Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven. Antoine Volodine

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      Praise for Antoine Volodine

      “These wonderful stories fool around on the frontiers of the imagination. All musical dogs, woolly crabs, children, and other detectives of the not-yet-invented should own this book.”

      —Shelley Jackson

      “His quirky and eccentric narrative achieves quite staggering and electric effects. . . . Dazzling in its epic proportions and imaginative scope.”

       —The Nation

      “Volodine isn’t afraid to tangle animate and inanimate spirits, or thwart expectations. He delights in breaking down our well-honed meters of what’s supposed to happen.”

      —Margaret Wappler, Believer

      “His textured portraits are convincing and well-rendered, and he has written the type of open-ended work that will capture the attention of lovers of lit crit as fiction.”

       —Publishers Weekly

      “The ramifying narrative strands of Volodine’s novels fascinate, but they are almost impossible to describe.”

       —3:AM Magazine

      “Minor Angels has all the markings of a masterpiece: compression, resonance, and vision.”

      —Terese Svoboda, Literary Review

      Also in English by Antoine Volodine (a.k.a., Lutz Bassman & Manuela Draeger)

       In the Time of the Blue Ball

       Naming the Jungle

       Minor Angels

       We Monks & Soldiers

       Writers

      Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1998

      Translation copyright © J. T. Mahany, 2015

      Originally published in French as Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze

      First edition, 2015

      All rights reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

      ISBN 978-1-940953-12-0

       Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis.

      [This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the United States.]

      This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

       Design by N. J. Furl

      Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

       www.openletterbooks.org

       LESSON ELEVEN

LESSON ONE

       Fragmentary Inventory of Deceased Dissidents

LESSON TWO

       Maria Clementi’s “Minor Angels,” romånce, 1977

LESSON THREE

       The Shaggå

       LESSON FOUR

       The Romånce

       LESSON FIVE

       Let’s Talk about Something Else

       LESSON SIX

       Novelles or Interjoists

       LESSON SEVEN

       Specific Terms

       LESSON EIGHT

       A Murmuract: “Breughel Calls Clementi”

       LESSON NINE

       Two Words on Our Bardo and Its Thödol

       LESSON TEN

       By the Same Author, in the Same Collection

Lutz Bassmann passed his final days as we all did, between life and death. A rotten odor stagnated in the cell, which did not come from its occupant, but from outside. The sewers in the city were fermenting, the docks in the harbor were emitting a rancid signal, the covered markets were stinking terribly, as they often did in the springtime when both the waters and the temperature began to rise. The mercury in the thermometers never fell below 34° or 35° Celsius, and it always rose back up from its nightly drop to give way to oppressive grayness. Puddles of mold spread across every wall. In the hours preceding dawn, darkness grew in power in the depths of lungs, under the bed, under the nails. Clouds burst into cataracts under the slightest pretext. The noise of the storm haunted everyone. Ever since Bassmann began to feel unwell, the rain had not ceased its patter against the prison’s façade, furnishing the silence with the sound of lead. It streamed over the exterior, crossed over the edge of the window, and gloomily drew lines of rust beneath the bars, onto the bulletin board that certain guards had baptized the “union board” and which resembled a very old cubist or futurist collage, very dense, very faded. The water zigzagged between the photographs and the newspaper clippings that Bassmann had pinned there, and which helped support him in his stay in the high-security sector, among us: this immobile voyage had already lasted for twenty-seven years, twenty-seven long, long, longer-than-long years. Then, the already-dirty liquid met up with a thin blackish ribbon wending its way to the bottom of the wall, thus mixing with the infiltrations from a leak in the plumbing, perhaps in the toilet’s outflow pipe. No doubt there, yes, in this pipe, or in a pipe of the same kind. Over several months, the humidity had pierced the cement, which gradually expanded. Thus, when atmospheric pressure dropped, the stench rose. Hence these waves that heavily velveted the surroundings, similar to the vapors of a cadaver on the march toward the nothing. The administration was waiting for Bassmann’s death before undertaking any renovations. The guards had made this known to the prisoner with the obtuse frankness common to horrid bipeds, and without snickering, for in their impatience to see the end of history they did not even snicker anymore in front of him when they spoke of his end. Bassmann himself was not waiting for anything. He faced our damaged portraits and sat there watching them. He contemplated the spongy, almost-illegible photographs, the obsolete portraits of his friends, men and women, all dead, and he looked back on who knows what trouble and, at the same time, the fact that he had lived marvelously in their company, when they were all free and shining, the time when all of us, from the first to the last, were something other than. But that’s not important. I have said “our” faces, among “us,” all of “us.” This is a process of the literary lie, but one which, here, plays with a truth hidden upstream