In the Time of the Blue Ball

by Manuela Draeger, Brian Evenson (Translator), Valerie Evenson (Translator)

“Humane, impossible, homely and alien, Draeger's extraordinary stories are as close to dreams as fiction can be.” —China Miéville

This collection of three magical stories introduce English-language readers to the detective Bobby Potemkine and his musical dog Djinn—and they come to us offering, among other things, mystery, romance, maritime-adventure, and a very angry noodle named Auguste.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, France, Literature, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Literary Fiction

134 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Manuela Draeger is one of several pseudonyms used by the author Antoine Volodine (which is also a pseudonym).

She is a fictional character in his book "Minor Angles".

Books published under her name tend to be very short stories said by Antoine Volodine to be "related both to surrealist imagery and to British nonsense literature..."

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a completely bizarre read that I somehow grew even more fond of when I started discussing it on my podcast (episode to come.) Manuela Draeger is a female pseudonym of the writer known as Antoine Volodine ... but not only that she is a character in some of his world building, a librarian who tells stories to children at a camp. These are some of those stories, from the girl who invented fire, to a wooly spider starting a business, to a fly orchestra... you just have to read it to try it. When I read some of it out loud the ridiculousness made me think of Roald Dahl's books for children, just silly and ridiculous enough to leave you wanting to stay and hear the end.

(I bought this alongside the other books from the Dorothy Publishing Project and was saving it for Women in Translation Month (August) but discovered I was foiled by the pseudonym and read it early!)

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Narrated by a detective-of-sorts named Bobby Potemkine, these interconnected stories are set in the distant past in a world where time is measured by the passage of colored balls, the police have been abolished, and inhabitants include talking animals and other fully imagined creatures such as a polar ratinette, which is 'a kind of covering, white or green according to the season, that moves kind of like a caterpillar'. In this place so unlike our own world, Bobby Potemkine investigates cases (in the absence of the police), and each of the three stories included here loosely follows one of his investigations.

This is only the second book I've read by the pseudonymous author Antoine Volodine (writing here under one of his other pseudonyms, Manuela Draeger), and it is very different from the first one I read, Radiant Terminus. While that book was quite darkly post-apocalyptic, this one is lightly whimsical in its absurdity (in France, the Bobby Potemkine stories are published individually for a teen audience). The tales segue neatly from one to the other and the shared characters and setting make them feel as if they are all part of a larger, potentially compelling story. Even so, the book wasn't calling me repeatedly to pick it up, and I consider it telling that given its brief length it took me an entire week to finish it. Probably recommended for those committed to exploring the full depth of Volodine's 'post-exotic' literary universe, but maybe not the best place to start? Hard to say. (3.5 stars rounded down)

[John Darnielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly, utterly delightful. Volodine as Draeger writing tales ostensibly for children. Weird, playful, bizarre, but also wistful and yearning — a treat from end to end.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three related stories featuring investigator extraordinaire Bobby Potemkine. He steps in where the police can't because... well, the police have disappeared. As a matter of fact, many things and people have disappeared in this surreal world Draeger has created. Potemkine must find a woman who created fire and took it with her when she disappeared. He attempts to rescue a noodle named Auguste Diodon sentenced much like Prometheus to repeated torture (in this case, being swallowed along with common vermicelli by nameless little boys and girls). And, finally, Potemkine, must locate the mothers of all these orphaned baby pelicans that seem to populate a coastal landscape of the subconscious. But fear not, Potemkine has a trusted dog named Djinn who manages to assist despite being pulled into playing the nanoctiluphe in an orchestra of flies. Indeed, there are more animal characters than human and the first name of all the female characters is Lili. All this might not make linear sense, but it does manage to cohere in a very charming and innocent fashion, one which rather amused and delighted me. Honestly, who doesn't still pine away for the female bat classmate they fell in love with in grade school?
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I enjoyed this book before I got to the back, but my appreciation deepened when I learned from the Publisher's Note:
- Draeger writes these Potemkine stories as a French literature series for adolescents
- Draeger is a pseudonym for the author Antoine Volodine, which is also a pseudonym used for the "adult" books this author writes
- Draeger also appears in another Volodine book as a character ("a librarian in a post-apocalyptic prison camp who invents stories to tell to the children in the camp")
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I offer a sincere thanks to Dorothy Publishing and translator Brian Evenson for making this available to English language readers.

