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| (photo: Cathy Bistour) | |
French writer, journalist, mathematician, food critic and teacher Hervé Le Tellier has published 15 books--stories, essays and novels--including All Happy Families and Electrico W. The Anomaly (Other Press, November 23, 2021), translated by Adriana Hunter, is the winner of France's prestigious Prix Goncourt. The novel draws from thrillers and science fiction to tell a page-turning story with a heavy philosophical bent, centered on an unexplainable anomaly during a plane fight that produces two seemingly identical sets of passengers.
At certain points in the book, scientists attempt to explain the titular anomaly to laypeople, often relying on the real-world simulation hypothesis, which proposes that we are all living inside a computer simulation. How important was it for you to try to approach the anomaly as a realistic scientific concept?
To explain that people split into two, you have to appeal either to magic or to a rational explanation. I did not want a moral tale, a fairy tale. I shy away from the fantastic, the supernatural. It was not a question either of engaging in a creation of worlds, like Tolkien, but on the contrary to be anchored in contemporaneity. If I cheated with that, it was lost. The simulation theory is not a "crazy" theory at all. In a recent article published in the journal Scientific American, there is about a 50% chance that it is true. We have to reason according to Ockham's razor principle, named after a 14th-century philosopher: the simplest sufficient hypothesis, even if it is implausible, must be preferred.
The novel obviously does not take place in a specifically French setting, but are there parts of the book that you think might come off differently to an American audience than to a French audience?
Yes, there is probably no "Frenchman" any more than there are "Americans." There are French people, all different, and Americans, all different of course. The character of the Christian fundamentalist Jacob Evans is very foreign to us, France being a rather atheist country, just as we imitate (rather badly) the American talk show.... But the book was designed to capture this strangeness of the world, these differences between peoples. There are even chapters written (mentally) in English, and the translator realized this.
I'm curious how many of your own authorial concerns you voiced through the character of Victor Miesel. I'm thinking particularly of a passage where Victor wonders "how many simultaneous stories would a reader consent to follow?"
How do you react when faced with yourself? I decided to write a real novel, with a spectrum of reactions to be assumed each time by a different character. We go from deadly confrontation to collaboration, through hatred, indifference, accommodation, fraternity.... Which character is best suited to take on one of these reactions, to don the toga that says "assassin" or "friend"? That defined my characters.
I looked for a range of ages, quite consciously: I chose men who were slightly older than the women, so that [th e women]would represent modernity, a more active way of acting than the men. I also wanted to deal with many themes, like racism, hidden homosexuality... and also to travel the whole planet.
Did having such diverse characters allow you to explore multiple genres in the same book? The hitman's sections, for example, read more like a thriller than other sections.
Yes, and that's absolutely the point. To build a novel with eight voices (and even more), you have to transform yourself into your own reader. Not abandoning your authorial project, and projecting yourself into an external reading, imagining what can stop you, make you lose the thread, and cross the obstacle with you, thanks to construction devices, before erasing the traces of this construction.
Eight characters was enough. I eliminated some. It was too much, it became a process. An old lady with Alzheimer's who was happy to share childhood memories with herself. A young rebellious teenager, who calms down because he sees himself stuck in rebellion!
There's an element of satire to the book, particularly in regard to "The American President," who feels very familiar. When approaching targets that have been as heavily satirized as Trump, do you feel motivated to try to skewer them from a unique angle?
Trump is a special case. He is a character even more than a politician. If I caricature him, it's because I need to. He plays the role of a Beotian, of an ignoramus, and this allows me to be didactic and to explain to a reader more complex issues without losing the energy of the narrative.
Are there depictions of doppelgangers in literature or other media that influenced The Anomaly?
I have always wanted to deal with the question of confrontation with oneself, the impossible lie, identity. The theme of the double has been present since Amphitryon, and of course in Hoffman's tale, Doppelgänger, but never in the form of a real confrontation between two identical beings. I wanted to propose, through multiple characters, an exploration of a range of possible reactions.
In Dostoyevsky's work The Double, if Goliadkin ("our hero") sees a double appear and disrupt his life, this is not the case for those around him, who only find a vague resemblance and are hardly surprised by his presence. The double becomes an affair between Goliadkin and himself, a paranoid journey. Virginia Woolf's Orlando is rather a crossing of the centuries by an androgynous character. If The Anomaly is, by its form, a novel that plays with the codes of pop culture, one could very well write a pastiched form in the style of Borges, in the style of Cortázar.
What kind of research did you undertake to make sure you captured characters like Slimboy as well as you capture, say, Victor Miesel?
The story of Slimboy is the result of the fusion between a real news item, in fact several, which all took place in Nigeria, and the life of a homosexual friend from Ivory Coast, who had to leave his country to live his sexuality in France. He is one of the few who asked me not to mention him in the "acknowledgements" at the end of the novel.
For the other characters, I took also a lot of documentation. Really a lot....
Have you had any reactions to the book that surprised you since its initial publication? I'm curious whether any practical or ethical questions related to The Anomaly emerged that you hadn't considered.
No. No reaction that surprised me, ethically or practically. I had thought a lot about answers, about religious questions, about the use of free indirect speech, which is the basis of literature, but which more and more people seem not to understand anymore, since social networks dominate and simple first-degree thinking has invaded everything.
If you could meet a version of yourself, would you want to?
I'm not sure I'd like to exist in duplicate. My life is complicated enough as it is, and having two would not divide its complexity. --Hank Stephenson