VICTOR MIESEL isn’t short on charm. His face, which was angular for a long time, has softened over the years, and his thick hair, Roman nose, and olive skin could be reminiscent of Kafka, a healthy Kafka who made it past forty. He’s big and tall but still slim, although the sedentary life inherent to his work has padded him out a little.
Because Victor writes. Sadly, regardless of favorable critical responses to two novels, The Mountains Will Come to Find Us and Failures That Missed the Mark, despite a very Parisian literary prize (albeit the sort that doesn’t cause a stampede when it’s trumpeted with a sticker on the book), his sales have never gone beyond a few thousand copies. He’s convinced himself that there’s nothing less tragic, that disillusion is the opposite of failure.
At forty-three, having spent fifteen years writing, he views the small literary community as a farcical train where crooks without tickets ostentatiously take first-class seats with the complicity of incompetent conductors, while modest geniuses are left on the platform—and the latter are an endangered species to which Miesel does not claim to belong. Still, he’s not embittered; with time he’s learned not to fret about it, accepting that he has to sit through book fairs, signing only four copies in as many hours; and when a comparable lack of success leaves whoever’s sitting at the table next to him with time on his or her hands, they chat pleasantly. Miesel can come across as distant and aloof, yet in spite of everything, he has a reputation for his sense of humor. But surely any man worthy of being called amusing is always given this label “in spite of everything”?
Miesel makes a living through translation. From English, Russian, and Polish, the language his grandmother spoke to him when he was a child. He’s translated Vladimir Odoyevsky and Nikolai Leskov, nineteenth-century authors whom no one much reads anymore. He’s also ended up with some extraordinary commissions, such as—at the request of a festival—translating Waiting for Godot into Klingon, the language of Star Trek’s cruel extraterrestrials. To put on a good front for his bank manager, Victor also translates entertaining English-language bestsellers that reduce literature to the status of a minor art for minors. This work has opened doors to reputable if not powerful publishers, not that this has helped his own manuscripts cross any of their thresholds.
Miesel has a pet superstition: in the pocket of his jeans he always carries a Lego brick, the most commonplace sort, two by four studs in bright red. It comes from the outside wall of a fortified castle that he and his father were building in his childhood bedroom. Then there was the accident at work, and the model stayed by his bed, unfinished. The child often sat silently studying the crenellations, the drawbridge, the little action figures, and the keep. Continuing the building process alone would have meant accepting death, just as dismantling the castle would have done. That was thirty-four years ago. Victor has lost the brick twice, and twice he’s salvaged another identical one. Firstly, in a state of grief, then with no qualms. When his mother died last year, he slipped the brick into her coffin and immediately replaced it. This little red parallelepiped isn’t his father, just a memory of a memory, a standard raised to his line of descent and to loyalty.
Miesel has no children. Romantically, he flits from one failed relationship to the next with his enthusiasm intact. He’s too often distant, unconvincing, and has never found the woman with whom he’d like to share a good portion of his life. Or perhaps he chooses his partners in such a way that ensures he’ll never achieve this.
That would be lying: he did come across the woman four years ago, at the Arles Translation Conference. She was in the first row during an in-conversation-with about “translating humor in Goncharov.” He tried not to look at her the whole time. Then, because an editor buttonholed him—How about you translate Liubov Gurevich for us? What do you think? That would be great, wouldn’t it?—he couldn’t get away. But two hours later, in the patient line of people heading for their desserts, she was standing behind him, smiling. The truth, with love, is that the heart knows straightaway, and shouts it from the rooftops. Of course, you’re not going to come straight out and tell the person you love them. They wouldn’t understand. So, to disguise the fact that you’re already hostage to them, you make conversation.
When they reached the final stage—chocolate fondants with whipped cream—Victor turned around and made his opening gambit. He asked her, stumblingly, how to translate crème chantilly into English. Yes, apologies for that, it’s the best he could come up with. She laughed, politely, and replied “Ascot cream” in a husky voice that sounded enchanting to his ears, and she went back to join her friends at her table. It took him a while to realize that Ascot, like Chantilly, is a racecourse, but in England.
They’d exchanged glances that he liked to think were knowing, and he’d headed pointedly to the bar, in the hope that she would join him there, but she was caught up in a lively discussion. Thinking he was behaving like an idiotic teenager, he returned to his hotel. He couldn’t find her among the photos of participants, but felt sure he’d see her again, and spent the next morning visiting all the workshops on a variety of pretexts. In vain. Neither was she at the closing night party. She’d evaporated. Over the last breakfast at his hotel, he described her to a friend involved in organizing the conference, but the words “small,” “dark-haired,” and “fascinating” have never gone far to describe anyone.
Victor came back to the conference for the next two years, and if he’s going to be absolutely honest, it was to see her. Since then—and this is a serious professional error—he’s slipped into his translations brief passages describing Ascot Racecourse or whipped cream. And it was in Gurevich’s collected articles that he started these misdemeanors: in the opening text, ““Почему нужно дать женщинам все права и свободу” (“Why women should be given freedom and all their rights”), he introduced the sentence “Freedom isn’t merely whipped cream on a chocolate cake, it is a right.” It was discreet, and who knows? After all, she was obviously interested in Goncharov. But no. If she read the book, she didn’t notice the addition, and neither did the editor, or any of the readers, for that matter. Victor let life go on, and it’s enough to break your heart.
