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Anne Garréta at InTranslation

InTranslation has a sample translation of Anne Garréta’s La Décomposition online:

Anne Garréta’s La Décomposition, written over a four-year period and published in 1999, is the story of a serial killer. However, given that the author is a member of Oulipo, and the killer well versed in literature, we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that victims are chosen from among the characters in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Their flesh-and-blood counterparts are hunted in a contemporary Paris of video arcades, bars, and shadowy corners by the Seine. As the murderer dispatches the victims, their fictional counterparts are eliminated from a digitized version of Proust’s magnum opus. Every reference to the “murdered” character is expunged from the book, reducing the novel’s length with each fresh kill. To complicate matters, the philosophical and ruminative killer, who is, disturbingly, also the book’s narrator, chooses these victims on the basis of a grammatical rule: they must agree in gender and number with the character in the novel. Otherwise, they are chosen randomly.



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