Lecture 70: Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest

[Music] listeners readers welcome to the fox page where we dive deep into the very best books you'll come away with a richer understanding of the text at hand all while learning to read everything a little better I'm Kimberly Ford one-time Adent professor at Berkeley best-selling author and PhD in Spanish and French literature the uh degree in Romance language and literature was probably not the most uh practical that I could have chosen but in some ways I feel like it chose me I really really am happy when my brain is engaged with any sort of World Language we're not supposed to say foreign language anymore we say World language for some reason my brain is particularly happy when it is engaged with French I don't have a lot of chances to speak French um and my reading French is definitely better than my spoken French but I just um I really love the opportunity to dig in to any kind of French fiction that is why in part we are reading today the mystery guest by gregar buer so part of the reason why we are reading it and why I was drawn to it is in fact this incredible Edition by MCN Jackson that is an imprint out of New York that is kind of resurrecting some titles that maybe made a big splash back in the day and need to be sort of lifted back into the conversation or ones that perhaps didn't quite get their due the original of this book was published in 2004 by gregar buer and it was translated into English at that point and in fact I was drawn to it and the idea of reading it in French because in fact it is very short it is in fact only 91 pages long so anyone out there who wants to dust off their French this would be a good one to read the English and the French side by side so I was attracted to the book because I really trust MCN Jackson also because of its length I also really love the cover what we have here is um sort of a gr ground and then the mark that a wine bottle would have left so that explains why in fact I am coming to you from a wine seller you will notice if you were on the YouTube that there are not very many bottles of wine in the wine Celler this wine seller came with our house but we are the kind of people who buy you know a few bottles of wine and we drink them we are certainly not collectors I think I have like a very cheap um you know San Blanc up here and maybe it's probably Mir ofal wow all that stuff with Brad Pit and his children woo so I am coming to you because in fact one of the main sort of plot points of this book has to do with a very very nice bottle of wine and I really was drawn um you know to to this image on the front of the cover it's also a little bit like the coffee ring that we have as our logo here at the fox page the fact that I am in seller also U may explain for some of you why the audio is a little wacky I really wanted to talk about this book and they're doing all week long some sort of road construction in front of our house and it is so loud that I am hiding out for those of you who like an agenda we are first going to talk about autofiction we're then going to do a very very brief bio of greguar buer and then we're going to dive into the text we're then going to talk about some literary parallels this book really rests in some ways on Mrs dooway by Virginia wolf which you can imagine how much I love that then we are going to move on to talk about the language that is the way it's sort of generally used in this word and then also about the translation so this is the second translation and I will tell you right now um I did not find it the best so I really want to love every single thing that mcnali Jackson um you know presents to me as an opportunity but I did even before I had read the French or read the other translation which also came out in 2004 I was a little suspicious um and we're going to get to that uh but but it was it was one of the elements that um you know was not quite as satisfying as some of the other elements of this Noella we have talked about autofiction before here at the fox page autofiction I think of it as a very French thing because the French don't seem to have quite as much of an issue that we Americans do of of sort of really really marking that line between fact and fiction so there's this whole body of work a lot of it um in French but also in other places where you can have an autobiography that is in fact very novelistic so there are a few things that Mark this kind of fiction one is that you will usually have a first-person narrator and if the protagonist is named that person will have the same name as the author you also have a lot of novelistic conventions you might have a memoir that sort of covers the whole entire life of someone autofiction tends to have more novelistic shape to it in the sense that it might focus on a certain period of time or in this case on a certain incident um you know this guy who's trying to get over a breakup and goes to a party a lot of autofiction too is sort of touted as a way for different writers to come to grips with who they are there is oftentimes kind of like a buildings Roman kind of feeling like someone coming of age or the idea of navigating a very difficult time so again it wouldn't be something where you would have you know the entire childhood the way you do with uh say Mary Carr for example where really the guiding force is just sort of chronology here we have in fact um you know more of a no istic Arc the other thing that happens when you have autofiction that is not designated as true you could have entire subplots that are made up their entire you know you could have an entire character you could have interactions and things that are not in fact true so I know for some people um this is really unappealing and is maybe making you very uncomfortable but I really don't have a problem with it in part because I am not sure you know how true any kind of memoir is so when someone is