Antoine Volodine, Minor Angels, Trans . by Jordan Stump, University of Nebraska Press, 2008."From Antoine Volodine comes a deeply disturbing and darkly hilarious novel whose full meaning, its author asserts, will be found not in the book’s pages but in the dreams people will have after reading it. In Minor Angels Volodine depicts a postcataclysmic world in which the forces of capitalism have begun to reestablish themselves. Sharply opposed to such a trend, a group of crones confined to a nursing home—all of them apparently immortal—resolves to create an avenging grandson fashioned of lint and rags. Though conjured to crush the rebirth of capitalism, the grandson is instead seduced by its charms—only to fall back into the hands of his creators, where he manages to forestall his punishment by reciting one “narract” a day. It is these narracts, or prose poems, that compose the text of Minor Angels."
"In his rebellion against traditional narrative styles, Volodine borders on the pretentious. His attempt to create a new reader consciousness has an alienating effect not only by the overlapping of narrators but also by the often vile imagery that permeates this work. Although there are some rare poetic moments reminiscent of Baudelaire's prose poems, one is ultimately left with a feeling of total loss and futility on both an esthetic and a human level." - Donald J. Dziekowicz
"Minor Angels has all the markings of a masterpiece: compression, resonance, and vision."—Terese Svoboda
"His talent surfaces time and again in luxurious, hypnotic ways." —Publishers Weekly
"His quirky and eccentric narrative achieves quite staggering and electric effects... Dazzling in its epic proportions and imaginative scope." — The Nation
"Rilke was right: Every angel /is/ terrible. But the language here is intoxicating, and the buzz you get makes even the ugliest stories appear beautiful."—New York Journal News
"Volodine isn''t afraid to tangle animate and inanimate spirits, or thwart expectations. He delights in breaking down our wellhoned meters of what’s supposed to happen. It is out of the shambles of these once-easy relationships that Minor Angels really soars."—Margaret Wappler
"Volodine''s characters struggle against humankind’s demise, managing to cling to their full names and little else, and in the process they reveal their compelling histories and strange presents, all of them concerned that their stories be told.''"—Tim Feeney
"Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels is presented in 49 short chapters, each except the middle one (25) paired in a sense with another (1 with 49, 2 with 48, etc.). Forty-nine 'minor angels' run through the text, each given as one chapter-heading, though many resurface in a number of episodes. Volodine calls what he presents: "narracts" - "the trace left by an angel", he explained in a preamble to the French edition that Stump quotes in his preface. They are episodes and stories, or mere glimpses of life in this world he has created.
Minor Angels is set in a quasi-post-apocalyptic world. Disaster struck centuries earlier, and humanity was decimated. The environmental and social effects are still being felt. Volodine doesn't describe what happened, but mentions such as "back when there was an Africa" suggest a major catastrophe.
It is also an unreal new world, filled with century-old women destined never to die. Lamenting "the sad fact that humanity had now entered upon the more-or-less final stage of its fading", the old women come up with a plan: to "assemble the avenger the world so desperately needed." This figure - put together from rags and bits of lint, becomes Will Scheidmann.
Will isn't everything they hoped for: he brings back capitalism, an apparently frowned-upon solution to the troubles of the times. Eventually he is tried and sentenced to be executed, but in this world even execution isn't simply accomplished ("Will Scheidmann's execution had been underway for three weeks", we learn at one point).
Will's story is one of the central ones in the book; other prominent figures include the writer Fred Zenfl (who writes stories about the extinction of his species) and any number of characters whose lives intersect - though not always in obvious ways. It is a very dreamy novel, allowing for the many surreal touches, and it's no surprise to learn from one character, for example:
'As on every sixteenth of October for what will soon be one thousand one hundred and eleven years, I dreamt last night that I was named Will Scheidmann, even though my name is Clementi, Maria Clementi.'
Some of this is absolutely bewitching, as Volodine beautifully conjures up this bleak world with small, sharp images, but much is confounding. There are certain events around which the text focusses -- not quite a plot, but enough to provide some hold - but the dream-reality convergence, and, especially, the lack of sense of time can leave the reader at sea.
The individual scenes and chapters - the 'narracts' - are often compelling, but the book does not come together comfortably. What narrative structure there is is clever, but does not ultimately offer enough to make the book truly gripping. An interesting but not entirely (or satisfyingly) successful exercise." - The Complete Review
Read it at Google Books
Antoine Volodine, Naming the Jungle: A Novel, Trans. by Linda Coverdale, The New Press, 1996.
"Antoine Volodine has been hailed as one of the most innovative and accomplished writers in France today. Compared by critics to Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll, Volodine weaves an unusual novel of political and psychological intrigue in a lush, exotic setting. The publication of Naming the Jungle marks his American debut and the first translation of his work into English. Puesto Libertad could be any Latin American city torn by the strife of civil war. In this isolated capital buried in the jungle, the revolutionary secret police have started digging into Fabian Golpiez's past. In order to avoid brutal torture and interrogation, he decides to feign madness. Led by a local shaman/psychiatrist in a bizarre talking cure, Golpiez must use indigenous names to prove both his innocence and his true Tupi Indian identity. To name is to conquer. He names the monkeys, the plants, and the insects all around him as he names his fears, his paranoia, and his pathologies."
