Salonica World Lit: BTBA 2011 First Look-Hocus Bogus by Emile Ajar(Romain Gary)

BTBA 2011 First Look-Hocus Bogus by Emile Ajar(Romain Gary)

Best Translated Book Award 2011

Emile Ajar~France

I am not respecting the chronology or any order or rules in this document, because I've read enough detective fiction to know that a proper structure can bring the cops right to your door--and let me leave you in no doubt, that is not why I've holed up in Dr. Christianssen's clinic in Copenhagen.

This is a typical passage from Emile Ajar's Hocus Bogus--irony, humor, and authorial antics abound. Out of all the books on the longlist, this is surely the one shrouded in the most spectacular life of mythic proportions. Romain Gary was born in Russia in 1914, he become a polyglot, earned a law degree, became an airman, French diplomat, before going on to become a novelist and ultimately winning the Prix Goncourt--twice--once as Romain Gary and once as Emile Ajar. Adding to that list, he was also a filmmaker and celebrity managing to snag the love of Jean Seberg of Breathless fame for a decade. The success of Romain Gary as a writer and international star grew oppressive and boring, decided that creating an alter ego, Emile Ajar would provide him with enough amusement for awhile. As Emile Ajar, he pens Life before us which ends up winning the Prix Goncourt. The public clamored for the identity of Emile Ajar and Gary runs to Geneva and writes Pseudo (translated as Hocus Bogus) as a response, a mock confessional memoir which presents Emile Ajar as Paul Pawlovich, an author in search of mental stability:

As soon as my first mythical book appeared people began to observe that I did not really exist and that I was therefor probably a fiction. The even assumed I was a collective.

It's true. I am a collective work, but I can't tell you whether it was premeditated. On the face of it, I don't consider I have enough talent to imagine that there could have been syphilis aforethought or anything of that kind solely in order to squeeze a literary trifle out of me. There could have been, of course, because you don't look a gift horse, but I can't be sure

Subject writes under the pen name of Ajar, pronounced "Azher," meaning "most brilliant" in Arabic, revealing masochistic vulnerability which the subject probably cultivates on purpose as a potent source of literary inspiration.

That's wrong. They're all bastards. I wrote my books in various hospitals on doctor's advice. They said it would be therapeutic. They suggested painting first, but that was a bummer.

Since I knew I was fictional, I thought I might have a talent for fiction.

Throughout the book, the author asserts himself as Paul, as Emile, as a python, and plays with the concept of authorship. Hocus Bogus is filled with psychological expressions of paranoia and self-delusion as he refuses to own any of his authorial voices. Uncle Bogey is the one constant in the novel that withstands the contempt of of the various invectives. Although Ajar manipulates voice and experiments with structure, there is a fevered, maniacal flow to the novel that is compelling, dazzling, dizzying and impossible not to enjoy. It feels like the work of a writer's writer, creating passages that can be read several ways producing several meanings. At times, I was convinced that Ajar had learned to put into words all the reflections of an author's identity, which in his case, was no easy task. There are the aspects of the surreal and the fantastical as when he claims he has turned into a python. And even when he is spinning all these plates in the air, he still manages to slip in some literary rhetoric:

"I am not ambiguous. I am congenital and that means heave and heave-ho to get away from my authors. Genetics is quite enough as far as the ineluctable is concerned. Didn't you see in the papers that I'm a collective work.?"

Within the novel, Ajar references that many thought his book was written by Perec or Queneau. And Hocus Bogus has the definite Oulipian feel of both of them. In the end, it is pure Romain Gary. A game with himself and his own talent cure himself of his own image, only to create another that is just as good, just as sought after. Just as with Perec, in order to encapsulate the tone and essence of the novel, a translator must be up to the challenge. David Bellos does a superb translation which I can only imagine was mind-numbing with choices in order to honor the text. This is not a novel that will tug on the heartstrings, but it will mystify with its masterful, humorous pathos.

Hocus Bogus
By Romain Gary(writing as Emile Ajar)
Translated by David Bellos
Yale University Press
Hardcover, 197
ISBN: 9780300149760
$25.00

Works by Romain Gary: