The Queen's Caprice: Stories

by Jean Echenoz, Linda Coverdale (Translator)

Overview

Seven short stories by the Prix Goncourt winner—“the most distinctive voice of his generation . . . master magician of the contemporary French novel” (The Washington Post).
 
France’s preeminent fiction writer, Jean Echenoz is celebrated for his ability to craft stories with such precision that readers are caught off guard by the intense emotion and imagination just beneath the placid surface of his writing. As Gary Indiana put it in his essay “Conjuror of St. Germain”, “Echenoz risks everything in his fiction, gambling on the prodigious blandishments of his voice to lure his readers into a maze of improbabilities and preposterous happenings.”
 
The Queen’s Caprice—seven stories available in English for the first time—reveals Echenoz at the height of his talents, taking readers on a journey across radically different landscapes. The title story explores a tiny corner of the French countryside; “Nelson” offers a brilliant miniaturist portrait of the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar; “In Babylon” sketches the ancient city of Mesopotamia, based on trace descriptions from Herodotus; and other stories visit the forests of England, the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, Tampa Bay, and the interior of a submarine. Amid the thrill and allure of this voyage of words, “again and again we pause to savor the richness of Echenoz’s startling, crystalline observations” (Lydia Davis).
 
“[A] terrific sense of humor tinged with existential mischief.” —L’Express

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620970652
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	04/07/2015
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jean Echenoz won France's prestigious Prix Goncourt for I'm Gone (The New Press). He is the author of eleven novels in English translation—including 1914, Big Blondes, Lightning, Piano, Ravel, and Running, all published by The New Press—and the winner of numerous literary prizes, among them the Prix Médicis and the European Literature Jeopardy Prize. He lives in Paris. Linda Coverdale's most recent translation for The New Press was Jean Echenoz's 1914. She was the recipient of the French-American Foundation's 2008 Translation Prize for her translation of Echenoz's Ravel (The New Press). She lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

02/16/2015
Echenoz (Big Blondes) offers seven “little literary objects": elegant, succinct narratives that question, mock, and undermine narrative convention. The first piece portrays English hero Admiral Nelson, prone to seasickness (“so 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 “In 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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Jean Echenoz:
"The most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel."
—The Washington Post

"Writing lives! [Echenoz's] words are full of grace and surprises, and he has the ability to throw relationships among them just off-center enough to make the images of people they convey seem all the more compelling and fresh."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Rarely has the difficult craft of storytelling been as well mastered."
—Times Literary Supplement

"A gentle tending to perversity links Echenoz to that other master of perverse detail, Vladimir Nabokov."
—Los Angeles Times

"[A] miniaturist who paints frescoes."
—Journal du Dimanche

"Jean Echenoz's short short stories are quirky, playful and subversive: Admiral Nelson is always seasick, the statues in the Luxembourg Garden wear baffling expressions, a beautiful woman swims underwater to an assignation. Once again, Echenoz masterfully reinvents the world by creating the illusion that improbable events might in fact be probable."
—Lily Tuck, author of The News from Paraguay

"There is an echo of García Márquez in these simple yet enigmatic pages. Echenoz gives us a slim series of elegant, tightly written tales, achieving a simple kind of magic.”
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2015-02-03
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 récits, 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 García Márquez in these simple yet enigmatic pages. Echenoz gives us a slim series of elegant, tightly written tales, achieving a simple kind of magic.

Kirkus Reviews