"The American debut of a French writer is an intense, hallucinatory novel of a man's daring psychological ruse to protect himself from political brutality. Fabian Golpiez, a Jucapira Indian in a fictitious post-revolutionary South American country, is interrogated alternately by a psychiatrist and by local security forces as he tries to untangle a confession, or at least tell a story, from his feverish memory. Employing a strange ritual, the psychiatrist displays images on a slide projector that prompt Fabian to tell his tale. But the Indian feigns madness in order to conceal his past associations with both sides of the civil war?a one-night love affair with a guerrilla commando, and some time spent peripherally assisting an authoritarian judge in his inquisitions. Meanwhile, Fabian plans vaguely to escape into the jungle with an associate and with his lover, a nurse. The actual story has a sparseness that contrasts with the lush lexicon of Volodine's imagined jungle: e.g., "surucating" (making love), "caranguejeira" (a type of spider); "jacare" (alligators). While the author undercuts his rich style with a certain self-consciousness, and his narrative lacks a vital dynamic dimension, his talent surfaces time and again in luxurious, hypnotic ways." - Publishers Weekly
"Intensely imagined evocation of post-revolutionary Latin America, from an acclaimed French novelist whose work appears here in English translation for the first time. The setting is the city of Puesto Libertad in an unidentified country whose new government assiduously examines the loyalty of those who fought in the recently concluded revolution. One such citizen, Fabian Golpiez, must match wits with Gonáalves, the choleric psychiatrist who grows increasingly frustrated with his ``patient's'' erratic memory (Fabian can't remember whether he served with government or rebel troops). The two engage in several amusingly combative conversations, in which Fabian is challenged to prove his native (Tupi Indian) identity by providing the correct Indian names for indigenous flora, fauna, and other phenomena. Volodine juxtaposes with these talks memories triggered by Fabian's efforts to "explain certain episodes of my love life or my revolutionary days'' - most notably his sexual relationship with a mysterious woman accused of collaborating with the former government's thuggish military police, and his complicated friendship with a rebel soldier with whom he'd planned to found an "egalitarian commune,'' climaxing with the pair's hallucinatory journey upriver into the dangerous interior. The novel is alive with color and detail, and its portrayal of the perils of existing in this volatile environment are powerfully evoked by the ubiquitous presence of seemingly endless varieties of snakes and spiders (which Fabian must both name and survive). And Fabian Golpiez, an uncomprehending little man who desires only to blend into anonymity with the jungle that hides him and with the compliant women with whom he blissfully "surucates,'' is an unusual and appealing protagonist. An unconventional look at the embattled human manifestations of amorphously large events - and a pleasing debut by a writer from whom we'll surely hear more." - Kirkus Reviews
"The jungle city of Puesto Libertad is reorganizing itself after a revolution. Imperialist speech is forbidden; only tribal vocabularies are acceptable. Anyone unable or unwilling to call a spider a "caranguejeira" is in big trouble, including war veteran Fabian Golpiez, who is suspected of disloyalty. To defer interrogation by the brutal police, Fabian agrees to undergo treatment by the grotesque Dr. Goncalves, a shaman-psychiatrist. As the therapy proceeds, Fabian is shaken to learn that he shares with Goncalves not only a first name but a lover, a violent past, and a wholly uncertain future. Fantastic events unfold in a surreal atmosphere of unresolved questions. While not likely to generate popular interest, this novel will appeal to readers of experimental fiction. Buy where demand warrants." - Starr E. Smith
"Antoine Volodine’s NAMING THE JUNGLE successfully mixes the stylistic and aesthetic conventions of Magical Realism, Surrealism, and Postmodernism to tell its strange tale of a band of outcasts barely surviving in a remote jungle. Thus, the reader must accept that characters are killed only to live again, that time is circular, and that the narrator is highly unreliable. Once these fictional conventions are accepted, Volodine’s story provides an exquisite glimpse of the grotesque side of human life.
Squirming in a dentist’s chair that his psychiatrist, Fabian Goncalves, has inherited from the previous owner of his office, the traumatized protagonist Fabian Golpiez must retrace his journey to the run-down town of Puesto Libertad. If he fails to use only Indian proper names for everything alive, Fabian will have to go back to the political police. In a narrative twist that powerfully comments on humanity’s amazing capacity for devising ever fresh forms of cruelty, Volodine’s police operate right in front of their kitchen. Here, unfortunate suspects are interrogated as cooks brutally slaughter alligators, monkeys, and tortoises, and play bloody practical jokes.
Once Golpiez decides to flee upriver, more quixotic characters appear. There is Manda, an Indian woman who sleeps with both the psychiatrist and his patient. Former soldier Rui Gutierrez snacks on snake meat and yearns for the deep jungle. Two of Golpiez’s lovers are mysterious women with government connections, Maria Gabriela and Leonor Nieves, who occasionally appear as gigantic bats, leaving Golpiez to pursue his escape by canoe.
With many of these fantastic turns and events, NAMING THE JUNGLE offers a deliciously absurd text where reality has taken a holiday." - www.enotes.com