[Stephanie B · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an absolute delight, and definitely one I will read again.
It is SO GOOD. I’m honestly completely distressed to see anyone has left less than 5 stars, how dare they?
It’s whimsical, playful, bizarre and cute - I really loved it immensely. One of the best books I have ever read, it is such a favorite!

[Ronald Morton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three short-ish stories of weird/fantastic fiction. Are mostly light and airy and avoid the more darkly surrealistic turns that some weird stuff can take. I personally prefer the darker stuff. This was fine though.

But, this is funny to me. When I searched up Manuela Draeger I got Antoine Volodine instead. The Wikipedia entry states:

Antoine Volodine (born 1950) is the pseudonym of a Russian-French writer. [...] Volodine writes under multiple heteronyms, including Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger, and Elli Kronauer. He has also translated literary works from Russian into French, including such authors as Eduard Limonov, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Viktoriya Tokareva, Alexander Ikonnikov, and Maria Sudayeva (who may be another pseudonym of Volodine's).

I appreciate the commitment to the bit here.

I think I picked this up because of the publisher + Brian Evenson was listed as translator. Then I put it on a shelf. Looks like I probably bought this like 6 years ago (it has an 10/14/14 date on its sticker) which, shit, I’ve got to get better about buying stacks of books and just throwing them on the shelf.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This slender volume collects three of Manuela Draeger's Bobby Potemkine stories, detective stories ostensibly for children, three out of ten that had been separately published in French by the time of release. Read out of context, these are surreal, playfully arch, stories for adolescents. Read with awareness of Antoine Volodine's larger fictional universe, one in which heteronym Manuela Draeger is a librarian telling stories to children in a post-cataclysmic prison camp, the stories take on more expansive and sinister dimensions. These could be read as myths explaining the imperfect world Draeger's audience has been born into, one in which ecosystems, species, technologies, and mechanisms for social order have largely disappeared or broken down. Less than ten percent of Volodine's output is available in English. It's enough to confirm his singular genius.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard-boiled nonsense stories for imaginary children. The author is in fact also a fictional creation, of Antoine Volodine's post-exotic world, a librarian in the post-apocalypse. Like much of Volodine's project thus far, the concept behind this still just exceeds the actual work itsef.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has a kind of naive wacky charm. Reminds me somewhat of Leonora Carrington.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this! Reading it felt like listening to my little cousin tell me a very involved story and I mean that in the most positive way. It's divided up into three stories following the same cast of characters in a world where there aren't any police, they have interspecies friendship and romance, and measure the passage of time by observing a ball in the sky. It was delightful and whimsical and exactly what I wanted to read.

[Ava · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange little stories that remind me of the dreams you half remember

[alyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

“...our teeth and jaws were chattering, and our snouts were freezing. I don’t say that the tips of our noses were freezing, I say our snouts were freezing. It’s so that my dog will understand.” (p. 10)

“We asked them where the Jumble was. The answers were contradictory. Certain of them pointed north, others south, yet others indicated the interior of their heads. In the end we understood that in the past the Jumble had taken up a quite precise area, but that now it had expanded to the whole of the world. Now, it was everywhere.” (p. 77)

[J.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

review forthcoming in PANK

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange and lovely and like nothing I’ve read before.

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

i liked it enough to type a review, absolutely fantastic and beyond fun, just an insanely fun read <3

[Bah Humpug · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Time of The Blue Ball by Manuela Draeger is one of the weirdest books I've ever read. Ever. It's written with the crazy logic and settings of dreams where time is counted by different colored balls, a woman who invented fire keeps them in jars, a tigerlike cat or a tiger lives in a stairwell, a dog plays in an orchestra of flies, and motionless baby pelicans litter the streets as they wait for mother pelicans to be created. I scoffed at first and thought I'd dnf, but somehow I got caught up in the rhythm of these strange stories. If you're looking for weird and something that'll test the limits of your imagination, check this out.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange and lovely collection of three strange stories featuring Bobby Potemkine, a not-very-effective investigator in a world where there are no police. The mysteries are strange-- where are the pelican mothers, and what happened to the woman who invented fires. And the adventures Potemkine takes part in to solve them are kind of circular. But the result of all this confusion is pretty wonderful-- it's almost Beckette-like, the way Potemkine just keeps going in the absence of clear progress or belief progress is likely to result.

