Antoine VolodineBesprekingen

This was my entry into Antoine Volodine's unique literary project, which he promises can be read in any order. Volodine is only one of a number of heteronyms used by the French-Russian writer behind them, which is certainly unusual but not unheard of, but then each of these personas is writing from the same alternate reality. In this reality these writers are all left-wing prisoners in a totalitarian state, telling each other stories, and birds are human-like members of the resistance. Weird, huh. The project so far consists of 44 of a planned 49 works published in France over four decades, under various of the heteronyms, and together they make up the "post-exotic" literature. Eight have been translated into English over the last 25 years and there are three new translations coming out in 2021 to push that total to 11, of which Solo Viola, published by the University of Minnesota Press is one.

Solo Viola consists of two main parts with a short postscript. The first section had me in mind of Italo Calvino. It has that fable-like, somewhat whimsical quality to it. It introduces the reader to several groups of separate characters in a capital city. There are three just released political prisoners - a horse thief, a circus wrestler, and a bird. There are four members of a string quartet. There is the horse thief's more successful brother. There are millions of Frondists, followers of a populist nationalism that controls political and public life, expert in manipulating the dark currents of the human soul. There is a clown. And there is a writer:

He is not content to offer peevish, bitter pronouncements about the world that surrounds him. He does not reproduce in exact detail the elemental brutality to which humanity has been reduced, the bestial tragedy of their fate... [his] usual process was to replace the hideousness of current events with his own absurd images. His own partial hallucinations, both troubled and troubling. Most of the time, although obviously not always, he obeyed the rules of logic... suddenly his exotic parallel worlds would coincide with something buried in some random person's unconscious mind. Suddenly, that reader would emerge from the subterranean levels of mirage and onto the main square of the capital... he was unable to render on paper, without metaphors, his disgust, the nausea that seized him when he faced the present day and the inhabitants of that present... we approach the story of a man who lives in the anguish of being unclear, a man who spends twenty-four hours a day obsessed by the real, but who nevertheless expresses himself in an esoteric, sibylline manner, locating his heroes in nebulous societies and unrecognizable times.

I imagine we can take this description of the character of Iakoub Khadjbakiro (all characters in this novel have exotic sounding names to this reader, often seeming to bear some resemblance to Armenian ones) as a fair description of the author's decades-long project. And if he was horrified by ominous developments concerning populist nationalism in 1991, when this novel was published in France, he would hardly be less so when considering political developments in the Western world leading up to 2021. Thus his project unfortunately has just as much relevance today as at any time in the last forty years of its compilation.

All these characters, and Frondism, come together in the second part of the novel in a gradually building set piece of horror that reflects an attack on the arts and its supporters, an attack on a perceived cultural elite by the populist mass expertly manipulated by totalitarian leadership. Those of us who enjoy a good string quartet performance will be rather uncomfortable here. Volodine portrays the helplessness of those who become the target of the totalitarian mob's rage, a mob for whom, as would be said of Donald Trump's rallies twenty five years after this book's publication, the cruelty is the point.

The brief postscript suggests, in my initial read at least, that escape from this fate is only partially achievable by turning away from the reality of human nature and society and turning inward to the world of imagination, where we can at least imagine a society of the brotherhood of man - but which would ironically only exist in the mind of a sole person, and which here is suggested by a solo viola playing. I'll have to read more of the author to see if that fatalistic reading holds!

I have suffered a reading slump recently which I can only blame on Volodine's Terminus Radieux, not because it is a bad novel, but because it is the most depressing novel that I have read in a long time. So here are some bullet points as to why I found it such a struggle to get through:

It is a dystopian novel, where even staying alive seems to be a pointless exercise.

It takes place in Russia - a post nuclear Russia.

Characters seem to be neither dead nor alive, but something in between.

The prose is circular with very few events and when something does happen it is liable to be described again.

It is a novel of over 600 pages (I read the french original and so I might have lost something in the translation) where the situation seemingly, gets worse and worse.

Kronauer; a soldier and two colleagues have escaped from the Orbise a collective that was functioning as a capital of the region. It had been attacked by barbarians. Everybody is suffering from radiation sickness. The three have been on the run for about a month, have run out of water and collapsed within sight of some railway tracks. The woman Vassilissa Marachvili has been carried on Kronauer's back for some time and she is nearly dead, slipping in and out of consciousness. A train consisting of four wagons containing soldiers comes down the track and stops nearby. It is manned by soldiers half of whom are very dead, some are almost alive and all are sick. The three comrades remain hidden, but Kronauer decides to make for some nearby woods in a search for water. He eventually makes it to a Kolkhoze (an agricultural collective) and becomes a semi prisoner of the President.

