Lili is Crying by Helene Bessette

He is dragging his wife along the hot road in the shadowless evening.
He is shouting:
--You'll have to choose, it's me or her.
--She's my mother, sobs Lili, I choose my mother.
--Naturally, Lili, she is your mother, and its a great shame, but if you want to see her again, you'll have to do it without me there. A separation, Lili. This evening, I broke up with my mother-in-law.
He cracks a match. He lights a cigarette, leaning forward, cupping his hands around his mouth.
He's a man.
And this evening he's fighting.
This troubled evening.
This tormented evening.
This tearful evening.
This cigarettes evening.
Lily is crying.
He hates to see Lili cry.
And so he gets angry.

Lili is Crying takes place in Provence during the early 20th century. Lili is a young woman living with her domineering and possessive mother, Charlotte, who runs a small boarding house. Charlotte is suspicious and resentful of any suitor of Lili's, regarding them as thieves who want to take her daughter away from her. To Charlotte, a mother should enough for Lili--a patently ridiculous thing to believe about the life of a young woman, but a belief with long-reaching consequences. Eventually, Lili marries a man who has no idea the trap he's walking into, how Charlotte will rage against him simply because she took her daughter away, and much of the novel is a back-and-forth between Charlotte and Lili's husband in which one demands that Lili choose them over the other. No wonder Lili is crying. "There are so many ways to love a daughter," Bessette writes, "And how well she could have loved her daughter, that mother Charlotte. There are thirty-six right ways. (But she chose the thirty-seventh.)"

This impossible dynamic is solved, in a way, when the man is taken away by the Nazis and sent to Dachau. In his absence, Lili and her mother become entangled again, and though the man eventually comes back, he struggles to realize that he has lost Lili's affections entirely in his absence. He's rich, in a way, having filled his pockets with the jewels and other affects that the dead of Dachau will no longer need, but Charlotte threatens to turn him into the authorities for this--all of which is a particularly bitter image of the life that those who managed to come back from the Nazi camps might have found. There's no place for Lili's husband; his absence was like a vacuum that has been filled. This culminates in a dalliance between Lili--who is now in her 40's--and a simple-minded shepherd who is thirteen years younger. Life at Charlotte's side has made Lili stunted, and an ordinary life seems to have passed her by; she has aged without ever really having the normal married life she dreamed of.

Helene Bessette was a member of Oulipo, the French school of "potential literature" founded by Raymond Queneau that prized wordplay and "constrained" writing. Lili is Crying is not so playful or experimental as some of what the Oulipians produced, but you can see the influence in her language. The novel unfolds almost like a poem of strung dialogue, sometimes demarcated by dashes when a speaker changes. The line between what characters think and what they say is not always clear. Its simple, staccato phrasing provides a grounding of the strangeness and tragedy of the story, which i found very affecting.

The Art of Asking Your Boss For a Raise by Georges Perec

having carefully weighed the pros and cons you gird up your loins and make up your mind to go see your head of department to ask for a raise so you go see your head of department let us assume to keep things simple--for we must do our best to keep things simple--that his name is mr xavier that's to say mister or rather mr x

If you don't want to read this entire book (all 80 of its small pages) you can instead look at the flowchart below which was the inspiration for the exercise. Georges Perec, possibly the most member of the experimental writer's group Oulipo, is probably best known for his 800 page Life: A User's Manual, but this slim volume is really the novelization of the flowchart, written in the way Perec imagined a computer might speak--there's no punctuation between sentences, no capitalization, no direct dialog. And given that, it's the perfect length.

The premise is in the title: the protagonist, unnamed, wants to ask his boss for a raise. A number of obstacles may or may not arise--if/then is one of the computational structures Perec structures the book around, alongside the loop--and depending on those, different options present themselves and so on. Branching narratives are common in Oulipe texts, and TAOAYBFAR's twist is to present all possible options and then follow them to their terminus which is, in reality, just another, slightly modified version of the loop the proagonist is stuck in.

For 70 of the pages, the narrator is entirely unsuccessful in asking for his raise. He's blocked by Fridays, weekends, vacations, measels, Lent, angry coworkers, and, most cleverly, the absence of his boss who is in fact stuck in the same loop of approaching his own surperior and being denied. You might think this would be tiresome and horse-beating, but in fact Perec is not much like a computer at all because he inserts a biting and poignant narrative between the lines. The protagonist may not get much closer to his raise in these 80 pages, but we do learn that he's been at the firm since he was a teenager, that he's now married with children, and during the time span covered by the iterations in the book itself, we know that he's at least 5-6 years closer to, well, death by the time he finally gets his ask.

