{"id":293326,"date":"2013-03-12T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/03\/12\/why-this-book-should-win-prehistoric-times-by-eric-chevillard-btba-2013\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:31","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:31","slug":"why-this-book-should-win-prehistoric-times-by-eric-chevillard-btba-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/03\/12\/why-this-book-should-win-prehistoric-times-by-eric-chevillard-btba-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Why This Book Should Win: "Prehistoric Times" by Eric Chevillard [BTBA 2013]"},"content":{"rendered":"

As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA<\/span> Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking here.<\/a> And if you’re interested in writing any of these, just get in touch.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

Prehistoric Times<\/em><\/a> by Eric Chevillard, translated from the French by Alyson Waters and published by Archipelago Books<\/b><\/p>\n

This piece is by translator, critic, and BTBA<\/span> judge, Tess Lewis.<\/em><\/p>\n

For sheer narrative inventiveness and luxuriant delight in the seductive power of fiction, you can do no better than pick up a book by Eric Chevillard. Chevillard is one of France\u2019s most mercurial and impish contemporary writers. He has written more than twenty idiosyncratic books that push Big Questions to absurd extremes and his Prehistoric Times<\/em> is an intellectual roller coaster and fun house mirror gallery in one.<\/p>\n

The unnamed narrator, an archeologist by training, was \u201cderailed\u201d by a fall while excavating a cave with dozens of Paleolithic paintings. He has been demoted to guardian and guide in the site, a position he is as unsuited to fill as the uniform that goes with it, his predecessor having been much shorter and fatter. In his meandering monologue, the narrator justifies his delay in taking up his duties despite increasingly menacing threats of dismissal. <\/p>\n

The narrator\u2019s reflections swing from the abstract to the concrete and back again. Sometimes his progress is logical, sometimes associative, but the connective tissue, Chevillard\u2019s antic, slightly off-kilter, acrobatic prose, virtuosically rendered into English by Alyson Waters, makes the web of his thoughts seem inevitable and coherent even at its most absurd.<\/p>\n

The size of his uniform\u2019s cap leads the narrator to meditate on the genesis of thought and to formulate a series of hypotheses about how the shape of the skull might affect the quality of the thinking done in it. Would thoughts develop more freely in a dome-shaped brainpan or would they get lost or confused? Alternatively, would a turnip-shaped skull engender sharper, more focused thoughts or simply constrict them? Then he segues to recollections of his childhood, to wondering whether Homo Sapiens<\/em> had usurped the place of more intelligent ancestors, Homo Sapiens Sapiens<\/em>, to man\u2019s need for rituals, to speculation on the aesthetic ideas of troglodyte painters and how imagination changes man\u2019s relation to world. He zigzags over a great deal of territory, assuring the reader that he is not wasting time, though by now the reader feels as if he has been led by the nose in random circles and U-turns. <\/p>\n

There is indeed a method to his meandering. His ruminations have all been preparation for his grand ambition, to create a work of art that will endure, like his beloved cave paintings, outside of recorded history. In Chevillard\u2019s hands, the novel of ideas is as exhilarating as a metaphysical fairground. Strap yourselves in and enjoy the ride.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[28736,48756,50266,45986,3426,50316,22526],"class_list":["post-293326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-alyson-waters","tag-btba-2013","tag-btba-2013-why-this-book-should-win","tag-eric-chevillard","tag-french-literature","tag-prehistoric-times","tag-tess-lewis"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":334096,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293326\/revisions\/334096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}