The President Solovièï practises some kind of mind control and has become immune and possibly immortal due to radiation poisoning. His partner Mémé Oudgoul has become notorious as one of the few people who also survives the radiation. They are encamped on a nuclear rector/outlet and have three daughters with whom Solvieï has incestuous relationships. He exercises control over the few inhabitants by nightmarish dreamscapes and is jealous of any unwelcome approaches to his daughters. Everybody is sick. Time passes, no one is really sure if they are alive or dead, the sun is almost blotted out, everything is grey and cold, daylight is decreasing and the creatures that seem to be benefiting are the carrion crows.

If ever a book celebrates the idea that darkness is coming then it is Terminus Radieux. Reading dystopian novels at a time when we are on the doorstep of a climate catastrophe is not everybody's idea of fun reading, but added to that the distinct possibility of nuclear war in Europe and one can easily for-see the future of our planet in the world that is described by Volodine. The novel is effective because it creates a powerful atmospheric force that destroys all hope of a return to lighter times. Is our future on this planet as bleak as Volodine claims, well if so I suggest you read his novel on a bright sunny day when the birds are singing. It should be banned as winter reading in Scandinavia or anywhere north of Alaska.

A difficult novel to rate, as an exercise in dystopian fiction then possibly a five star read. It is however a struggle and my enjoyment limits it to 3.5.½

I am not a fan of dystopian novels (the author defines his work as post - exotic literature, which I'm not disputing; I am merely indicating how my brain processed this novel). Despite all the horrific novels I've read, this genre makes me feel an indefinable interior darkness that is difficult to comprehend. Nonetheless, I am intrigued by Draeger's (pseudonym for Antoine Volodine) novel. It is interspersed with beautiful prose, creative folktales, horrific scenes and, dare I say, some very dark humor. His command of the written word is exquisitely complex and tormented. Volodine states that the meaning of post - exotic literature is found, “not in the book’s pages but in the dreams people will have after reading it”. I have little doubt Volodine will infiltrate my dreams for days to come.

The novel's hunting idée fixe:
"You are burning. I go to you. In this moment, we are with you. We are all moving toward you. We are exchanging our last breath. Your memory trickles from your eyes. My memories are yours."

This was a powerful piece of writing! Imagine being raised in an apocalyptic world, trained to be a Communist revolutionary from birth, in an environment in which physical punishment of children is absolutely forbidden, yet the psychological toll of living & breathing revolution is possibly worse. The book is essentially about the end of the human species and the experience that extinction as it happens. A decades long battle between capitalism and communism, in which the communists want total egalitarianism, finally achieves oneness, ironically as death is meted out equally. The concept of the Bardo is a central feature, both in legend as told by the old and wise Granny, and in the reality of the characters.. Quite fascinating. Yes, it is a dark read, yet the writing and structure are powerful.

Conflicted. Can't decide what I think about it. I'll come back to reviewing it when the dust has settled a bit.

When I finished this novel I began to cry.

But: I have no idea what this novel is supposed to mean. I could read up about it, I suppose. But even with more knowledge, I'm not sure there would be a way for me to have loved it more, or to have been touched by it more, or to have been made to think more, than the choice I made, which was to read this very complicated and mysterious novel as a dialogue, a 1-1 relationship between me and the words on the page.

So how to describe this complicated knot of feeling, now that I've reached the end?

What I'm feeling has to do with a sense that this novel stands for the permanence of human relationships--that our thoughts and feelings and actions as thinking creatures can create a reality that endures every kind of assault.

Described here is a horrific world. And yet the characters trapped in this horrific world never fully despair. And the story itself, however violent and seemingly hopeless, always holds out in the end a thread of fragile hope that humanity (not just people, but their best selves) will endure.

I read the first two pages as an ebook sample and thought what terrible writing and even worse translating. Luckily I had to read this for a book group, because I started again with a print copy and thought what amazing writing and translating. Once I got used to the rhythm of the writing and the weirdness of this particular bardo, I found so much 'post-exotic' humor and creativity. Definitely a book that works best as a group read.

Strangeness is the form taken by beauty when beauty has no hope.


