Jonathan Littell, _The Fata Morgana Books_, trans. Charlotte Mandell

I STILL HAVE not finished Les Bienveillantes, though (clears throat) I fully intend to, but I thought I could give this a try in the meantime--seven short stories (or six and a novella, perhaps) originally published a four separate volumes by a French publisher, Fata Morgana.

Most striking to me, coming to this after having read 860 pages of Les Bienveillantes, is the near-perfect absence of the kind of contextual framing historical fiction provides.  Les Bienveillantes is painstaking about names, places, dates; in these fictions, while the details of a scene are usually vibrantly precise, we have no orientating information about where we are, or what year it might be, or even very many personal names.

This difference made it all the more remarkable that the two books definitely seem to be the work of the same author (even though I read this in translation and am reading Les Bienveillantes in French). The novel's narrator, Maximilien Aue, has the same eye for the same kind of detail, the same cool equanimity even while describing shocking events, the same willingness to let a sentence unwind to its end, however long it needs, that the narrators of these fictions have.

The back cover copy mentions Kafka and Blanchot, which sounds about right, both in the suppression of precise localizing detail and in the tone of eerie calm in the face of irrational events that teeter between comic and horrific.  We might mention Lispector and Beckett as well. "Fait Accompli" could almost be the Beckett version of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants."

"An Old Story" made the strongest impression on me. The book's longest story at just under eighty pages, it makes a loop: its ending capable of being seamlessly joined to its beginning. It could, theoretically, become an infinite repetition (which may be what makes the story "old."). The events are dreamlike, swift and shifty and arbitrary, yet the narrator accepts whatever happens and steps into whatever role circumstances offer with scarcely a hesitation or demur. Episodes include an encounter with a Joseph Kony-like child army, a troupe of marauding Cossacks, a luxurious party, and a sex club; they dissolve rather than end, the narrator finding himself at the conclusion of each in a track suit, running down a corridor, until the next door opens on yet another scene in which he will play yet another role.

The story begins and ends at a swimming pool, which makes me wonder whether "An Old Story" is an elaborate homage to John Cheever's "The Swimmer."

The story's import? I know not, but I would say it is altogether safe from Oprah's blessing, and that's something these days.