Fionnuala's Reviews > L'Anomalie

If on a winter afternoon a plane flies into a super-cellular storm...

If I'm paraphrasing Italo Calvino, it is because Hervé Le Tellier's book seems to be an homage to Calvino, and to some other members of Oulipo from the 1960s and 70s such as Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, both of whom he references—and Le Tellier is the current president of Oulipo.

Like Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, L'Anomalie begins with a series of story fragments seemingly unrelated to each other, but, as in Calvino's book, the more of the fragments we read the more we understand how they lock into each other like pieces of Lego.

The initial fragment concerns a man who leads two lives. One is the comfortable life of a middle-class family man, the other is the life of a hired assassin who changes his personal details with every job so that his identity becomes a long series of duplications.

The second fragment introduces a failed writer (called Victor), who makes a modest living translating other writers' work including the Russian writer Goncharov, creator of the character Oblomov whom Victor resembles in his tendency towards passivity and day dreaming about an idyllic future. Victor always carries a single piece of red Lego in his pocket in memory of his father who died when Victor was a child and who used to help him build Lego models. He has sometimes mislaid the piece in the years since his father's death but has replaced it with an identical piece each time, not caring that it is only a duplicate.

When Victor is on a flight from Paris to New York, a flight on which the hired assassin from the first fragment is sitting a few rows in front of him (though Victor sees only a man in a hoodie), the plane flies through a series of super-cellular storms, and the experience marks Victor in an unusual way. When he returns to Paris he writes a novel entitled 'L'Anomalie' which is an immediate bestseller and which several of the people who were on the same flight later read. And just as in Italo Calvino's book, the reader begins to ask herself if the book she is reading is the book the readers in the book are also reading, or if the book she is reading is a further book Victor writes a couple of months later, after a repeat of his strange experience, and which he also wanted to call 'L'Anomalie' except the title was already taken. Oh, and he now owns a second piece of red Lego.

How many duplications can there be in one book, you are no doubt asking. The answer is 'many'. As many as the verses Georges Perec created using heterograms of the eleven-letter word ulcérations—and incidentally that number is thirty-five, the same as the number of sections in Le Tellier's book. If I've mentioned that, it's because the word ulcérations appears in the final very fragmented sentence of L'Anomalie, a sentence that looks for all the world like a Lego model that has been kicked to pieces.
Or a sand-timer that is running out of sand.

That old sand-timer has been busy in the course of the book in any case. L'Anomalie features a man for whom the sand runs out not once but twice, another man for whom the sand runs back up into the timer, and a man who gives new meaning to the phrase 'he killed himself working'.

Oh, and there's a toad who has a reverse sand-timer episode too—and another crapaud who, in 2021 when the book is set, seems to be still living in The White House. Now there's an anomaly!