One has to admire the ambition, the pluck, to boldly attempt to create a new genre. Volodine crafted the post-exotic supposedly to engender not the effect of reading the book, but to cultivate or influence the nature of the dreams one has after reading. The framing story concerns the fate of the one who brought back capitalism after the second fall of state communism. The figure in question isn't quite human but rather sentient. he's due to die anyway for his heinous crime (imagine, opening to the door to the return of Mafioso and demagogues of industry) . The condemned spends its time constructing naracts--these 1-3 page descriptions which depict a world of collapse, privation, cruelty and despair.

I feared initially that this novel would resemble some of the work of Blake Butler: a taxonomy of disaster as performance piece. Instead I saw Volodine's aim steer towards the heights of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. I wasn't enthrall throughout but the framing story did afford it resonance.

The credo behind the crowd which is Antoine Volodine states that the post-exotic effect of literature is the dreams one has after finishing the reading of a novel. Based on that metric, the subconscious effect elevated the experience.

This novel in stories depicts a bleak future, where corruption and revolutionary failure has driven many to Buddhism. All the protagonists find themselves in the Bardo state between death and rebirth. That element is certainly difficult for this reader to swallow.

Volodine uses some interesting elements, bricolage, improvised technology, and even the dire image of someone reading an anarchist tract aloud to direct a fallen comrade in the afterlife.

There is a layer of humor but it appears to be a result of the pervasive disorientation which everyone feels in that between state.

Présumant que le défunt est obligé par son karma de traverser les quarante-neuf jours du Bardo, et qu'il doit rencontrer, sur le chemin de la renaissance, de terribles visions et obstacles, un lama lit le Bardo Thöddol, le Livre des morts tibétain, pour l'aider à triompher des dangers qui le menacent. Mais que se passe-t-il lorsque le mort refuse d'écouter les conseils ? Ou lorsque l'existence dans le Bardo lui plaît au point qu'il ne veuille plus en sortir ? Où lorsque le lama, au lieu de réciter le texte sacré, se met à lire à haute voix un livre de cuisine et des poèmes ? Que se passe-t-il quand au monde des mystiques se superpose le monde des fous, des révolutionnaires ratés, des imbéciles et des sous-hommes ? L'écrivain et acteur Bogdan Schlumm tente de mettre en scène les réponses à ces questions. Personne ne l'écoute. Les arbres l'entourent, les oiseaux lui fientent dessus. Il est très seul.

Prepare to enter parallel universes where time collapses on itself--it's circular--the future and the past are always the present, where a 2,000 year old Gramma feeds and talks to a nuclear reactor core, where you never know if a character is living, dead, or somewhere in between, and where the characters exist mostly in a dreamlike state. The setting is a nuclear wasteland after the fall of the second Soviet Union. The antagonist Solvyei is much too powerful and it's not difficult to figure out what he is supposed to represent in Volodine's politically charged novel.

While dealing with time in a circular fashion so that those previously dead are alive again, and attempting to manipulate people's dreams so that the character never knows if they are in their own dream, someone else's dream, or awake is certainly difficult subject matter, several parts of the book were tedious and redundant. Each time a character entered a different state, the author described it all over again. There were simply too many details. Do the readers really want to know exactly what is being fed to the nuclear reactor core each time Gramma feeds it?

Volodine went to great lengths to ensure the reader doesn't confuse his writing with sci-fi or any other genre. He wants it to be called post-exotic fiction as one of his characters, a writer, makes clear at the end, and as he mentions throughout the novel. Apparently, this is an emerging genre and it seems you must be one of the cogno senti to fully appreciate it.

It would be easy to write this novel off as the rantings of a madman, but Volodine is far too clever to be called a madman. For those with the patience to enter this dreamworld, it's a fascinating place.

ça tourne en rond et plus j'avançais dans le livre et plus il m'était difficile de lire...

A spiritual farce? A human comedy? A satiric view of the absurdity of humans? All of the above? Volodine takes a belief regarding the afterlife and demonstrates that humans, with their foibles, cannot manage to navigate it without total chaos ensuing. The author even takes a stab at the "play within a play" concept. Three vignettes within one vignette. It is a jumbled life, a jumbled afterlife, and a bit of a jumbled read. Very well done!

How to describe this book? The 11th lesson of Post-Exoticism appears to be that Post-Exoticism cannot be understood by anyone outside of the prison system; not only can it not be understood, it does not want to be understood. For Post-Exotics prison is a lesser hell than the hell of living in a politically retrograde valueless capitalist society. They are, all of them, political dissidents who refuse to be assimilated, who refuse even to use the same linguistic conventions as deemed acceptable to the "free" world.