It's not much of a spoiler, perhaps, to reveal that the end of the book is just the beginning of another iteration of the loop--after asking his boss for the raise, which is only an additional 9 pounds per month(!), he's given what amounts to a polite brush off as his boss says he deserves it but it needs to be sent up the ladder, a ladder that both the reader and the protagonist know is ultimately unscalable. Maybe in six months, the dispassionate text says, or maybe 6 months after that.

But the text isn't really dispassionate either. One of the funniest, most poignant jokes is the repetition and mutuation of passages:

you can always wait for him by circumperambulating the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the organization of which you are an employee
---
you can always wait for him by circumperambulating the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of one of the biggest firms in one of the key sectors of one of the nation's most infulential industries
---
you can always wait for him by circumperambulating the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the consortium which pays you a pittance while grinding away the best years of your life

Perec shows his cards in the second person narration: the protagonist doesn't have a name because their name is your name, their endless loops are your endless loops, the slow grinding away of the best years of your life under the crushing machinery of capitalism is the day-to-day existence of most people, and tiny mutations in the sequence are the rays of hope, which are always yanked away but promised again. But at least Perec makes it funny.

 

Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau

'Being or nothingness, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears. A taxi bears him off, a metro carries him away, the Tower doesn't care, nor the Pantheon. Paris is but a dream, Gabriel is but a reverie (a charming one), Zazie the dream of a reverie (or of a nightmare) and all this story the dream of a dream, the reverie of a reverie, scarcely more than the typewritten delirium of an idiotic novelist (oh! sorry). Over there, farther -- a little farther -- than the Place de Republique, the graves are overflowing with Parisians who were, who ascended and descended the stairs, came and went in the streets, and who did so much that in the end they disappeared. Forceps bore them, a hearse carries them away, and the Tower rusts and the Pantheon cracks a little more rapidly than the bones of the dead who are too much with us to dissolve into the humus of the town impregnated with cares. But I am alive, and there ends my knowledge...'

One fact that will tell you what Raymond Queneau's Zazie in the Metro is like is that Zazie, the foul-mouthed little girl from the French countryside who arrives to spend the weekend with her uncle Gabriel, never rides the Paris Metro. No doubt you will think about Waiting for Godot, another text where the promise of the title never happens; it's merely set over the page like a winking irony. Like Becket, Queneau's characters are all surface. It's hard to recognize any human depth in them, which makes their conversations hard to follow, composed as they are of verbal tics being spooled out again and again. The characters are composed of verbal tics, I mean. They are like the parrot Laverdure, who says only one thing: "Talk, talk, that's all you can do."

French people, the introduction informs me, find Zazie in the Metro enormously funny. There's a recognizably comic plot, that goes something like this: Zazie arrives to visit her uncle with only one desire, to ride the Metro, but there's a strike on. Her uncle tries to give her a tour of Paris, but she eludes his control, skipping off to pester and curse at strangers. Zazie is in turns chased after and spurned by Gabriel, as well as his gentle wife Marceline, his landlord Turandot, Turandot's parrot Laverdure, a disguised cop named Trouscaillon, and several other broad comic figures.

There's something ultramodern about Zazie, something that captures a postwar Paris emerging into a global culture. What Zazie jones for, other than to ride the Metro, is a nice pair of American blue jeans and a Coca-Cola. Her uncle Gabriel and his friend Charles, a taxi-driver, try to show Zazie the "real" Paris, but prove to know as little as she does: they bicker over whether a certain building is the Place de Republique, or the Gare de Lyon, or the Commercial Court. The only landmark they can really identify is the Eiffel Tower, but standing at the top of it with Zazie, they no longer have any faithful reference point at all.

All of which is underlined when Gabriel is "captured" by a group of tourists who, despite not thinking any French, believe him to be a tour guide; instead of taking Zazie to see the "real" Paris, Gabriel finds himself kidnapped by the group, leading them to sites neither he nor they can recognize. If you're still thinking of Waiting for Godot, you might read Zazie at the Metro as a romp through the postmodern emptiness of words, which fail time and time again to locate the characters in space or in meaning. The blue jeans are real but the Pantheon is just some building.

