[posted by Greg]
We want here to make note of an important book published late last year, The Conductor and Other Tales by Jean Ferry. A copy was kindly sent to us by its publisher, Wakefield Press, upon the request of the work’s distinguished translator, Edward Gauvin (we’ve previously published his translations of The Pavilion and the Lime Tree by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, The Wrinkle Maker by Marcel Béalu and, indeed, one of the stories that appears in this volume, Kafka, or the Secret Society.
The book immediately stands out because of its elegant appearance. It is printed in a format I’m mainly familiar with in Europe – a matte (not glossy) paperback cover with a folded over leaf – that is largely reserved for literary works with a smallish print run. This sense of the literary was reinforced by the abundance of compelling black and white collages by Claude Bellaré. Indeed, seeing a small literary work so distinctively and lovingly put together in an American context served as a reminder of how rare that experience is here, and for reasons that are not entirely clear: the graphic work done on our mass produced trade paperbacks can certainly be of high quality, but the graphics and illustrations are generally limited to the front and back covers, leaving the rest of the book almost indistinguishable from any other book of its type, while the small press literary works also generally fall into the same standard trade paperback format with the disadvantage that they do not have such a large budget for the cover art. As every single story in this volume is illustrated by one of Bellaré’s surrealistic collages, that is not a problem here.
And the stories themselves are quite brilliant. As this is but a short review, I will attempt to describe Ferry’s stories succinctly but imperfectly by stating that they present a reality being pushed by the circumstances described in the story and the narrator’s reflections on those circumstances to the breaking point and then, inevitably, past it. As in the story “Rapa Nui,” in which the narrator finds himself at long last on Easter Island after 30 years of literally dreaming, time and again, that he was finally on Easter Island except that, at the end of the story’s two pages, we learn that “not a line of the above is true, except that for 30 years I’ve wanted to go to Easter Island, where something awaits me…” The same is true in the story of Ferry’s that we published, “Kafka, or the Secret Society,” in regard to the the mysterious, but flexible and expansive (perhaps endlessly expansive) membership parameters of the society mentioned in the title. Indeed, the stories generally share the quality of the island on which the narrator is stranded in “Letter to a Stranger,” whose reality causes him to ask the reader, “Haven’t you, in the dark, ever reached out with your foot for the final step of a staircase, only to find there wasn’t one? Do you remember the utter disarray you felt for a moment? … Well, this land is always like that.”
Indeed, this work reinforces for me the sense that we in the English-speaking world are not sufficiently familiar with the strong, and unique, tradition of the fantastic that exists in the Francophone world. Like many, I’ve been aware of and even read occasional works by such authors as Alfred Jarry and iconic names such as Baudleaire and Rimbaud. But that these are only the most famous names of what is a very deep tradition has been brought home to me from three sources in the course of my work with The Cafe Irreal: the translations that Mr. Gauvin has sent us (see above), the translations that Michael Shreve has sent us (Morphiel the Demiurge by Marcel Schwob, Hell by Remy de Gourmont, and Where Are the Plans? by Jean-Marc Agrati) and, in the course of my own translating and reading of the work of the Czech writer Michal Ajvaz, his mention in an essay (which I read several years ago) that the author who has had the greatest influence on him was Raymond Roussel.
This was a surprise to me as I didn’t have at that time the slightest idea who Raymond Roussel was. I have since corrected this by reading Roussel’s Impressions of Africa. It is true that it is not at all my favorite work from amongst what I have read of this group of authors, but perhaps to correct this I need to read a bit more of Ferry’s work. For it turns out that Ferry wrote no less than three works about Roussel. Indeed, André Breton, who called Roussel the “greatest mesmerizer of our times,” admitted in a letter to Ferry that “without you, I would probably still not see anything in him.”
But here we have entered the realm of the translator’s excellent introduction, and these and other aspects of Ferry, Jarry, Roussel, the Collège de ‘Pataphysique (of which Ferry was a leading member — “pataphysique” is “the science of imaginary solutions”), the Oulipo (a subcommittee of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique) and other such matters are concisely and nicely explicated by Gauvin. Which is yet another reason to purchase this book, and/or recommend that your local library does the same.
The Irreal Cafe 