A heady and tough read. Volodine's perpetual task is to make clear the theoretical and literary style of Post-Exoticism, as if to make it intelligible, but then refuses that intelligibility is possible for anyone who is not part of the Resistance.

I inadvertently did myself a good turn by reading Volodine's Writers directly after reading Ben Lerner's 10:04. Ostensibly their subject is the same: writers and writing, so they can both be classed in a postmodern literary metafiction subgenre together, but they treat the matter so differently that it seems unfair to class them under the same umbrella. Besides the fact that both authors blend fact and fiction in their work, they have little else in common. Ben Lerner blends fact and fiction by drawing on his own life, making himself the point of interest, but Volodine eschews such personal attention. Volodine is not even the author's name, it is one of several pseudonyms employed. Volodine himself is a fiction, and he has created a "fictional-yet-real" literary movement called "post-exoticism" that he expands on throughout his stories.

Volodine is imminently more serious, both insofar as his worlds are darker and grittier (none of the writers who serve as main characters of the 7 stories are successful), but also insofar as he exercises his imagination and extends BEYOND himself as a writer. Ben Lerner is a showman, a poet turned novelist, flexing his muscles in front of the mirror that is the critic's circle. Volodine is a workhorse and he writes because he must GET IT OUT.

The writers of Volodine's slim book of short stories also must “get it out.” They are imprisoned, mad, exiled, unknown, unsung, ordinary, unintelligent, uneducated. They have been political assassins, factory workers. They sometimes write on scraps of paper, but they just as often ‘write’ aloud in their jail cells, or standing before the abyss. Every one of Volodine's characters is always speaking out over an unhearing void--they speak to no one and anyone and to themselves. They speak to you, if you are reading it I suppose, but they are unaware of your audience. This reader almost feels guilty witnessing them in their barest moments, but there is a sort of bravery in them that offers the slightest bit of consolation.

While Lerner is an aesthete in the Romantic style, circling in on himself, Volodine has an Aesthetic Theory that is grounded in suffering, and the raw emotion that compels us to speak out in the face of it. Unlike Lerner’s narrator, Volodine’s writers are not privileged, they are totalizingly disenfranchised. And yet still they create.

All of the stories are good, but they build strength as the little book progresses. I found "Acknowledgments" to be a needed delight after the dismal first stories in a madhouse/jail. Volodine has a seemingly endless supply of improbable unique character names, which he gets to make ample use of in this writer's overindulgent and increasingly absurdist "Acknowledgments." Readers interested in Volodine’s concept of “post-exotic literature" will find “The Strategy of Silence in the Work of Bogdan Tarassiev” and “The Theory of the Image According to Maria Three-Thirteen” of particular interest. The latter I found thoroughly haunting. The volume closes with a story about a man who discovers that the tale of his birth was a lie, and then becomes compelled to write it ‘correctly.’ All told, a lot of literary power is packed into a mere 108 pages. Volodine is officially on my radar. Long live post-exoticism!

This book is in seven parts, each dealing in some way with a writer. These writers are utter failures--commercially, critically, and in terms of eventually acquiring even a minuscule sympathetic readership. This failure is treated bluntly and often humorously. However, the writings here revel in the power of words that reach no one, words for potential or future audiences, words merely written but discarded, words merely spoken but never written, words borne of "deaf voices," words with no owners. And the writers are as derelict as their words: former, future, or potential assassins, revolutionaries, and suicides, riddled with diseases, writing in spite of or because of their dysfunctions. It's clear that Volodine's vision and aesthetic are firmly in place, and I'm eager to read more of his writing, mainly to see other facets to his "post-exotic" approach, for it is clear that another audience for the writers in these stories is one another--other writers in the post-exotic universe, who appear to be for the most part imprisoned or otherwise institutionalized, and who pass their stories to one another. While Volodine's post-cataclysmic universe and its writers kept me busy enough, still other writers kept coming to mind. The dark, bitter and fatalistic resistance to totalitarianism of Danilo Kiš wasn't far from my thoughts. Nor was Cesár Aira, who also frequently includes veiled--and refreshingly non- or anti-academic--treatises on language and writing couched in his fictions. Also, in discussing failed writers, or writers who stopped writing, or writers who never even started writing, I was reminded of Enrique Vila-Matas' "Bartleby & Co.," except I found this work to be more compelling, more darkly enjoyable, and above all more evocative and imaginative in its hints and allusions to the various reasons why writing is, all at the same time, impossible, necessary, worthless, and transcendent.