writing about thems eles in any kind of great detail and a lot of Memoirs seek to feel like a novel certainly something like Mary Carr does or The Glass Castle or you know all the Cheryl stray books those really read like novels I mean they aren't newspaper articles and they aren't you know sort of Journalism where you have the language that is very stripped down in fact here we have scenes and we have details that feel very novelistic but in some of those cases I do Wonder kind of what is true certain when an author is talking about their childhood if you have entire scenes and details part of me is like wait how is it that you can remember all of that and maybe in fact these people have that kind of memory and are able to to do that but my sense is that um it's a little suspect I also really like the idea of of of reading something that feels like a novel but understanding that the person who is writing it is is really um you know may be a lot of these things may be real so um and I also really love it when any kind of real life stuff uh you know makes an incursion into the novel so in this case we have Sophie KH who is a a very important French performance artist I did not know that before I started the book but when she makes her entrances at different times into the book it's very exciting because you sort of have this sense of like the real world as as being very available to you and being sort of shown to you in a different way because it is a different author who is telling you about themselves examples of this one of the big ones is Carl O koward who's a Norwegian yeah I think he's yes he's Norwegian and um he wrote like a 36,000 page no 3,600 I think that sounds um more in the ballpark actually don't quote me on how long it is but it's like a six volume thing called my struggle which talks about his childhood his adolescence um you know his marriage all sorts of different stuff and it is not um you know it is not categorized one way or the other it is not novel and it is not in fact a memoir and nobody seems really very bothered by that we do have some examples of American situations Brett Easton Ellis you know when like less than zero really did feel in lots of ways autobiographical that felt like sort of an autofiction kind of book we also have an older example in Truman capot In Cold Blood so he in fact called his writing faction um in fact you know a mixture of fact and fiction and and you do I think everybody knows know that it's kind of this you know novelistic portrayal of an actual crime that occurred and nobody seems to be too bothered by you know sort of parsing which of those facts are real partially because the writing is so good and the details are not super consequential so maybe that's one way to think about autofiction it's not like you're reading a manual or um you know like the newspaper you're reading something where the information you know the sort of facts the nuts and bolts are not the most important part that's another very important piece of this puzzle and it's another reason why it doesn't really bother me because I am not in fact trying to glean actual information that that I need uh to in fact be true again there are a lot of French writers who write like this one of them is Annie ER know if you're looking for short French work to read um you know side by side with your English Annie er no is excellent because of her stripped down Pros she it's so engaging and so incredibly um you know just sort of engrossing and so interesting but but the pros is um you know it's not it's not like flow bear where you have to know what like a beblau is or you have to know what a certain Carriage looks like you know it's still very rich in many ways but it's kind of stripped down Pros that's easier for someone um you know who's reading French is not perhaps maybe what it used to be okay so gregar buer I actually like know very little about him he was born in 1960 in alers but grew up uh in France he in fact did have a relationship with Sophie and very famously she um had a piece of art that was shown at the Venice ban Alle like a very big deal that was that was inspired by a note that he left for her when they ended their relationship and the last part was take care of yourself which I think she found a little cold and a little inadequate given their relationship and so she did a lot of work with other women and this phrase for those of you on YouTube I will take a look at it and um post some images he wrote a book that was very popular the came out in 2002 in France called a report on myself and then he wrote L Mis in 2004 and then we have this long break and in 2024 he came out with this monster book called and um I can't give you the English translation of that title because in fact it doesn't exist um I heard about this great you know short novel by gregar buer and I actually ordered it online and I didn't know the title of it I didn't really think that was important and I in fact got the like 900 page book and I was like wait a minute this is not the Nolla that I was ready to dive into I am not sure if I'm ever going to read but you never know we're going to go ahead and dive now into the book I like the title so much the mystery guest it's very straightforward and in French it is Lang so it it's very close to the French um and I really like the way that it is really foregrounding the idea of mystery and in many ways um you know it's not super my serious who this guy is but it comes from this idea that Sophie call um every year when she has her birthday she invites the same number of people as the as the year she as the number she is turning and then she invites this mystery guest so the premise of this book is at the very beginning our author SL narrator uh gets a phone call from a woman who he is desperately trying to get over someone who he'd had a horrible breakup with not uh actually a few years before and she's finally calling him back and he is assuming