praise for
Antoine Volodine
“His quirky and eccentric narrative achieves quite staggering and electric effects. . . . Dazzling in its epic proportions and imaginative scope.”
—The Nation
“Clever and incisive.”
—New York Times
“These wonderful stories fool around on the frontiers of the imagination.”
—Shelley Jackson
“He delights in breaking down our well-honed meters of what’s supposed to happen.”
—Believer
“The Dalai Lama himself would probably approve.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“His talent surfaces time and again in luxurious, hypnotic ways.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The Volodinian cosmos is skillfully crafted, fusing elements of science fiction with magical realism and political commentary.”
—Music & Literature
also in english by
Antoine Volodine
(a.k.a., Lutz Bassman & Manuela Draeger)
Bardo or Not Bardo
In the Time of the Blue Ball
Minor Angels
Naming the Jungle
Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven
We Monks & Soldiers
Writers
Copyright © Editions du Seuil, 2014
Translation copyright © Jeffrey Zuckerman, 2017
Foreword copyright © Brian Evenson, 2017
First published in France as Terminus radieux
First edition, 2017
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-53-3
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
Foreword
by
BRIAN EVENSON
Radiant Terminus, which received the 2014 Prix Médicis, is Antoine Volodine’s most recently published novel. At least under that name. In 2015, he published a book under the heteronym Manuela Draeger, who also appears as a character in some of the books published under the name Volodine. And the name Volodine itself is a heteronym for an author who prefers not to have his real name revealed.
I use “heteronym” instead of “pseudonym” because “Draeger,” or “Volodine,” or “Lutz Bassmann,” or “Elli Kronauer” (two more of the names he’s used) function as much more than pseudonyms (someone named Kronauer, who may or may not be the same as the heteronym, is in fact the central character in Radiant Terminus). As with Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, they each take on a life of their own, with distinct interests and concerns, and together they make up a collective of authors who write “post-exotic” literature.
Volodine’s post-exotic writing often has the emphasis on world-building of fantastic fiction, science fiction in particular, though it brings a series of very different generic and literary elements to the table along with this. Volodine’s innovation comes in going about this world-building more intensively and more eccentrically than most fantastic fiction, over multiple books and multiple authors, inventing new and different genres—imagining not only a fantastical world, but also envisioning many different generic representations of such a world, and even overlapping, slightly different worlds. Volodine’s books present worlds in which various struggles have failed, in which a good percentage of the world’s population seems to exist in camps, and in which radiation has infected large chunks of the planet. His worlds are rife with incarceration and interrogation, but are also ones in which dream and reality meld, in which the fantastic and the real shade into one another, and in which the line between life and death is so thin that you don’t always know when you’ve passed from one to the other. More than any other writer I know, Volodine manages to create worlds that feel at once palpable, multivalent and real, and yet discontinuous and constantly shifting, as if threatening to fade from existence. His work, like Gerald Murnane’s, demands we move beyond the logic that we tend to rely on to understand fictional worlds. Not only can Volodine be simultaneously read as oneiric and palpable, as pre- and post-death, as real and unreal; he erases the distinctions between these categories, ultimately demanding that we simultaneously manage the impossible task of simultaneously seeing a both/and and a neither/nor.
The “Radiant Terminus” of the title is the name of a kohlkoz, a failing collective farm in a part of Siberia so sickened with radiation that even the spiders have died. The novel is full of soldiers and citizens who seem to be occupying a phantasmic state, or who maybe persist after their deaths, or who perhaps have been dreamed or reanimated by the kolkhoz president, Solovyei, who seems also capable of strolling around inside people’s heads, peering into all their nooks and crannies, violating them. Violation is one of several of the major thematics of Radiant Terminus, as is the relation of art to reality, and an examination of the remnants of failed political struggle.
Volodine’s title also seems at least partly a response to the notion of l’avenir radieux, a dream of a glorious and radiant future that allows one to maintain faith in communist or Marxist ideology and see one’s immediate sacrifices as enabling one’s fellows to continue to march arm in arm toward a better place.
The characters in Volodine’s novels seem to have acknowledged the impossibility of this radiant future, something which turns their adherence to ideology into a sort of paradoxical ritual behavior, with affinities on the one hand to mysticism and Tibetan Buddhism and on the other to Beckett’s “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” These are people who continue the struggle despite knowing that the struggle has failed. They persist not only in the face of the political futility, but in the face of death. Indeed, in many of Volodine’s works the characters may be dead, existing in the space of the bardo, caught between nothingness and reincarnation. Or they may be experiencing a kind of oneiric state. Or maybe what they think is happening is not real after all. Or maybe some combination of all the above. They themselves are not certain. In the balance that Volodine strikes
