The Queen's Caprice

February 16, 2015
Echenoz (Big Blondes) offers seven âlittle literary objects": elegant, succinct narratives that question, mock, and undermine narrative convention. The first piece portrays English hero Admiral Nelson, prone to seasickness (âso awkward for a sailor"), eating with one hand and reading sideways with his one good eye. As Nelson plants acorns for oaks to build future ships, the narrator mentions that oak is also used in barrels like the one that will carry Nelson's body home from Trafalgar. The title story consists entirely of a description of a French country landscape, the travelogue of a casual expert editing his not-quite-final draft, simultaneously quoting and ignoring Joseph Conrad's plea for orderly exposition. The travel-writer protagonist of âIn Babylon" is the Greek historian Herodotus, whose remarks on the ancient city, filled with exaggerations, misinterpretations, and straight-out fiction, will be read for centuries. Other pieces depict statues in the Luxembourg gardens and a writer's attempt to write about a Paris suburb. The story with the most clearly articulated plot, about a French engineer visiting Florida, features an abridged history of bridge building. Cinematic underwater sci-fi fantasy rounds out the collection. Coverdale's ingenious translation, with endnotes on linguistic idiosyncrasies and cultural references, brings to life Echenoz's minimalist precision, ironic humor, and savvy choice of detail.

February 15, 2015
Seven odd little vignettes that add up to a book of beauty.French author Echenoz has visited American readers several times previously with wry novels such as the recent revision of I'm Gone (2014). This collection of stories is something entirely different. The translator, Coverdale, describes the tales as recits, but Echenoz's own description is preferable-"little literary objects." In some of the stories, nothing happens other than a literary description of the landscape for 360 degrees around the writer's chair ("The Queen's Caprice") or a series of walks around a decaying French town that will not see better days again ("Three Sandwiches at Le Bourget"). The collection proceeds with Echenoz's distinctive voice, and Coverdale appends various endnotes to explain some of the arcane facts he freely inserts into his tales. One of the gems, "Nelson," is a fair representation of what's at work here. Adm. Nelson sits down to dinner, certainly the center of attention and affection. The admiral's afflictions and injuries are obliquely unveiled over the course of the evening. When given a newspaper covering the Treaty of Amiens, he "places the page to his left, at an angle, and seems able to read it only in this manner, sideways," having been blinded in his right eye during the bombardment of Calvi. When Nelson rises from the table between courses, leaving the other guests behind, with quirky elegance Echenoz reveals him taking acorns from his pocket, "retimbering" at the edge of the woods outside. "He has set his heart on planting trees whose trunks will serve to build the future royal fleet." There is an echo of Garcia Marquez in these simple yet enigmatic pages. Echenoz gives us a slim series of elegant, tightly written tales, achieving a simple kind of magic.