maybe that they will get back together when in fact she is calling to invite him to be the Sophie call mystery guest but you do have this sense of of being sort of drawn in by the mystery of the title it's also very important um that we have here a true story so again this gets back to that whole American thing about like really wanting to know when things are true and when they are not true but I will say you know when something says a true story and it looks very literary like a novel and it's you know being brought out by MCN Jackson you've got me because well I mean I would have to make sure that I actually was interested in the story a little bit but but it is there is something about you know something being true that that draws you in but again like I'm not interested I don't even really read very much Memoir because the fact of something being true is far less important to me than than than the experience of being in that language for a certain amount of time when the book was translated in 2004 by Lauren Stein it whoa it's very shiny um it came with the subtitle an account so it is the mystery guest an account um and I like both of those I mean a true story to me seems like a little bit bold but but but it certainly does grab you I also really like the cover of this we've got just um you know the standard and very appealing way that um MCN Jackson always does their title and then we have this like very neutral but very appealing grayish kind of background and on it we have this um you know this uh ring that looks like a the bottom of a wine bottle the irony is of course that the mystery guest brings this very expensive bottle of wine to the party and then realizes in fact that Sophie call is a woman who um not only does she have a mystery guest at her birthday parties but she saves all of her birthday gifts and uses them in a piece of contemporary uh performance art we are now going to go ahead and open up the book I also enjoy the fact that the um the French flaps I'm a sucker for the French flaps and in fact mcnali Jackson does such a beautiful job with the color of these French flaps it's a very wine colored um you know uh interior of this book which is very appealing so then we have a whole slew of these blurbs but it's very important to recognize that these blurbs were for the other translation they are for the 2004 translation which to me felt like a a bit of a cheat and again I want to love everything that MCN Jackson puts out but that did feel like a bit of a cheat if you are someone who is sensitive to translation and you know who's reading things in Translation and and trying to sort of you know reverse engineer certain phrases that might sound a little awkward the translation is very important so the idea of all of this laudatory stuff at the beginning is not about this translation it is very important to note that the dedication of the book is to Sophie call so um he dedicated did that to her and she in fact dedicated one of her Works to him which I really again I really enjoyed the idea that this person in this slim volume that feels very novelistic to me is in fact someone who is real so it does bring up this question though which I kind of you know wrestle with which is that there are lots of ways that this book feels a little opaque because in fact we don't know who Sophie I mean maybe you do a lot of people maybe do um I did not in fact know who Sophie call was I o did not know um anything about gregar buer I did not know that they had um a relationship I also didn't know who Michelle Lis was he's a Sur surrealist writer who we meet right at the beginning so I I I will look these things up obviously but it sort of takes you a bit out of the work in a way that's not great and it does leave you with this question of sort of like how much responsibility does the translation have and in fact the answer is zero like the translator doesn't need to be pointing out all of the different you know people and giving you biographies in unless they come out with like an annotated version of this oddly there is a time at the end when Ben Truman who is the translator of this points out um like the name of a singer that he is quoting our narrator is quoting um which seems like kind of an odd time there were other times where it felt much more important to understand who these people were but perhaps the translator uh maybe he's French and maybe he in fact knew all of these people so well that they did not you know need any kind of uh you know annotation we are now going to dive into the text I'm going to read the first paragraph it was the day Michelle Lis died this would have been late September 1990 or else very early October the date escapes me but never mind I can always look it up later on in any case it was a Sunday because I was at home in the middle of the afternoon and it was unseasonably cold out and I'd gone to sleep in my clothes wrapped up in a blanket the way I often did when I found myself alone in those days cold and Oblivion were all I wanted this was fine with me one day I knew it would be time to rejoin the living and that day could wait I'd seen enough beings things Landscapes I had enough to ruminate on for the next Century or two that was plenty I didn't want more trouble okay uh so a couple of quick things here so we are beginning with the death of Michelle L it's a very big deal for him it's sort of grounding the entire Nolla and what's important about this is that Michelle well I mean there many things that are important but one element is that Michelle Lis was a um he was a very important surrealist French writer and the fact that he is dying at the beginning of the book and it comes up again and again um it's important to focus on the surrealism but also as we have the death of the one writer and sort of the beginning of the career of the other you can see um the way in which perhaps our narrator is wanting to have sort of a passing of the