Quite fun.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny to return to this, several years after giving it a try the first time around and not connect at all with the dream-logic and deceptive simplicity of the narration, and have it really work this time around. Maybe it's a deeper appreciation of noir, which these stories take from in ersatz ways-- they are all detective stories that operate according to (and sometimes against) child logic and storytelling. Entrancing and goof-hearted.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

somewhere between oulipo, a children's show, and david ohle. simple detective stories that are just a hair this side of nonsense despite being internally consistent and clear. something very french about some of the humor, but don't hold that against it! also the second work by a fictional author i can remember reading, after 'venus on the half shell'.

[Madi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bizarre and fun but I didn’t feel a sense of purpose in reading them. Bought this along with 6 other Dorothy Project books because I’m obsessed with two of their releases (Wild Milk & The Babysitter at Rest) but this one felt a little flat for me. Maybe something was missing in translation. I could see these being fun to read out loud to kids.

[Scotty · Rating 5 out of 5]

the nice thing about these post-exotic stories is that they're so familiar despite constantly flouting all references of familiarity. and they're totes adorbs.

[emmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely darling set of sweetly imagined stories!

[Dan Sacks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though it moved at a somewhat glacial pace, each stories resolution deeply affected me. The last one triggered something like a full blown reaction! Fun to read aloud, which counts for a lot.

[Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh. My.

This collection of three novellas (published as separate books in France) is the American debut, I think, of "Manuela Draeger," one of the other pseudonyms of "Antoine Volodine." In their simple sentences and primary-colored events, they're children's books. Except they're set in what might as well be a different universe. Draeger makes Dr. Seuss look like a realist.

It's a nighttime world, before calendars are invented, before fire; meteorite showers are common. Yet the narrator Bobby Potemkine lives on the seventh floor of an apartment building, and his friends live behind the vegetables in the minimart or next to the abandoned RER station. The police have disappeared, leaving Bobby to investigate bizarre cases. The three cases here (the first in an ongoing series) concern the disappearance of the woman who invented fire, the rescue of a noodle named Auguste Diodon from a child's lunch, and an outbreak of baby pelicans with no mothers to tend to them.

You know how it is: "Ever since the rain of black meteorites this winter, baby pelicans have been parked in the streets, the houses, the stores, on the twisted rails of the RER, and their mothers are nowhere to be found. ... After a while, someone always leans down to stroke them and talk to them, and ask them if they have any news of their pelican-mothers. The baby pelicans don't answer. They remain mute and make no movement. And you don't end up getting the slightest information out of them."

Bobby's friends and helpers include his dog, Djinn, a virtuoso on the noctiluphe, a wooly crab named Big Katz, and a tiger or large tiger-striped cat named Gershwin. His school-days crush on the batte Lili Niagara still makes him blush whenever he hears the clippeting of the tips of her wings. Gershwin threatens to eat Bobby, Djinn marries and moves away, and Big Katz brings a flood of ocean wherever he goes: the usual gumshoe problems.

The translations by Brian Evenson (one in collaboration with his daughter) are excellent; the vocabulary, odd as it is, never feels unnatural. It's a gorgeous little book, too, and the publisher (Danielle Dutton, as "Dorothy, a publishing project") wants to prompt more translations of Draeger and of Volodine. It's hard for me to imagine that not happening, once people experience this gem.

[Domitori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was ready to give this 4 stars at most, as it does emit a distinct whiff of cutesy, brittle cartoonishness reminiscent of Wes Anderson/ Michel Gondry's films, a whiff that would normally make me queasy: what's with the flies playing in a jazz orchestra, bats ("battes") wearing their hair in braids and gossiping, wooly crab named Big Katz running a marshmallow store and carrying around rubber bladders filled with ocean, and those baby pelicans everywhere... But I am giving it a 5, on the account of being mightily impressed by Volodine's ability to:
(a) find such a distinctive authorial voice for this female Québécois heteronym of his (as opposed to virtually indistinguishable authorial voices of Volodine vs. Lutz Bassmann - both of which I, incidentally, adore, if only in translation);
(b) once again build a completely unique, solid universe that doesn't fall apart in 2 days: a perpetually nocturnal, icy dystopian nonplace and nontime, where police no longer exists, coins have not been invented yet, and everything is either flooded or destroyed by the meteors; a universe that is vivid, palpable, and pungent (smelling of tiger urine and hazelnuts, among other things - yes, Volodine is an olfactory author par excellence);
(c)avoid neat happy-endings even in these fairy tales allegedly written for old children or young adults. Bobby Potemkine's cases are closed and the quests are over but what's left is IMMENSE sadness, because everyone deserves some "sadness to cultivate": Lili Soutchane, post-exotic Prometheus who invented fire, throws her invention from the cliff into the ocean; a noodle named Auguste Diodon, subject of feverish solidarity demonstrations and of an elaborate rescue mission, turns out to be an obnoxious asshole and gets promptly eaten by the malodorous tiger Djimmy Gershwin; baby pelican disappears in the undulating folds of the polar ratinette Soraya Gong who may or may not become his mother; and our petless and loveless protagonist, detective Bobby Potemkine, once again goes home, alone.