comment est le monde, à la fin? juste avant, mais aussi un peu après? hommes et femmes, dans ces lieux désolés, cherchent à vivre encore, et à rêver. la nature s’épuise face aux cataclysmes, lentement tout noirci. les hommes disparaissent peu à peu, chaque signe de vie, d’une vie qui lutte, prend une teinte puissante. celui qui écrit les histoires n’est jamais bien sûr s’il est encore de ce monde, seuls les histoires sont là, plus réelles que l’humanité qui s’éteint. les espaces s’étendent comme aux premiers jours de l’humanité, rendant les rencontres providentielles, ou fatales. se retrouver est encore ce qui justifie la survie, même si cela doit se produire au seins de rêves, des siens ou des autres. finalement pas vraiment d’espoir en vue pour rétablir un semblant d’humanité, quelques projets et comptes à régler, comme celui de débarrasser du capitalisme qui semble avoir tout précipité, mais aussi le désir profond d’aller chercher par delà les espaces nus, devenus immenses, pour retrouver un foyer de vie, une parcelle de communauté, mais ce ne sont que des histoires isolées d’hommes seuls ou presque, vieillissant sans plus de projet, perdus dans un monde vicié, toujours plus inhabitable, relégués à la contemplation de souvenirs.

Oh. My.

This collection of three novellas (published as separate books in France) is the American debut, I think, of "Manuela Draeger," one of the other pseudonyms of "Antoine Volodine." In their simple sentences and primary-colored events, they're children's books. Except they're set in what might as well be a different universe. Draeger makes Dr. Seuss look like a realist.

It's a nighttime world, before calendars are invented, before fire; meteorite showers are common. Yet the narrator Bobby Potemkine lives on the seventh floor of an apartment building, and his friends live behind the vegetables in the minimart or next to the abandoned RER station. The police have disappeared, leaving Bobby to investigate bizarre cases. The three cases here (the first in an ongoing series) concern the disappearance of the woman who invented fire, the rescue of a noodle named Auguste Diodon from a child's lunch, and an outbreak of baby pelicans with no mothers to tend to them.

You know how it is: "Ever since the rain of black meteorites this winter, baby pelicans have been parked in the streets, the houses, the stores, on the twisted rails of the RER, and their mothers are nowhere to be found. ... After a while, someone always leans down to stroke them and talk to them, and ask them if they have any news of their pelican-mothers. The baby pelicans don't answer. They remain mute and make no movement. And you don't end up getting the slightest information out of them."

Bobby's friends and helpers include his dog, Djinn, a virtuoso on the noctiluphe, a wooly crab named Big Katz, and a tiger or large tiger-striped cat named Gershwin. His school-days crush on the batte Lili Niagara still makes him blush whenever he hears the clippeting of the tips of her wings. Gershwin threatens to eat Bobby, Djinn marries and moves away, and Big Katz brings a flood of ocean wherever he goes: the usual gumshoe problems.

The translations by Brian Evenson (one in collaboration with his daughter) are excellent; the vocabulary, odd as it is, never feels unnatural. It's a gorgeous little book, too, and the publisher (Danielle Dutton, as "Dorothy, a publishing project") wants to prompt more translations of Draeger and of Volodine. It's hard for me to imagine that not happening, once people experience this gem.

Mes lectures habituelles sont plus de science-fiction et fantastique, je suis venu à lire cet œuvre car il parle de la fin de l'humanité. Bien sûr ce n'est pas vraiment un livre de science-fiction à proprement dit, plus une fable de science-fiction, racontée en 49 narrats. C'est le livre dont j'ai le plus de mal à me faire une opinion, je n'ai pas été emporté comme d'autres lecteurs l'ont été, et je les comprends tout à fait, mais on ne peut nier qu'il se dégage de l'œuvre une aura de conte de la fin du monde tout à fait enchanteresse. Qu'on aime ou qu'on aime moins, ce livre est assez marquant mais si certains sont hésitants quand à sa lecture, lisez le premier narrat et voyez si vous êtes transportés. En tout cas, une expérience pas désagréable.½

Chronique : http://www.fricfracclub.com/spip/spip.php?article385

boring and captivating at one time.½