Also, there is some meta-stuff about a writer who pens a book entitled, you guessed it, "The Anomaly". And of course, it also plays with the contingency of life, as what happened in the few months the March versions have not yet lived is crucial for their relationship to the June versions. The author of this romp is a mathematician and a member of the experimental writing group Oulipo, and his work plays with probabilities and permutations of reality in order to show how individuals and societies, in this case mainly the American and the French society, react to phenomena beyond their comprehension. The public is alarmed, the pairs of doppelgängers (who is whose doppelgänger in such a scenario?) try to fight the breakdown of their lives: Who gets the apartment, the spouse, the kids, the job now? And where the hell is the serial killer that boarded the plane? Their March versions are collected and brought to the hangar, so they can meet their June version security experts, politicians, the media, and religious groups get involved. And it's the exact same machine, with the exact same people inside people who now exist twice. Le Tellier investigates how people cope (or don't cope) when their idea of reality gets defeated: A flight from Paris to New York is caught in a storm, then lands in the US - twice, once in March, once in June 2021. Their March versions are collected and brought to the hangar, so they can meet their June version security experts, Winner of the Prix Goncourt 2020 Winner of the Prix Goncourt 2020 Soon available in English: The Anomaly Le Tellier investigates how people cope (or don't cope) when their idea of reality gets defeated: A flight from Paris to New York is caught in a storm, then lands in the US - twice, once in March, once in June 2021. While confirming the existence of an underlying text, the author refused to make it known, preferring to leave it to readers and translators to reconstruct it. During a round table discussion held on at the Maison de la Poésie in Paris, Hervé Le Tellier and nine of the translators of L'anomalie spoke at length about the final page. However, if these last lines in the shape of an hourglass provide a key to the novel, it is a deliberately incomplete key. The five preceding letters-"sable"-indicate another possible meaning: "sable fin" (English: fine sand) evokes the granularity of time. The last three letters can be read as forming the word "fin" (English: end) vertically. Among others, there is the series of letters "u.l.c.é.r.a.t.i.o.n.s.," a reference to the extended heterogrammatic poem "Ulcérations" by Georges Perec, which in 1974 was the first publication of La Bibliothèque oulipienne. The first words are easy to guess: "et la tasse à café rouge de mar e I y da la ma de ctor" can be read "et la tasse à café rouge de marque Illy dans la main de Victor Miesel," and the following sentence could be: "et le diamant noir sur la bague d'Anne Vasseur." It is an invitation to readers to restore an absent text. The letters, in increasing number, disappear from the page while the width of the lines decreases until there is only one character. (view spoiler) The last sentence leaves the reader with some work of creative interpretation. This witty variation on the doppelgänger theme, which takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House, proves to be Hervé Le Tellier’s most ambitious work yet.more None imagined just how true that was.Ī virtuoso novel where logic confronts magic, The Anomaly explores the part of ourselves that eludes us. Among them: Blake, a respectable family man, though he works as a contract killer Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star tired of living a lie Joanna, a formidable lawyer whose flaws have caught up with her and Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet commercially unsuccessful writer who suddenly becomes a cult hit.Īll of them believed they had double lives. Among them: Blake, a respectable family man, though he works as a contract killer Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star tired of living a lie Joanna, a formidable lawyer whose flaws have caught up with her and Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet In June 2021, a senseless event upends the lives of hundreds of men and women, all passengers on a flight from Paris to New York. In June 2021, a senseless event upends the lives of hundreds of men and women, all passengers on a flight from Paris to New York.
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