AT THE START of the year, a Franco-American organization financed by the cultural department of the French Embassy in the U.S. gives him a translation prize for one of the thrillers that keep him fed and watered. In early March he flies to the States to receive it, and the flight hits appalling turbulence. The storm throws the plane in every direction for an eternity. The captain talks soothingly, but everyone in the cabin—and Miesel more than most—suspects that they’re going to plunge into the sea, shattering on impact with the wall of water. For many long minutes he puts up resistance, clinging to his seat, straining his muscles to counter every jolt. He avoids the window that looks out into hail-filled darkness. And then, a few rows in front of him, he sees this woman. If he’d noticed her when they were embarking, he wouldn’t have been able to take his eyes off her. Although not exactly like her, she is cruelly reminiscent of his vanished Arlésienne. Judging by her fragile quality, the delicacy of her features, the texture of her skin, and her slender body, she’s little more than a girl, but tiny lines around her eyes suggest she’s around thirty. The nose pads on her tortoiseshell glasses etch temporary fly wings on either side of her nose. From time to time she smiles at her neighbor, a man, older than she is, perhaps her father, and the plane’s lurching seems to amuse them, unless they find it reassuring to pretend that they don’t care.
But the plane plummets in yet another air pocket, and something in Victor suddenly snaps, he closes his eyes and lets himself be sloshed every which way, no longer trying to anchor himself. He’s turned into one of those lab mice that’s subjected to violent stresses and eventually stops fighting, resigned to dying.
At last, after what feels like forever, the plane escapes the storm’s clutches. But Miesel is still prostrate, mired in a horrible impression of unreality. Life resumes around him, people laugh, or cry, but he observes it all through smoked glass. The captain announces that no one is to leave their seat until after landing, but Miesel is drained of all energy and wouldn’t be capable of heaving himself from his in any case. As soon as the doors of the plane are open, the other passengers race out, impatient to get away from the contraption, but as the cabin empties, Victor stays where he is, in his seat by the window. A hostess taps his shoulder, and he agrees to get to his feet. At this point he remembers the young woman, with renewed intensity. He intuits that she alone can extricate him from this abyss of nonlife. He looks for her but she’s out of sight, and neither can he find her in the line for passport control.
The head of the book office comes to pick him up at the airport, and shows concern for this disoriented, monosyllabic translator.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay, Mr. Miesel?”
“Yes. I think we nearly died. But I’m fine.”
His toneless voice worries the man from the consulate. They don’t exchange another word all the way to the hotel. When he comes back to collect Miesel late the following afternoon, he gathers that the translator hasn’t left his room all day, or even eaten. He has to insist that he take a shower and put some clothes on. The reception is being held at the Albertine bookshop on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. At the appropriate moment, on an insistent cue from the cultural attaché, Miesel takes from his pocket the thank-you speech that he wrote in Paris, and proceeds—in a droning voice—to say that the translator’s role is to “liberate the pure language captured within a work by transposing it”; he professes limply all the fine things he doesn’t think about the American author, a tall blond woman with terrible makeup who smiles to herself, and then he stops talking abruptly. Confronted with the growing discomfort in the room, the writer takes over the mic to give her heartfelt thanks and to announce that her fantasy saga is to have two further volumes. Then it’s time for drinks and mingling; Miesel’s expression is faraway.
“Jesus, when you think what this kind of party costs us, he could maybe make an effort,” the cultural advisor mutters as an aside. The man from the book office half-heartedly defends Miesel, who has his return flight the next day.
Once back in Paris, he starts to write, as if following dictation, and the uncontrollable mechanism of this writing process itself plunges him into a state of profound anxiety. The book will be called The anomaly, and it will be his seventh.
“I have not made a single gesture in my life. I know that, from time immemorial, it is gestures that have made me, that not one movement has been made under my own control. My body has been happy to come alive, pulled by strings I did not attach. It is presumptuous to imply that we master the space around us, when we simply follow the curves of least resistance. The limitation of limitations. No takeoff will unfold our sky, ever.”
Over just a few weeks, a graphomanic Victor Miesel fills hundreds of pages in this style, fluctuating between lyricism and metaphysics: “The oyster that feels the pearl knows that the only conscience is pain, in fact it is only the pleasure of pain. […] The coolness of my pillow always reminds me of the pointless temperature of my blood. If I shiver with cold, it means my pelt of solitude is failing to warm the world.”
In the last few days he hasn’t left home at all. The final paragraph sent to his publishers shows just how close this derealization experience comes to being insurmountable: “I have never known how the world would differ had I not existed, nor toward what shores I would have driven it had I existed more intensely, and I cannot see how my passing will alter its movement. Here I am, walking along a trail whose absent pebbles lead me nowhere. I am becoming the point where life and death unite until they are indistinguishable, where the mask of the living man settles restfully in the face of the deceased. This morning, because the weather is clear, I can see all the way to me, and I am like everyone else. I am not putting an end to my existence but giving life to immortality. Ultimately, it is futile for me to write a final sentence that does not seek to change the moment.” Having set down these words and sent the file to his editor, Victor Miesel, overcome by a piercing anxiety that he cannot identify, steps over the balcony, and falls from it. Or throws himself from it. He leaves no letter, but the whole book leads him to this ultimate gesture.
“I am not putting an end to my existence but giving life to immortality.”
It is April 22, 2021, at twelve noon.