefinable animal — one who, during the course of its 136 pages, changes from a chick to an insect to a jellyfish to a rhinoceros to a whale — without its human characters ever expressing confusion? Only in France, home of the Theatre of the Absurd, could an author pull off such a feat.

Chevillard’s novel is a sort of animalian version of Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s great “biography” of a character who changes gender, personality, class, and profession many times during the course of the work. Like Woolf’s protagonist, Palafox is pathologically chameleonic. It begins its life as an adorable creature, pecking its way out of a delicate egg at a dinner party and charming its owner and his guests in the process; forty pages later, it escapes its pen and goes on a killing spree, eating every animal it encounters. The creature alternately spends time in a circus pen and sails into the oceanic horizon with a woman on its back, wins dog shows and decapitates terriers, is loved by its owners and slits the throat of one of their parakeets. This is an animal that furiously resists categorization.

And yet, the novel’s one constant is the four scientists who follow Palafox around, a team of bumbling men busily attempting to classify the creature. Each of the four have completely different understandings of the animal, depending upon their academic backgrounds, and each is unable to see Palafox for the enigma it is. The message — that science regularly misses the point, and often studies things according to the way scientists understand the world rather than the way the world really is — is well-taken, if a bit heavy-handed, but such is often the nature of the messages in this type of concept-book.

First published in France in 1990, Chevillard’s third novel wasn’t translated into English until late 2004, when Wyatt Mason made what I’m sure was a Herculean effort to render the novel’s fluid, complex, and subtle stylings into English. Mason’s translation is stunning — the book’s prose is simultaneously smooth and startling; its long, comma-filled sentences dart in different directions but somehow manage to maintain an internal logic that, incredibly and crucially, keeps this rambling absurdity of a text together. All of this combines to make Palafox a lot like the modernist novels I read in college — formally experimental, beautifully written, aggressively toying with the line between real and surreal — and it does these things surprisingly well. If my knowledge of absurdist plays extended beyond the Beckett-inspired Waiting for Guffman, I would compare Chevillard’s novel to those too, and, if I agreed with the majority of the French press, that comparison would be favorable. To my knowledge, not many writers are still writing this way — keeping alive the delightfully bizarre style made popular in early twentieth century avant-garde Parisian literary salons. That Chevillard does this, and does it interestingly, makes this novel a curious and pleasantly anachronistic read.