Baton then we have him going into some specifics about dates and times again this is really grounding Us in some ways in his uh in his world and and it is also again resonant with this idea of wanting to figure out who you are as sort of this autofiction as being a way to explore who it is that you are and here again in terms of autofiction and because of the title of the uh English version having a true story we have this idea that it is not in fact a Nolla and we have this idea that we should be reading this as Memoir when in fact in the French it's not really specified one way or the other we we conflate the author and the narrator in lots of ways and we have the sense that gregar buer is talking about himself but we have a lot of novelistic elements that make it feel like a Nolla so this idea of beginning the novel with a well-known French writer this surrealist writer carries on in the sense that we have lots of literary references throughout the book and I just want to point out a couple one is um a very subtle one but I think very important on page 24 I was berating myself for being an idiot for being crazy no for being an idiot and I was consumed with self-mockery I was just a dim store Don kote looking for trouble and trouble was what I'd find so this reference here to Don kote is important in many ways first of all I mean he's invoking cantes who is you know some people believe that Don kote published in 16004 16005 uh is literally the first novel and it's a very complex novel because we have kind of an unreliable narrator but here we have him just really evoking the idea of Don kote and it's important to remember that Don kote is sort of emblematic of like having your head in the clouds and and having a very rich fantasy life and in fact Don kote is in love with dula who's like a kind of a just a normal peasant uh woman but he sees her as this incredible princess who's very beautiful and in his mind he has really built her up so I think we are being invited here to really um believe that our narrator who is also essentially Greg wer we have this idea of him as as building up these romantic attachments that he has with different women and really investing a lot of fantasy in them whether or not um you know they're actually going to meet uh his expect we also have a number of different references to ulyses so some of them are to Odus ulyses and Odus being the same thing but we have if you can hear that click click clicking that is a dog who is so nervous that I didn't I don't know why he's so nervous maybe it's all the road work um that I didn't have the heart to to put him outside plus he'll scratch um so apologies for the click click clicking of the very old dog back to ulyses so Odus otherwise known as ulyses is um this Wanderer who is on this Quest very much like we have our Wanderer on his quest here to to sort of get back together with his um ex-girlfriend or at least to show up at this party and be the kind of superlative mystery guest so we have this idea of Odus um and he laments in here that like at least Odus had his son with him and in this case you know he's by himself we also again have a woman in relationship to odsis or ulyses which is Penelope so we have this idea of Penelope as being back on their home Island and in fact being courted by all of these other people and odys trying to get back to her so again we have this huge literary icon who is really in many ways known for having this kind of important um love that the story in many ways sort of turns around so we have these kind of heavy duty references to literary greats you know he mentions self-mockery here in many ways I think he's bringing out these literary Giants um in part to realize sort of what in his 91 pages that he is nothing like uh you know cantes or a homer um and he also brings up two other ulyses so one is this little um space probe that's going that's a French space probe that's going to check out the sun which I was a little like I don't think you can land on the sun maybe it's like just taking pictures and making readings and whatnot um so that is ulyses you know it's it's traveling far away and coming back back home and then we also have uh ulyses as the James Joyce modernist classic so in that again you have like an everyday man who is having a quest during a period of one day and um is very much like the ulyses character in uh in The Odyssey but in fact is kind of an Irish Everyman so we have this modernest masterpiece in ulyses and it sort of dovetails nice way with another modernist Masterpiece which is of course Mrs dooway by Virginia wolf so Virginia wolf is one of my very favorite writers and I was so happy when I got to the end of this and realized that Mrs dooway is very much like a controlling idea and that it Maps very neatly in some ways onto the mystery guest most of you I think are familiar with Mrs dooway at the very beginning Clarissa is um you know she's preparing for a party at her home and she is going to go out and buy some flowers so very much like the Odyssey she makes her way out and around London and then comes back to her home but she is also very closely aligned with both her husband Richard dalay but also with Peter Walsh and Peter Walsh was sort of like um you know an earlier love in Clarissa delay's life and really would have um you know meant that she lived an entirely different life than she did with Richard dooway but Peter Walsh ends up being this very important figure of of regret and possibility and sort of the road not taken so again in many ways we have this gregar bouer character here who is who is looking at exactly the same sort of thing um he has broken up with this woman several years before he's trying to get over her um and you have the sense of him as being a very much like Peter Walsh in that he would have liked to have been with this woman much like Peter Walsh would have liked to have been with Clarissa delay and um you know this sort