OF TIME AND TARZAN
Authors Fortier, Plamondon well-served by new translations. Two novels concern struggling writers and jump around in time
There’s a fairy tale quality about Mont St-Michel. Think of the words “medieval,” “abbey” and “monastery” or variations, close your eyes, and the image that comes up will probably look a lot like the fortified island off the coast of northern France, for centuries only accessible from the mainland at low tide and now served by a pedestrian bridge.
A little bit of backstory only adds to the allure: The monastery’s library and scriptorium, dating back long before the invention of the printing press, was at times among the best in the world. Once a magnet for scholars from all over Europe, it has survived, through cycles of damage and neglect, all the way to the present day.
If you’re a bibliophile you couldn’t devise a richer and more romantic scenario, and Dominique Fortier obviously is. The Island of Books (Coach House, 147 pp, $19.95, translated by Rhonda Mullins) finds the award-winning Quebec novelist and translator once again demonstrating what director Jean-Marc Vallée has called her “gift for making insightful connections between seemingly distant ideas.”
Éloi, a 15th-century French portrait painter grieving the death of his lover and favourite subject, is taken on by the Mont St-Michel monks as a restorer of fading manuscripts. An irony is that, like all but a privileged few at his time in history, he is himself illiterate: He’s not so much writing as painting letter-shaped figures.
Five hundred years later, a Québécois writer and new mother is struggling to reconcile parenthood and creativity. “Every moment devoted to reading or writing is a moment not spent with my daughter,” she laments. “Writing has developed a dreadful urgency and a nagging guilt.” Hoping to rekindle the inspiration she felt on a visit to Mont St-Michel as a 13-year-old, she goes back 25 years later.
Fortier structures the novel by alternating between first-person accounts from the Renaissance painter/restorer and the presentday writer. Ground Zero for this kind of centuries-hopping strategy, at least in its modern iteration, is probably A.S. Byatt’s 1989 novel Possession. Ali Smith did something similar two years ago in How to Be Both.
Fortier shows herself worthy of such august company: Her sensuous prose, rendered with perfect smoothness by Mullin, is always a pleasure in itself, and she lets the historical parallels and affinities — Gutenberg’s press threatens to make the loving labour of the monks redundant; the forces of modern technology conspire to steer us more and more away from books and into reading from screens — emerge organically. The result is a seductive love letter to reading, to books, and to the creative impulse.
The Island of Books appears in English a mere year after its Governor General’s Awardwinning French original, Au péril de la mer. That’s a refreshing exception in a marketplace where translations often lag behind much longer — when they happen at all. It’s hard to maintain a healthy literary dialogue across the language divide when the respective readerships are years apart.
Which is not to say we shouldn’t applaud a new English edition of Éric Plamondon’s Hungary-Hollywood Express (Véhicule/Esplanade, 168 pp, $19.95 translated by Dimitri Nasrallah), only to express some regret that we’re only now reading the first volume of a trilogy when all three volumes are already available in French — in fact, they’ve been gathered into a single volume, a mark of the standing they’ve achieved both critically and popularly.
With a title inspired by Richard Brautigan’s Tokyo-Montana Express, Plamondon’s novel bears a couple of marked similarities with Fortier’s: It, too, concerns a struggling writer, and jumps around in time, though in this case the trail is a lot more tangled.
Gabriel Rivages is a man in his late 30s whose biography overlaps in certain ways with the author’s; for reasons best left for the reader to discover, he has developed a fixation on Johnny Weissmuller, the Hungarianborn swimmer and actor who won multiple Olympic gold medals, achieved enormous but fleeting fame on the silver screen as Tarzan, then suffered a long and terminal fall from grace that ended with his penurious death in 1984.
The novel takes the form of 90 numbered and titled sections, most no more than a page, some as short as a few words. Historical lines both public and private are traced, their one common meeting point being Weissmuller: future Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs selling pencil sharpeners on the streets of Chicago; the bikini bathing suit being launched in 1949 at the same Paris swimming pool Weissmuller had inaugurated in 1924; the boy Weissmuller diving into Lake Michigan at the same moment Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914.
Plamondon’s broad net allows him to incorporate historical figures as diverse as Al Capone and Fidel Castro, as well as literary mavericks Herman Melville and Richard Brautigan. The meta levels can get a bit dizzying: At one point Rivages muses on two translators’ varying takes on a passage from Moby Dick, and it hits you that you’re reading a translation of a comparison of two passages that are themselves translations.
One review in the Frenchlanguage press called Hungary-Hollywood Express “a novel for the Wikipedia generation,” implying both good things and bad: a breadth of knowledge and references, but also a bite-sized approach that could be seen to pander to short attention spans.
In practice, though, the effect is actually the opposite — yes, you’re skipping around a lot in time and space, but you’ve got to pay extra close attention to make the connections Plamondon intends. What keeps it all grounded is the man in the middle of it all: Somehow, despite being little more than a cipher in Plamondon’s design, Weissmuller emerges vividly on the page, his plight a thing of true pathos, his life’s arc no less painfully human for serving as an archetypal 20th century odyssey.
The second and third volumes in the 1984 trilogy, Mayonnaise and Apple S, revolve around Brautigan and Steve Jobs respectively. Given that the sandwich spread, the late writer and the late computer visionary are all mentioned in the first instalment, the whole thing, you suspect, will make a new kind of sense as a single entity.
Seeing exactly how Plamondon pulls it off promises to be a lot of fun. Even if you’ve already found out in French.