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We Monks and Soldiers
From one of the most original French writers of our day comes a mysterious, prismatic, and at times profoundly sad reflection on humanity in its darker moments—one of which may very well be our own. In a collection of fictions that blur distinctions between dreaming and waking reality, Lutz Bassmann sets off a series of echoes—the “entrevoutes” that conduct us from one world to another in a journey as viscerally powerful as it is intellectually heady.
While humanity seems to be fading around them, the members of a shadowy organization are doing their inadequate best to assist those experiencing their last moments. From a soldier-monk exorcising what seem to be spirits (but are they?) from an abandoned house, to a spy executing a mission whose meaning eludes him, to characters exploring cells, wandering through ruins, confronting political dissent and persecution, encountering—perhaps—the spirits once exorcised, these stories conduct us through a world at once ambiguous and sharply observed. This remarkable work, in Jordan Stump’s superb translation, offers readers a thrilling entry into Bassmann’s numinous world.
While humanity seems to be fading around them, the members of a shadowy organization are doing their inadequate best to assist those experiencing their last moments. From a soldier-monk exorcising what seem to be spirits (but are they?) from an abandoned house, to a spy executing a mission whose meaning eludes him, to characters exploring cells, wandering through ruins, confronting political dissent and persecution, encountering—perhaps—the spirits once exorcised, these stories conduct us through a world at once ambiguous and sharply observed. This remarkable work, in Jordan Stump’s superb translation, offers readers a thrilling entry into Bassmann’s numinous world.
191 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 27, 2020
We Monks and Soldiers comprises fragments of existence in the hallucinatory and nightmarish cacotopia…
Ideology is vague and incomprehensible… Reality and dreams are no longer distinguishable and both are distorted and full of bleary abstractions…
However attractive and promising is ideology in the end it always turns against the human nature.
Although still hoping to alter the course of history, the Organization had abandoned its old first principles. They knew humanity was done for, and they harbored no illusion that a just and fraternal proletarian society might come into being on this earth. They urgently wanted to save what little there was left to save, and, since the utopian tools of the past had proven ineffective and even absurd, they now founded their strategy on obscure forces they’d once denounced as the product of backward minds or typical of feudal regressivism: dreams, schizophrenic imprecations, shamanistic trances, fakirism.
Ideology is vague and incomprehensible… Reality and dreams are no longer distinguishable and both are distorted and full of bleary abstractions…
Far, far away, men and women must still have been hearing it, hearing that exhortation. Little matter where they’d been confined – asylums, prisons, or prayer rooms. We can assume they were following our progress from their cells and their squalid straw mats, from their cages, from their endless half-sleep, all of them, men and women alike, psychically damaged and prostrate, from their own existences, marginal or carceral or oneiric or otherwise.
However attractive and promising is ideology in the end it always turns against the human nature.
January 31, 2021
Even in a flawed or degenerate form, a proletarian universe could only be better.
This proved a bizarre treatment of revolutionary History, how each iteration can be sabotaged or loses its footing. It is enough to make one question the very notion of Progress. I wasn't annoyed with this exercise, even as the narrative began to hastily devour itself. Perhaps it is my liberal circumstances which inhibit or blind? I personally like the idea of exorcism achieved through the use of grenades. I should qualify that, I like the idea in theory. Then again, the need for exorcism remains superfluous to my droning and plodding.
I do savor the idea of the post-exotic, though I find its apogee a fleeting endeavor. All too often we instead find taxonomies and digressions in the wake of further exploration. I still recommend Radiant Terminus to everyone.
This proved a bizarre treatment of revolutionary History, how each iteration can be sabotaged or loses its footing. It is enough to make one question the very notion of Progress. I wasn't annoyed with this exercise, even as the narrative began to hastily devour itself. Perhaps it is my liberal circumstances which inhibit or blind? I personally like the idea of exorcism achieved through the use of grenades. I should qualify that, I like the idea in theory. Then again, the need for exorcism remains superfluous to my droning and plodding.
I do savor the idea of the post-exotic, though I find its apogee a fleeting endeavor. All too often we instead find taxonomies and digressions in the wake of further exploration. I still recommend Radiant Terminus to everyone.
November 24, 2020
What's a woman to read during these increasingly authoritarian and dystopic days? It's November 2020 and Trump hasn't conceded the election. Whatever your affiliation, democracy is losing. It feels inappropriate, maybe even profane, to read anything light, utopic, or escapist given the circumstances. On the other hand I’m not much inclined to read non-fiction to make sense of this moment in time; Trump’s (continuing) refusal to concede is unprecedented in US History. I don’t want bromides or apologetics! I need a book to match my mood! Current mood: democratic despair, tinged by highly tempered optimism that some version of progress will somehow continue to...well, to progress I guess, despite all odds. I want to read radical liberatory fiction.