of unrealized love and this unrealized future predictably I loved the parts of the Nolla Where Mrs dooway and Virginia wolf really um you know come to the four where he's very upfront about the ways that Mrs dooway is in fact coloring his experience of Life essentially so I want to read a couple of those excerpts and he really is seeing Mrs dooway as kind of determining his fate he goes back to his place and he uh finds a copy and reads it and realizes how how clearly it maps onto his experience also he is talking here about um his old flame who he had broken up with because the entire book made it clear that it wasn't her who called to invite me to that party it was Mrs dooway or rather the spirit of Mrs dooway which had possessed her just as the spirit of ulyses stuck with me after she left starting then yes I wasn't the only one who had experience such bizarre sublimations or even total Metamorphoses it happened to other people too starting with her and it was both scary and amazing and it all fit together too neatly not to be true and then a little further down who owned my reality I was a human being too in my way and when I looked at these events through the lens of Wolf's novel I was finally able to believe and to hope that they'd happen for a reason and that this reason was accessible to me yes all of a sudden they no longer struck me as absurd and chaotic and disastrous but rather as logical and inspired and life-saving as I saw one page after another transported into reality and saw how wonderfully given the means at her disposal and how little she had to work with she had tailored Wolf's novel to her own life so I think there ways where I can look at this and and be excited that Mrs dooway is showing up in the novel but it's very important to take it one step further and ask ourselves so what why is it important that he has making all of these literary references and one of the ways um that that we can think about this is that throughout the entire Nolla he's really searching for sense he's really trying to make sense of his life and the things that have happened to him and the things that are out of his control and in his control and there's a lot here about time and fate and um you know love and unrequited love and disastrous love so we have all of these large questions that are often the questions of literature so you have this of this you know slim 91 Pages as really showing us how in the modern day all of these major major preoccupations that we have seen you know for centuries and that we saw in Don kote and that we saw again well first we saw them in the Odyssey and then Don keot and then and then in Mrs delaway um so you have this beautiful sort of idea that that each one of us in our kind of normal lives with our normal problems and our kind of every preoccupations really are also on some level grappling with these very large issues there's also the idea that our narrator is looking for patterns and he's looking for ways to reframe what is happening to him and and to sort of understand it more fully and these patterns that he sees in literature are very helpful in terms of understanding how things are going to go like what it means so instead of just thinking that he was totally rejected by um you know his former love which may have been the case um he can sort of think to himself that maybe he is in fact like the Peter Walsh character in Mrs dooway and that in fact she had very deep feelings for him it just simply didn't work out so all of these literary Echoes are a very good segue into the idea of language and sort of language in general in the novel in some ways the way that the pros reads is really interesting it reads almost more like a diary or a journal than it does um like a story that is being told to someone else and I think in some ways um he's really playing with how narcissistic it feels and how sort of self-absorbed it feels but but at times I must say that it felt like a little too narcissistic for me a little too self-absorbed I was like oh my gosh I mean I think a lot of it was meant to be funny but um some of it actually did not feel that funny and felt a little more just frankly kind of annoying but again I believe part of that is because of the translation but the reason why it has this feel in in large part is because you have these long sentences and often the punctuation in the English version will have question marks and it will have um periods where in the French version we have a lot of semicolons so the sentences seem even longer in the French version and we have a lot of digressions so it's sort of like stream of Consciousness in the sense not really in the sense of Virginia wolf but like in the sense of like something you know occurs to him and he's sort of off on a tangent in a way that I found very interesting but again it feels very much um like something that he is writing for himself it's almost like we're invited into his mind um and actually that's quite a bit like the Carl O canos card in my struggle you feel like you are invited into the mind of this person and they're sort of sharing all of their thoughts with you not um you know sort of laying out a more novelistic approach that would have more to do with plot and character development this is very much um interior musings and one of the things that's really excellent about being in the mind of this person who is in fact really suffering and and you know these things may be you know very self-absorbing to him but there is a lot of vulnerability so he's really laying out for us you know himself in in some ways in like his most raw form and his most vulnerable form and there's something very appealing about that it's that old saw in um MFA programs where they tell you that you know if you want someone to love your characters that you're writing you should show them all of your characters vulnerability not their strengths that strengths are um you know more alienating than