[Ed Erwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three very short dream-like nonsense stories which play out in a world which seems like a nightmare, except that nobody seems unhappy. Sure, it may be freezing and there may be meteorites raining down and destroying train stations, and the wolverine factory has stopped making wolverines, but your dog plays wonderful music with the fly orchestra, so why worry? Better for you to team up with a wolly crab to go on a journey to try to prevent some child somewhere from unknowingly eating the one noodle with a name, Auguste Diodon.

Now, I love surrealism and nonsense, but somehow this wasn't nearly as interesting to me as I had hoped. Perhaps I'd enjoy it more if I had first read "Minor Angels" by Antoine Volodine, in which this author is a character, as that would give me some context for the world in which these stories were written, and the characters they were written for. An article in The Paris Review gives me a little of that context, and suggests that maybe these stories are taking place in the Bardo, the realm between life and death, which makes some sense for me. But still, I think I can't say that I like these more than tepidly.

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Ross (Editorial Assistant): Draeger is a French author of adolescent fiction, but she’s also a fictional character created by Antoine Volodine, which is a pen name of an anonymous French writer. In Volodine’s stories, Draeger is a containment-camp librarian who writes stories for children, but in France she’s published without that backstory. Thank god for The Dorothy Project, who published three of her stories in the US in a delirious, playful Brian Evenson translation called In the Time of the Blue Ball. The stories follow Bobby Potemkine, a makeshift detective who lives in a post-apocalyptic world with startlingly few signs that it was actually our world pre-apocalypse. In my favorite story, Bobby searches for a mother pelican to solve the inexplicable plague of morbidly placid but endearing baby pelicans that have appeared in the city. That turns out to be a tall order, as Bobby soon learns, because it seems “nobody has invented mother pelicans yet.” Language means something different in this world, but maybe meaning means something different, too. It’s fascinating and fun and I’m going to learn French immediately just to read more.

[Mason Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a charming little book. At 126 small pages, it goes by fairly quickly, and it's also an easy, somehow cheerful read. Divided into three connected stories, we follow the character Bobby Potemkine through a series of surrealistic adventures, as he crosses paths with other characters including his talking, musical instrument-playing dog Djinn, his schoolboy crush Lili, a flying batte, and a giant talking crab, among many others. He has mysteries to solve, the most mysterious of which is the rescue of a noodle named Auguste Diodon, who is eaten every day by boys and girls. Time is told by use of colored balls, tigers named Gershwin sometimes can't help eating people, and baby pelicans litter the town waiting to be born. These are bizarre, enjoyable tales told in simple, charming language. This is apparently the first book by Draeger to be published in English, but I will be eagerly awaiting others. If you like authors such as Etgar Keret and Victor Pelevin, you should check out this book.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bizarre yet... right. The three stories contained here are strange, funny fables. The storytelling is brisk, and the whimsy never overwhelms the narrative itself.

The stories stand on their own, well worth your attention. What makes it all the more fascinating for me is that Manuela Draeger is another pseudonym for the (already pseudonymous) writer Antoine Volodine. Draeger, in fact, is a character in Volodine's Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven. So, these works also make up a strange little corner of Volodine's ongoing and sprawling project. Because of course you should have some fables aimed at a younger audience as part of your imagined/invented/existing literary resistance movement.

Very good stuff.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The pull-quotes on the back of the book heavily mention dreams, and this is appropriate, because this endearingly strange, surreal collection of tales is one of the most dreamlike books I've ever read. It requires the reader to surrender to the eery internal logic of the tale and be swept through phantasmagoric cityscapes along with unforgettable characters. To describe the plots is to recount your vivid dreams...no matter how alive they are to you internally, they usually are rendered drab and lifeless when you try to articulate them.

What is worth noting is that Manuela Draeger is a character created by the imaginary author Antoine Volodine. Draeger tells stories to the children trapped with her in a futuristic post-collapse prison camp. This nested framing device may seem overly contrived, but in fact lends a compelling, if Borgesian, aspect to this collection.