Zazie is a novel also about modern sex panic. It seems awfully prescient, for example, in the way that Zazie's solo adventures invoke anxieties about sex perverts, anxieties that Zazie herself is more than willing to weaponize when, for example, she wants to duck Trouscaillon. But it's Zazie herself that turns out to be sex-obsessed: an off-hand remark by Trouscaillon pushes her to ask her uncle, again and again over the course of the novel, whether or not he is a "hormosessual." He's not, he insists, but he does make his living by dancing at a nightly drag show. And neither does he consent to tell Zazie what a "hormosessual" is exactly--in another way failing as a guide to his young nice.

What this edition could have really used, I think, is a translator's note. Queneau was famously the linchpin of Oulipo, a group of French writers whose hallmark is wordplay. I'm sure the translations into English here are very clever when you know the original French, but I found myself wondering why I should really be interested in calling the blue jeans "blewgenes" or the Coca-cola "cacocalo." Some layer of meaning--like the blue jeans themselves, for Zazie--kept alluding me. The madcap energy of Zazie's weekend was never enough, for me, to make up that deficit.

My Life in CIA by Harry Mathews

I'd known what she would say, and I hated hearing her say it. At 41 I still longed to be thought of as open and good, to seem wonderfully transparent (and transparently wonderful, no doubt). It hurt to be thought of as a spook. Not because by that time it had become shameful but because it was simply wrong.

I had gone through something like this already. Many people in Paris "knew" I was gay, because for years I used to dine several times a week with my best friend, and he was gay. QED. I didn't disapprove of homosexuality, on the contrary; but how could people see me for whoever I was if they made such a basic mistake?

My Life in CIA is Harry Mathews' memoir, ostensibly, of a period in his life in which people believed he was an American intelligence agent working in Paris. God only knows if the real Mathews ever experienced anything like this, but if he did, it certainly didn't play out the way it happens in the novel, though its verisimilitude is bolstered with real friends of Mathews' like the French writer Georges Perec. As Mathews tells it, the rumor came out of his time spent in Laos with a friend who was an American ambassador there, and at first he claims that it caused him shame and consternation, until a friend recommended that he lean into it and make a game out of it.

For Mathews, who was associated with the formalist French literary school Oulipo, complicated "games" are what life and literature are all about, and he goes about this game in a particularly Oulipo way. Recognizing that any real CIA agent would have a job, he starts an ersatz travel company; his first job is to give a speech to group of men who have "travel-stress dyslexia" that make catching planes and trains difficult. He suggests only traveling at times that are palindromes, seeding his explanations with train times to remote Siberian nuclear sites--train times, palindromes, that's the Oulipo stuff, though here it seems rather tame compared to the complex wordplay of a novel like The Sinking of Odradek Stadium.

Anyone can see where My Life in CIA is headed, the same place that a couple dozen more straight-faced books and films head, too: Mathews gets mixed up with the real CIA, real Communists, real right-wing agitators, and eventually gets in over his head. The setup promises hijinks, and delivers: at one point Mathews is rolled up nude in a priceless Persian rug and delivered by coincidence to a banquet of violent right-wingers. At the dinner they discover he's a poet and make him play silly poetry games that force him, quite gleefully, to rhyme "jonquil" with "tronquil." It's extremely goofy. Right after that he makes love to a little person.

Women and sex are another element of the game here: Mathews' depiction of himself is a sort of James Bond-like womanizer, irresistible to women. The little person is one, but there are a half dozen other women clamoring for him, too; and three of them are named Marie-Claude. One of them, who induces Mathews into the mysteries of touchless tantric sex, has the hilarious name of "Marie-Claude Quintelpreaux," which is a very good COINTELPRO joke that I felt very smug for getting. The joke Mathews plays on himself is that, even though he has the seductive quality of a good literary spy, every single attempt made at actual fucking in the book is interrupted. That's how you end up naked in a rug.

At the heart of My Life in CIA are questions of identity: if enough people say Mathews is CIA, could that make him actually CIA? The novel is set during in the early 70's, in the hangover left by the 60's counterculture and by Vietnam, and the CIA is up to no good, getting mixed up, among other things, with Pinochet's coup d'etat in Chile. Though Mathews isn't really a CIA agent, the rise of Pinochet makes him feel guiltily implicated, and the real life bounty on his head threatens to collapse his false identity and the real one.