anything else and again unrequited love or dashed hopes I mean these are very Universal things so in many ways we can both relate and also kind of not relate to what is happening with this narrator another aspect that was very um you know remarkable to me in the sort of true sense of that word about the language generally in the book is the use of cliche so there's lots and lots of use of idiomatic expressions and a lot of cliche and you can feel that because again and again and again um there there are little phrases that say like as they say as they say as you might say as they say and it's the same in the French and and it gives you it sort of tips you off of course to this idea that you know he's using a cliche and then he's like as they say so you have this sense of language as as being something that is very familiar and something that is used um like almost a little bit overused in some ways but ALS also I think a lot of the cliche stuff is is effective here because first of all it's a very efficient shorthand you know I mean I think sometimes you can tell that a writer is trying to work around a cliche and it just ends up feeling awkward so you have this idea of this shorthand but you also have the idea of of language as being kind of worn out and as genre as being kind of worn out and this idea of um you know this fixation on what people say and what these expressions are is this real idea of trying to articulate something that is difficult to articulate and that he himself is trying to make it more familiar so I think you could argue that the cliches are in some ways his effort to make this understandable to make sense to himself in fact a lot of the cliches end up um being uses of figurative language so figurative language is you know metaphor simile anytime language is like doing more than just denoting something and there is a lot of figurative language in the book some of it more successful than others so figurative language also poses a real difficulty to translators because oftentimes you know an expression using figurative language will be an idiomatic expression in a certain language and it does not translate directly so we're going to take a look at some of these examples of figurative language on page seven we have this this is at the very beginning of the novel when his uh ex-girlfriend has called I wanted her to know and no my life hadn't turned into one long hibernation and it wasn't as if I spent all my time pining away in bed all by myself ever since she'd left quite the opposite my life was one party after another and I was in top form and every moment of the day was a Tiptoe Through the Tulips whatever she may have thought to the contrary what's interesting to me about this passage first of all I was like how are they translating Tiptoe Through the Tulips because that that's a little bit of an Arcane expression in some ways also like a little bit um corny or like it feels like a different generation in some ways and it is in French it has to do with poppies um it's the Cil lot it's it's sort of close to the idea of Tiptoe Through the tul lips that kind of thing but it doesn't have some of obviously doesn't have some of the same resonance that that one does and what we have here is this piling up both of figurative language and also of idiomatic expressions so we have the long hibernation which is suggesting you know a bearer and this idea of having to retreat for a long period of time also winter and then you know growth in Spring but then we have the idea of pining away in bed which is translated it's it's obviously that's not the expression in French so there is um it's this is not a bad translation in my mind but it is um you you have this different first we have the hibernation and now we have pining away and then a little further down he um my life was one party after another and I was in top form so you know saying his life was a party that is a metaphor and and then this Tiptoe Through the Tulips so he there are lots of times where you have this kind of accumulation of figurative language and idiomatic expressions and I I tired of it frankly a little bit but I also think it it is somewhat a conscious choice because I think lots of times our um you know that sort of how we think of things and also because he is trying to figure out and and sort of really understand his reaction the idea of trying on a bunch of different Expressions is maybe a way for him to get closer to some sort of meaning and some sort of understanding on page 18 we have a few more of um of this kind of accumulation of figurative language one point he's talking about his turtlenecks and he says everyone has their straight jacket so you have this idea here of insanity which you know at times you're like I think this might be a clinical situation here potentially meaning maybe he's clinically depressed and and needs to like you know get out of bed so this idea of of the straight jacket is obviously you know pointing to this idea of being insane then a little further down he talks about being a basket case which is again something that doesn't translate particularly well into the French so we have this kind of accumulation and then just like he did before at the end we have this kind of lifting he says I was sailing through life with impunity and felt altogether relaxed and i' even met somebody new so you have this idea at the end not only of Hope because he has met someone new but this idea of sailing through life it's very much like a tip Toe Through the Tulips so often too you'll have these kind of desperate um idioms and um and uh metaphors and different types of figurative language and then at the end there's kind of a reversal where suddenly everything is fine then we are going to look at the very end of the book on page 74 this is an example of figurative language that sort of this nice culmination in some ways and this is an example of symbolism more than it's an example