Meike's Reviews > Die Anomalie

Winner of the Prix Goncourt 2020
Soon available in English: The Anomaly

Le Tellier investigates how people cope (or don't cope) when their idea of reality gets defeated: A flight from Paris to New York is caught in a storm, then lands in the US - twice, once in March, once in June 2021. And it's the exact same machine, with the exact same people inside; people who now exist twice. Their March versions are collected and brought to the hangar, so they can meet their June version; security experts, politicians, the media, and religious groups get involved. The public is alarmed, the pairs of doppelgängers (who is whose doppelgänger in such a scenario?) try to fight the breakdown of their lives: Who gets the apartment, the spouse, the kids, the job now? And where the hell is the serial killer that boarded the plane?

The author of this romp is a mathematician and a member of the experimental writing group Oulipo, and his work plays with probabilities and permutations of reality in order to show how individuals and societies, in this case mainly the American and the French society, react to phenomena beyond their comprehension. And of course, it also plays with the contingency of life, as what happened in the few months the March versions have not yet lived is crucial for their relationship to the June versions. Also, there is some meta-stuff about a writer who pens a book entitled, you guessed it, "The Anomaly".

Unfortunately, I was not really captivated by the novel: There are roughly 100 pages of exposition, and what plays out afterwards, the reactions of the numerous individuals we've been introduced to, from a lawyer over a rap star to an aging architect and a single mother, is rather unsuprising. The idea sounds much more interesting than the final product. Still, this is a crowd pleaser, appealing to a way broader audience than many other Goncourt winners that go for more intricate, complex tales, as Le Tellier aims to entertain and divert while staying accessible (which isn't bad per se, it's just that this reader wasn't particularly entertained). In Germany, the publisher flooded the blogosphere with copies in order to ensure mass appeal, and it worked.

So let's see whether international prize judges will go for this - I think it will be widely read in the English-speaking world, especially as it tackles and satirizes so many American sensibilities.