My Life in CIA is a lot of fun, but something about it made me feel like it could never be as fun for the reader as it is for Mathews, or maybe for poor mixed-up George Perec. There's promise in Mathews' desire to play with his own real world identity, to blur the lines of novel and memoir, but it's not like he's someone whose public persona ever mattered much in the first place, so as a postmodern experience the novel falls a little flat. But I enjoyed it all the same.

The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium by Harry Mathews

I shall reminder, and do you, that the life in time is a wheel, and one point sole of the rim touching the earth, a creature is alive but at the point, the rim's points gone by are death, the points coming are not alive, when they come the now will be dead.  It shall be new creatures.

Zachary McCaltex is a librarian living in Miami; his wife Twang Panattapam, a native of the fictional Southeast Asian country of Pan-Nam, is living in Florence, Italy.  The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium is composed of their letters to each other, discussing a lost Italian treasure they believe has disappeared off of the Florida coast, and how much they miss each other.

Harry Matthews was known as the only American member of Oulipo, a French writing collective whose authors set for themselves strange linguistic games.  In Odradek Stadium that manifests in Twang's letters, which are a kind of pidgin-English meant to reflect a half-successful translation from the fictional language of Pan:

I've the memry of your to-come in my town.  Our dog in the under-house likes you, he make the strange woof of tendernes and sensure--then, I have interest in you.  And hiss.  Do not put a way your memery of the litlte money you will send.  Do not think, the of-Nau things be roots, they are tirds, yet are OK if you act only little.  I & you; harmnony; peace.

The mistakes, such as they are, have regularity because they come from a clearly conceived linguistic structure.  Pan, you might infer, has no gerund but only infinitives; see Twang's memory of Zachary's "to-come" in her small town, rather than his coming.  She mixes up "c" and "h," suggesting something about the pronunciation of Pan.  Mathews uses her unfamiliar English vocabulary to make a number of small pomo jokes: she describes a radio program describing a fire as a "pogrom," rather than a program; a beautiful blue geranium becomes a "cranium."

A scheme like this would easily devolve into condescension and Orientalism, but Mathews makes Twang self-evidently intelligent and wise.  From her place in Florence she is the chief researcher regarding the treasure; she uncovers the story of its inheritance bit-by-bit.  She tries to recommend a kind of Buddhist wisdom to Zachary, though her zen koans tend to be lost entirely in translation.  And what's more, her English gets progressively better over the course of the novel--so slowly that it's actually difficult to notice.

Even still, the main theme of the novel is how much gets lost in translation.  Zachary and Twang, though they know each other better and more intimately than they do anyone else in the world, frequently misunderstand each other.  A secret letter, in which Twang confesses that she knows her associates in Italy are reading her mail and so she is going to salt her letters with misinformation, gets lost in the mail, muddying the linguistic waters even more.  They get so mixed up, in fact, that Zach boards a plane to Florence at the same time Twang boards one to Miami, and so they miss each other completely.

In his letters, Zachary tells the story of his induction into Florida's premier secret society, the Knights of the Spindle.  He accepts in part because he wants to get close to the head of the society, who bankrolls treasure-hunting expeditions, but he's also flattered to be admitted into arcane truths (itself a kind of postmodern commentary on the theme of the accessibility of knowledge and communication).  These scenes borrow their comic wildness from The Crying of Lot 49, and can be really funny.  They play rec-league baseball against other secret societies, and at one point their libidinous party in their secret sewer lair is interrupted by municipal workers, who join them in their revels.  The Miami of Odradek is a fanstasia of occult Carnival festivities that seem more appropriate to New Orleans, but exaggerated to riotous lengths.  It's better, I'm sure, than being in the real Florida.

In the end, The Sinking of Odradek Stadium achieves the most difficult thing that a postmodern language-obsessed can achieve: it strikes an emotional chord.  After their relationship seems to have utterly dissolved--Zachary, going slightly mad, loses all the hair on his body--Twang discovers the missing letter, marked return to sender, and says some very beautiful things in her newfound English:

It is as that which was tumbled is raised or what was hidden is unclosed, some yellow rose, like the right road pointed to she who was lost or a light brought into the dark for those who have eyes to see.  Yes my cheeks are wet.