of a you know um a metaphor or a simil foreshadowing and I I think this works very well he's talking about the ex-girlfriend and um how he uh she asked him to changeed the light bulb in the bathroom and he was putting it off and then finally did it I jiggled the used up bulb to hear the little sound of the filament and only then did I realize that it was really and truly dead and at that moment I wasn't thinking about some light bulb no all at once I understood that I was able to replace this bulb because the light had come back on in some dark recess of my being and so now it made sense that there should be light in the bathroom so it's important to that this is a bathroom this is a shared space for the two of them but it's a very intimate space in lots of ways it has to do you know with privacy and being by yourself you know most conventionally but we also have this idea of light you know obviously light is very symbolic and he even says you know he he was sort of lighting up a dark part of himself a dark recess so I like the idea too of changing the light of going from Darkness to light so there's a lot of use of figurative language that that isn't in fact cliche and that I think works very well the whole discussion of figurative language actually Segways very nicely into the idea of translation because you can imagine the ways in which idiomatic expressions metaphors and similes just wouldn't have the same especially if they were cliche didn't have wouldn't have the same kind of resonance in English as they did in French I was very um curious about how a lot of that kind of translation was going to happen the biggest example of the kind of difficulties of translating a French cliche into or idiomatic expression into English actually has everything to do with Mrs dooway so early in the novel or early in the Nolla we have a a translation of an ID idiomatic expression that's very important to be expressed this way but it's so obviously should have been something else that I was like wait what what we have here he's frustrated because was just getting over his ex-girlfriend and then she calls and so what he says here and our translator leaves this in French say bouquet this latest this really is the bouquet that is an expression that means this takes the cake so in English we would say this takes the cake but in this case he just leaves it at that and there is no explanation so really beautifully in the other addition here because that is such an important point so the bouquet is very resonant of Mrs d away um the way that this translator Lauren Stein handled it was with a a short translator's note very brief at the beginning of the novel and he says this for reasons the reader will understand I have refrained from translating the expression s it means more or less that takes the cake so I thought that was a much more elegant way to go about translating this instead of just leaving it because part of me was like wait like the expression is this take the cake and it's very obvious from the context and and having some French and knowing that s bouquet would mean this is the bouquet also it's the same word in English so I think everybody would know that like this is this is the bouquet means this Takes the Cake the bouquet becomes very important because at the end when he sees this bouquet of roses it reminds him of the flowers that Mrs dooway has purchased in her book and so it is this very important plot point but I think it was much uh more elegantly handled by Lauren Stein so what's odd in some ways is that we have this kind of translation here but then when um but then in a couple of other places we have a footnote on the part of our translator Ben Truman where it's a much less important idiomatic expression or piece of figurative language and yet we have this footnote that pulls us out and in fact often it has to do with a pun that isn't very well translated and we're not going to go into that too deeply but it seemed so strange to me because when we really needed a note and just to explain it quickly we don't have it but then later at what seemed to me slightly random times he would have something to the effect that you know this is an untranslatable pun and he would explain it but um I also think that when you are translating as with anything in fiction you don't want to draw your reader out of the narration and it definitely draws you out of the narration to have him say oh this is an untranslatable pun here is what it is in French uh and then you're kind of looking back and forth and you're doing the translation yourself and you're totally outside then of the text and what Lauren Stein does instead is he makes sort of his best approximation untranslatable pun and you know it it's not actually even awkward because I think Lauren Stein did a very good job translating this so you have just a different Construction in English um and sometimes it's obviously not the same pun that it would be in French but he just kind of lets it go another issue I had with the translation was word choice so the first one is this idea of the bouquet um and and Takes the Cake and again I think that would have been handled better um with a note but we also have a couple of other uh big word choice issues so one is when he starts talking about the turtleneck undershirts in English in my the way I think of an undershirt is like a you know like either a tank top undershirt one of those ribbed ones or like a like a plain white Hanes t-shirt that you would wear underneath a dress shirt that to me is an undershirt it is not usually a turtleneck a turtleneck I mean I know he's talking about like a cotton turtleneck that we all were wearing back in the 80s and and and I I mean obviously I understand what a turtleneck is but what he does is from the very beginning he introduces it as this turtleneck undershirt so it was very difficult for me first of all to picture that and second of all I every time it