Then it hit me: VOLODINE.** I need some post-exotic tales (“entrevoutes”) spoken by the last living democratic revolutionaries. Count on Antoine Volodine to provide postcards from the edge of humanity, to sing high praises of the few that remain, i.e. We Monks & Soldiers--the forgotten martyrs and heroes hidden away in prisons, insane asylums, and underground. This is all to say Volodine is sufficiently dark, but if you look closely enough you can see the flicker of a match from the depths, and imagine them praying for us.
**If you are wondering why I am talking about Volodine and not Lutz Bassmann it is because they are one and the same. Volodine writes under the pseudonyms Bassmann and Manuela Draeger. Delightfully, Volodine itself is a pseudonym.
Then it hit me: VOLODINE.** I need some post-exotic tales (“entrevoutes”) spoken by the last living democratic revolutionaries. Count on Antoine Volodine to provide postcards from the edge of humanity, to sing high praises of the few that remain, i.e. We Monks & Soldiers--the forgotten martyrs and heroes hidden away in prisons, insane asylums, and underground. This is all to say Volodine is sufficiently dark, but if you look closely enough you can see the flicker of a match from the depths, and imagine them praying for us.
**If you are wondering why I am talking about Volodine and not Lutz Bassmann it is because they are one and the same. Volodine writes under the pseudonyms Bassmann and Manuela Draeger. Delightfully, Volodine itself is a pseudonym.
July 16, 2013
short stories that are both linked, and repeated. 1 an exorcism beside the sea 2 crisis at the tong fong hotel are repeated, but in different form and different outcomes later in book, as is dialog on the beach. the best chapter for me is 5 forgetting
but as to content, imagine ray bradbury as re-incarnated into a 21st century topor The Tenant dra Dra– cyborg and the outcome of the bad weather is always unpleasant and the rich always win.
i think this was nominated for the best translation from the french award too, should have won.
lutz bassmann is a made up author by the author antoine volodine.
but as to content, imagine ray bradbury as re-incarnated into a 21st century topor The Tenant dra Dra– cyborg and the outcome of the bad weather is always unpleasant and the rich always win.
i think this was nominated for the best translation from the french award too, should have won.
lutz bassmann is a made up author by the author antoine volodine.
January 27, 2021
Weird, interesting, still not sure what it was really about as it definitely needs at least one reread; a collection of 7 linked vignettes featuring reoccuring characters and set in a strange future a few centuries from now, though there is also a sense of timlesness; definitely an unusual read
October 10, 2015
Powerful, puzzling, magnificent. Also intermittently terrifying and haunting. Lutz Bassmann is another one of Antoine Volodine's pseudonyms, and might by my favorite of his personae yet. While retaining the dark, mournful stance toward our declining reality, the stories here have a strange immediacy that some of the other Volodine/Post-Exoticist works choose to eschew. I might be saying this is a good place to start, though I might also be saying it is somehow not representative. But that isn't right. We have all the critique of the Way Things Are, all the strange twists and turns, the sad regret that we have in the end condemned ourselves to this selfish and petty end, and yet the whole time there are too the hints and whispers and ghostly hopes (or terrors) that there must too be something beyond this failed reality of ours.
I plan to re-read Volodine's Minor Angels later, once I've finished his other works in translation (Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, Writers, Naming the Jungle: A Novel) because in retrospect it might be the other most powerful work amongst these masterpieces. It's hard to know now whether this one landed with such wondrous gravity thanks to the greater understanding of Post-Exoticism I have now. But I think anyone with a taste for adventurous fiction that engages these dark times will find much to like here. And a reread of other Volodine works is certainly something to savor rather than dread. (Or perhaps better to say one savors the coming dread.)
Really wonderful work.
I plan to re-read Volodine's Minor Angels later, once I've finished his other works in translation (Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, Writers, Naming the Jungle: A Novel) because in retrospect it might be the other most powerful work amongst these masterpieces. It's hard to know now whether this one landed with such wondrous gravity thanks to the greater understanding of Post-Exoticism I have now. But I think anyone with a taste for adventurous fiction that engages these dark times will find much to like here. And a reread of other Volodine works is certainly something to savor rather than dread. (Or perhaps better to say one savors the coming dread.)
Really wonderful work.
