Hervé Le Tellier, Anomaly , translated from French by Thea Mijan.
WRITTEN BY: Pablo Srdanović
The best-selling French book of the decade is a patchwork of science fiction, thrillers and "beautiful literature", burdened with the skepticism of existentialist philosophy and populated with as many as eleven main characters and a small million secondary characters. It is difficult to escape the impression that the international literary phenomenon, called Anomaly, is first of all a writer's experiment, an experiment whose popularity is only one of the possible outcomes, perhaps the most improbable.
Because although Le Tellier's novel does have certain hitoid settings, they are, to put it mildly, scrambled beyond recognition. The story, the backbone of which is a great sci-fi joke related to the flight Paris - New York, Air France 006 and its two hundred and forty-three passengers, takes place mainly in the USA and France, but it sets all over the globe - it is a novel of wide scope, literally and metaphorically, one of those that strives to capture the world and life as a whole. But the inexplicable phenomenon that calls into question everything we've ever known about our own existence is just a skeleton ready for a multi-layered and very different superstructure. Flirting with parody, the author sometimes writes a Hollywood trash-blockbuster (the Trumpolic president of the USA is an inevitable occurrence), only to turn a little later into more direct social engagement or philosophical passages, deconstructing, for example, the mechanisms behind phenomena such as religion or fear of the Other - always with a huge dose of black humor.
Let's also say that this is a novel that hides (at least) one more novel and another writer - cold-blooded, cynical and somewhat inscrutable Victor Miesel, a character who knows how to laugh in the face of absurdity, and his latest book is called, you guessed it, Anomaly . And yes, it is a big hit, a real phenomenon. But let's return for a moment to the empirical author, the playful Frenchman Hervé Le Tellier.
Anomalia is a veritable library of literary, film and musical titles, interwoven with popular culture and, although based on a science fiction plot, strongly anchored in the contemporary historical moment. Moreover, as the novel progresses, dynamically jumping over genre barriers, the abstract and the fantastic become more and more tangible and the reader suddenly finds himself caught in a trap, in a kind of trap for bon vivants eager for literary entertainment - he turns the pages almost like a fire, forced to think intensively about the world he lives in and his own response to it. Something similar happens to Le Tellier's characters, because although all of humanity is faced with the unknown and inexplicable, a meaningful collective response will not be possible this time, and the individual will only be left with a confrontation with himself - a personal choice and his own truth. As is usually the case with good literature, Anomaly is one of those novels that persistently refuses to offer final and unequivocal answers, but that is why it constantly produces questions, real questions, revealing along the way something of what the answer cannot possibly be.