came up and it comes up a lot and it actually is very symbolic in lots of ways I was like it's not an unders shirt and and they do talk about it as a supul which is like it would go under a sweater but what that would be would be like a normal turtleneck like a cotton turtleneck that you would wear underneath um you know a sweater that was going to be scratchy for you so um it was it was a little bit frustrating for me and we have um I want to read a sentence of it just to give you a sense of sort of how um this idea of the turtleneck under shirt really jumps out they had erupted into my life without my noticing and then it was too late those fateful turtleneck undershirts had gotten hold of had flung themselves onto my existence and I no longer knew the feeling of the Wind on the back of my neck so the other issue here is that um this idea of them flinging themselves onto him um in in the French the subject of the sentence is not in fact this uh turtleneck undershirt that is flinging itself at him what it is is the unavoidability of the turtleneck or this under shirt um you know that has the higher collar which is the Su which is s oou meaning under and p l l meaning under a sweater so in the French version it's like the inevitability of the turtleneck that he is fighting against and he talks about fighting against it and how it erupted into his life but here what what happens with Ben Truman is the turtlenecks become the subject of the sentence and it's very awkward when they flung themselves onto him I was like how is this being translated so I looked at it and I was like that's not even the subject of the sentence and and it also um the French verb is like seized me it was the inevitability that seized him it was not the turtleneck that flung itself upon him so um I I wouldn't normally care except that some of these translations in the English were honestly like strange enough that I was like I got to check this out I got to look at how the other guy did it Lauren Stein and then I got a look at the original okay the last translation element I want look at is not actually so much a translation thing it's just a difference in terms of the addition so um this is the addition of the French and I really um love its size it's really uh like it's like a tiny little book which is sort of underscoring the fact that this is a you know a Nolla it's only 91 pages long in this version by mcnali Jackson but one thing that's very important in this Edition that I don't see in the MCN Jackson because it is not there is the use of ephemera so there are a bunch of different times in um in this little French volume where we will have a sort of a pulled out um you know like a square of text or at the very end we have um like a a photograph of the bottle of wine and we have an excerpt that's actually like a like a copy of one of Sophie K's um you know her part of her birthday art performance thing that she does we also at one point have a uh newspaper announcement from Lund um you know the the big French newspaper about ulses about that uh that uh spaceship that is out in space and also has a very important role at the very end of the book so we have these different incursions of real life into the novel and I really loved them the other thing that um that we don't have when we uh eliminate them is we don't have the little captions that are beneath them so for example when we have this little block of text here underneath it we have the following and I'm going to have to translate it for myself it um it's an extract from which is Sophie Call's big work and it has the date 1998 it's untranslated and this chunk of text is in I mean the the words themselves are in um the book that was translated by Ben Truman but for some reason they decided not in fact to set the the stuff apart and they don't obviously then have these captions that I actually found um very meaning ful you feel like you're reading a report you feel like you're reading a an account of something and in many ways this makes it feel like a much more true story so it seems like it would have behooved them to include these I really always love to just looking at other uh you know handwriting from other people who do not speak English or at least didn't grow up in the United States so it's very fun to see in fact handwriting by Sophie call which is really um a treat and we get that here because we have these copies of this eera I want to close today by looking at this one passage toward the very end of the Nolla it's not quite the last page um but but it it really speaks I think to the entire book as a whole so fiction might come to the aid and service and the rescue of reality as if reality weren't always already a fiction and I looked out the window at the road I had already traveled I thought of all the events that had taken place all over the world and all the beings and things and my wayward and basically lucky life and we had arrived and paying the fair in a currency that was no longer the same as before I wondered what book might be lying on her bedside table and at that moment I was eager to find out we also have this very kind of meta thing because he starts talking about um writing a book at the same time that this this ulyses spacecraft is going up for its third uh you know third voyage so um you have in many ways this kind of weaving together of lots of these different strands and at the end it is so satisfying the way that we really see all of these resonances with these literary Echoes that we keep hearing and especially the ones with Mrs dooway so thank you very much for tuning in I really had such a good time at really digging in to some of the real strengths of this novel and really enjoying this experience of autofiction it's very rewarding in many ways to sort of play with the idea of what kind of a it is that that sort of straddles that line between fiction and autobiography so thank you very much and happy reading [Music]