{"id":294236,"date":"2013-06-07T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-06-07T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/06\/07\/latest-review-les-aigles-puent-by-lutz-bassmann\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:09:44","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:09:44","slug":"latest-review-les-aigles-puent-by-lutz-bassmann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/06\/07\/latest-review-les-aigles-puent-by-lutz-bassmann\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "Les aigles puent" by Lutz Bassmann"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Reviews Section<\/a> is by John Thomas Mahany on Les aigles puent<\/em> by Lutz Bassman, from \u00c9ditions Verdier.<\/p>\n

JT\u2014as we know him\u2014is an MA in Literary Translation Studies student at the University of Rochester, and a recent addition to the superfandom of Volodine’s work. He’s also working on a translation of Volodine’s Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons: Lesson Eleven<\/em> (Le Post-exotisme en dix le\u00e7ons, le\u00e7on onze<\/em>, Gallimard 1998), forthcoming from Open Letter Books in Fall 2015.<\/p>\n

Here’s a bit of his review (which is followed by a little excerptfrom Les aigles puent<\/em>):<\/p>\n

\n

If you\u2019ve been following any of the recent Antoine Volodine talk going around Three Percent\u2014both on the blog or on the podcasts\u2014and have heard his fans wax obsessive over all his alter author-egos, you\u2019re probably starting to feel some Volodine fatigue setting in. One more mention of what his books do to your dreams, of postexoticism, prison literature, Untermenschen<\/em>, or people with blends of Eastern European, Mongolian, and Middle Asian names, and you\u2019ll start bleeding from your ears, right?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Sorry, but we\u2019re not done yet.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Yet unpublished in English, Les aigles puent<\/em>, a novel by Lutz Bassmann (one of Volodine\u2019s many reoccurring faces\/names\/characters), is the tale of a man named Gordon Koum who has just returned from an assassination mission for the Party, only to discover that his home city has been devastated by a (possibly nuclear) bomb. Everything is completely and irreversibly demolished, turned to black ash and soot. Everyone whom Gordon Koum loved\u2014his wife, his children, his comrades\u2014is dead at the hands of these \u201cwitch bombs.\u201d As he picks through the rubble, Gordon quickly realizes that everything is hopeless, that all is lost. Maddened, irradiated, and wracked with sorrow, our protagonist sits on a bit of rock and waits for death, his only companions a dead bird stuck in the tar, and a golliwog that had miraculously survived the blast. He uses his gift for ventriloquism to converse with them, and tells them stories of his lost friends: Benny Magadane, Antar Gudarbak, his wife Maryama Koum, and many others.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by John Thomas Mahany on Les aigles puent by Lutz Bassman, from \u00c9ditions Verdier. JT\u2014as we know him\u2014is an MA in Literary Translation Studies student at the University of Rochester, and a recent addition to the superfandom of Volodine’s work. He’s also working on a translation of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[49366,3426,51766,51776,51756,1646],"class_list":["post-294236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-antoine-volodine","tag-french-literature","tag-john-thomas-mahany","tag-les-aigles-puents","tag-lutz-bassman","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294236","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\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294236"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310616,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294236\/revisions\/310616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}