May 15, 2022
A translator finds herself enmeshed in a bizarre plot in this highly referential novel. Many novels begin with a professional taking on an assignment they probably shouldn't. That's what happens to Vanessa Salomon, the narrator of Greer's novel, who begins work on a new project from a French novelist known initially as Not Michel Houellebecq. Soon enough, she learns that there are actually two authors using that name: H1, "a serial harasser," and H2, who tells Vanessa he's hired H1 to be his public face while he works as a corporate CEO. Things get more complicated from there, with the plot eventually encompassing Vanessa's actress sister as well. As Vanessa continues working with H2, she finds traces of her late ex-lover in a hotel room and comes to believe that H2 may have sinister designs on her. If this all seems ornately complex, you're not wrong, but Vanessa's caustic voice goes a long way toward supplying a memorable comic edge. "I was born in a trilingual household, you see--French, English and money," she says early in the book. Later, she notes that "in France diminutives are regularly employed to address children and strippers." As befits a book about a translator, Greer's novel abounds with literary references, with a passage at the end indicating that "raw material" for aspects of the plot comes from Recollections of the Golden Triangle by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Readers familiar with Greer's work as a screenwriter (including Unsane, 2018) will find a few easter eggs here as well. The ending feels a bit unwieldy, but a charismatic narrator can work wonders, and that's the case here. A thoroughly bizarre, frequently compelling literary thriller.
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July 11, 2022
Musician and screenwriter Greer (Everything Flows) delivers a zany and messy story of a literary translator hired by an infamous French author referred to as “Not Houellebecq.” Vanessa Salomon, 29, lives in a New York City apartment once inhabited by photographer Francesca Woodman, and carves out a life in contrast to her movie star twin sister, Angelique. Vanessa obsesses over Woodman’s 1981 suicide at age 22. She also assumes responsibility for the recent suicide of her lover Thomas, a poet who, like Woodman, jumped to his death. She travels to France to meet Not Houellebecq, whose work she despises, and learns he has yet to finish the book she is meant to translate. The situation presents a convenient opportunity for Vanessa to test her theory that the best translations are written before the original text, but before she gets very far, the “rapey” Not Houellebecq drugs her, and she wakes up back in her apartment in New York without knowing what happened. The prose is often overwrought and dilletantish, with Vanessa expounding on literature and sharing her pessimistic views, and the esoteric journal entries from Thomas add nothing. Still, an absurdist action-packed third act involving a rescue operation of Angelique in the Alps turns out to be fun, kind of like watching that old Bruce Willis caper Hudson Hawk. The author’s fans might dig it.