June 9, 2014
Faithful readers of Tin House #FridayReads will remember my effusive gushing over mysterious French author Antoine Volodine’s short stories written under the name Manuela Draeger. On the recommendation of those stories’ faithful translator, Brian Evenson, I recently picked up another Volodine project, We Monks and Soldiers, a collection of linked stories written under the name Lutz Bassman (translated by Jordan Stump). Post-apocalyptic and strange like the Draeger stories, the Bassman collection is darker, drearier, and more experimental. For instance, the same story appears twice, told differently and with slightly altered details, and by the second telling, the world Bassman invents is more complete and the shards of hope seem smaller, but shine brighter in the very dark world Bassman evokes. The stories are populated (and usually narrated) by post-human beings (Angels? Bird people? I don’t know, they have wings.) trying, desperately or idly, to save humanity from its self-inflicted death, or at least comfort it in its dying moments. (Please, someone suggest something lighter for me to read!)
December 7, 2025
Вроде и все хорошо, но по сумме каких-то неуловимых факторов (усталость? Избыточная фрагментарность повествования даже на фоне обычного?) дочитывать в этот раз было тяжелее обычного. Финал красивый и печальный, с этим у постэкзотического сонма (в лице одного человека), представителем которого является Володин, обычно нет проблем.
January 7, 2021
Will do a video review soon, love this author.
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June 11, 2014http://www.full-stop.net/2012/12/19/r...
Review by Scott Beauchamp
Lutz Bassmann is not Lutz Bassmann. That is to say, Bassmann is not a flesh and blood author who needs sleep and food and who makes semi-regular bowel movements. Lutz Bassmann isn’t real. He’s an imaginary author invented by the French writer Antoine Volodine, who is, we can only assume, a real-life being who actually does eat snacks, go to the bathroom, and write books.
To understand the intention behind We Monks & Soldiers, we must also understand why Volodine would create a work of fiction written by a work of fiction. What does this extra layer of guise add to the book itself? It is a method that calls to mind some of the playfully Dadaist identities assumed by Bob Dylan, like “Jack Frost” or “Sergei Petrov,” co-writer of the movie Masked And Anonymous, in which Bob Dylan stars as “Jack Fate,” who, of course, is really Bob Dylan. Volodine, too, keeps a stable of fictitious writers, each with his or her own interests, flaws, and voices. But more than just an empty accumulation of artifice, the method seems to be a way to emphasize the freedom of uncertainty, and it’s a move that fits thematically with the collection.
Weighing in at under 200 pages, We Monks & Soldiers is a slim book. And it’s better that way. Composed of seven interconnected stories, the work combines nebulous atmospherics with taut, professional control. It begins with the story of an errant monk, dispatched to exorcise spirits from an abandoned beachside home. But when things begin to go wrong (or do they?), Bassmann simply moves on to the next story. In this short time, however, Bassmann establishes some very important themes that will carry through the rest of the book.
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2012/12/19/r...
Review by Scott Beauchamp
Lutz Bassmann is not Lutz Bassmann. That is to say, Bassmann is not a flesh and blood author who needs sleep and food and who makes semi-regular bowel movements. Lutz Bassmann isn’t real. He’s an imaginary author invented by the French writer Antoine Volodine, who is, we can only assume, a real-life being who actually does eat snacks, go to the bathroom, and write books.
To understand the intention behind We Monks & Soldiers, we must also understand why Volodine would create a work of fiction written by a work of fiction. What does this extra layer of guise add to the book itself? It is a method that calls to mind some of the playfully Dadaist identities assumed by Bob Dylan, like “Jack Frost” or “Sergei Petrov,” co-writer of the movie Masked And Anonymous, in which Bob Dylan stars as “Jack Fate,” who, of course, is really Bob Dylan. Volodine, too, keeps a stable of fictitious writers, each with his or her own interests, flaws, and voices. But more than just an empty accumulation of artifice, the method seems to be a way to emphasize the freedom of uncertainty, and it’s a move that fits thematically with the collection.
Weighing in at under 200 pages, We Monks & Soldiers is a slim book. And it’s better that way. Composed of seven interconnected stories, the work combines nebulous atmospherics with taut, professional control. It begins with the story of an errant monk, dispatched to exorcise spirits from an abandoned beachside home. But when things begin to go wrong (or do they?), Bassmann simply moves on to the next story. In this short time, however, Bassmann establishes some very important themes that will carry through the rest of the book.
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2012/12/19/r...
September 24, 2012
Volodine/Bassmann/etc. is one of the most strange and interesting French writers of modern times. Can't wait to read "Naming the Jungle," and hopefully more of his books will make their way into English over the next few years.
May 20, 2016
A very strange, very good little book
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews