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Los relatos de Fata Morgana
'Mientras dormía, me decía: habría que escribir sobre esto y nada más, ni sobre la gente ni sobre mí, ni sobre la ausencia ni sobre la presencia, ni sobre la vida ni sobre la muerte, ni sobre las cosas vistas u oídas, ni sobre el amor, ni sobre el tiempo. Además, todo tenía ya su forma.'
De 2007 a 2012, Jonathan Littell publicó los cuatro relatos que integran este volumen en la pequeña y arriesgada editorial francesa Fata Morgana y que ahora se traducen por primera vez al español. Fueron cuatro bellos libros breves casi clandestinos, de los que nunca apareció ninguna reseña: el laboratorio perfecto para un escritor que, como Kafka, piensa que 'nunca puede hacerse el silencio alrededor de lo que uno escribe'.
Este lento período de desarrollo finalmente llevó a la escritura y publicación, también en Galaxia Gutenberg, de Una vieja historia, una nueva versión salvajemente expandida de la última historia de este volumen.
De 2007 a 2012, Jonathan Littell publicó los cuatro relatos que integran este volumen en la pequeña y arriesgada editorial francesa Fata Morgana y que ahora se traducen por primera vez al español. Fueron cuatro bellos libros breves casi clandestinos, de los que nunca apareció ninguna reseña: el laboratorio perfecto para un escritor que, como Kafka, piensa que 'nunca puede hacerse el silencio alrededor de lo que uno escribe'.
Este lento período de desarrollo finalmente llevó a la escritura y publicación, también en Galaxia Gutenberg, de Una vieja historia, una nueva versión salvajemente expandida de la última historia de este volumen.
160 pages, Paperback
First published October 21, 2013
6 people are currently reading
188 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Littell
28 books413 followersA bi-lingual (English / French) writer living in Barcelona. He is a dual citizen of the United States and France and is of Jewish background. His first novel written in French,
Les Bienveillantes
, won two major French awards.
His father is the writer Robert Littell, also resident in France and who authored numerous spy novels.
His father is the writer Robert Littell, also resident in France and who authored numerous spy novels.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 9, 2023
Алисина Страна чудес для взрослых, утративших связь с реальностью. В трансгрессивном пространстве Литтелла чувственность подменяется насилием, реальность утрачивает смысл и растворяется.
April 4, 2014
Guh. Ever wonder what would happen if Samuel Beckett and William S. Burroughs somehow managed to make a terrible French baby? Of course not. No one has.
August 1, 2016
Surrealism, Alive and Well
In scale, this might be called Littell-lite, its elegant 184 pages nowhere near the heft of Littell's 974-page magnum opus The Kindly Ones. This edition by Two Lines Press of San Francisco is also a beautiful physical object, a svelte volume, silky to the touch and calming to the eye. The text consists of four pieces that Littell wrote for the Fata Morgana press in Montpellier, France, between 2007 and 2112, varying in length between 30 and 70 pages. Like all Littell's fiction, they were written in French, although the author himself is American. The translation by Charlotte Mandell is exemplary, not because it reads like colloquial English, but because, even in English, it could not be anything but French.
For well over 100 years, the French have had a particular affinity for inward-turned writing about memory, emotional states, and question of existence. The classic, of course, is Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913–), but forty years earlier, Rimbaud was exploring inner states through an extraordinary use of imagery in A Season in Hell (1873). France in turn became ground zero for Surrealism, with its interest in dream states and the potency of the absurd, a thread that has continued well beyond the middle of the last century. A particular strand of this is the exploration of pornography, in such works as Georges' Battaile's Story of the Eye (1928)—whose echoes I hear strongly in these pieces by Littell—right through to writers like Michel Houellebecq today. The nearest thing I have read recently in American writing has been Sergio de la Pava's recent Personae, although that is much more complex than the stripped-down simplicity of Littell.
The first section, Etudes, consists of four short pieces, each dated with one of the seasons of the year. "A Summer Sunday" seems to be about some ordinary tryst that takes place in a nameless country scarred by an ongoing war. "The Wait," as its title suggests, is one of those Kafkaesque waits for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn, but it also contains an episode of graphic homosexuality. The spirit of Kafka surfaces again in "Between Planes," in which the narrator and his lover keep missing each other over a long sequence of irregular flights and missed connections in what seems like Soviet Europe. "Fait Accompli," finally, is some kind of emotional negotiation that appears to be between lovers in a triangle situation, but it is expressed entirely in terms of logical calculus, with numbered postulates and consequences.
Many of these themes—violence, stagnation, loss of identity, and persistent sexuality—recur in the other three pieces, which all have something of the consistency of a dream. The longest and most impressive of them is the last, An Old Story. It starts with the narrator getting out of a swimming pool and running down an ill-lit, twisting corridor with encroaching walls. From time to time, he encounters a door to one side, opens it, and goes through, finding anything from a suburban garden, a family mansion, or a sexual orgy, to a village in the African jungle. Most of the episodes involve sex: at first apparently that of man and wife (with a small child in the middle distance), but gradually blurring not only the nature of the relationships but also the gender of the participants; one scene has him dressed in women's clothing in bed with girls who seem possessed of male appendages. Halfway through, the story stops and starts again, following the same general path, with the same landmarks (a Leonardo reproduction on a wall, an embroidered coverlet on a bed), but now with the sexuality clearly all male.
I have little idea what it means, and I wouldn't want to read more than two hundred pages or so. But I do know I'm in the hands of a master, which makes me eager to pick up The Kindly Ones after all.
In scale, this might be called Littell-lite, its elegant 184 pages nowhere near the heft of Littell's 974-page magnum opus The Kindly Ones. This edition by Two Lines Press of San Francisco is also a beautiful physical object, a svelte volume, silky to the touch and calming to the eye. The text consists of four pieces that Littell wrote for the Fata Morgana press in Montpellier, France, between 2007 and 2112, varying in length between 30 and 70 pages. Like all Littell's fiction, they were written in French, although the author himself is American. The translation by Charlotte Mandell is exemplary, not because it reads like colloquial English, but because, even in English, it could not be anything but French.
For well over 100 years, the French have had a particular affinity for inward-turned writing about memory, emotional states, and question of existence. The classic, of course, is Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913–), but forty years earlier, Rimbaud was exploring inner states through an extraordinary use of imagery in A Season in Hell (1873). France in turn became ground zero for Surrealism, with its interest in dream states and the potency of the absurd, a thread that has continued well beyond the middle of the last century. A particular strand of this is the exploration of pornography, in such works as Georges' Battaile's Story of the Eye (1928)—whose echoes I hear strongly in these pieces by Littell—right through to writers like Michel Houellebecq today. The nearest thing I have read recently in American writing has been Sergio de la Pava's recent Personae, although that is much more complex than the stripped-down simplicity of Littell.
The first section, Etudes, consists of four short pieces, each dated with one of the seasons of the year. "A Summer Sunday" seems to be about some ordinary tryst that takes place in a nameless country scarred by an ongoing war. "The Wait," as its title suggests, is one of those Kafkaesque waits for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn, but it also contains an episode of graphic homosexuality. The spirit of Kafka surfaces again in "Between Planes," in which the narrator and his lover keep missing each other over a long sequence of irregular flights and missed connections in what seems like Soviet Europe. "Fait Accompli," finally, is some kind of emotional negotiation that appears to be between lovers in a triangle situation, but it is expressed entirely in terms of logical calculus, with numbered postulates and consequences.
Many of these themes—violence, stagnation, loss of identity, and persistent sexuality—recur in the other three pieces, which all have something of the consistency of a dream. The longest and most impressive of them is the last, An Old Story. It starts with the narrator getting out of a swimming pool and running down an ill-lit, twisting corridor with encroaching walls. From time to time, he encounters a door to one side, opens it, and goes through, finding anything from a suburban garden, a family mansion, or a sexual orgy, to a village in the African jungle. Most of the episodes involve sex: at first apparently that of man and wife (with a small child in the middle distance), but gradually blurring not only the nature of the relationships but also the gender of the participants; one scene has him dressed in women's clothing in bed with girls who seem possessed of male appendages. Halfway through, the story stops and starts again, following the same general path, with the same landmarks (a Leonardo reproduction on a wall, an embroidered coverlet on a bed), but now with the sexuality clearly all male.
I have little idea what it means, and I wouldn't want to read more than two hundred pages or so. But I do know I'm in the hands of a master, which makes me eager to pick up The Kindly Ones after all.
June 6, 2020
I STILL HAVE not finished Les Bienveillantes, though (clears throat) I fully intend to, but I thought I could give this a try in the meantime--seven short stories (or six and a novella, perhaps) originally published a four separate volumes by a French publisher, Fata Morgana.
Most striking to me, coming to this after having read 860 pages of Les Bienveillantes, is the near-perfect absence of the kind of contextual framing historical fiction provides. Les Bienveillantes is painstaking about names, places, dates; in these fictions, while the details of a scene are usually vibrantly precise, we have no orientating information about where we are, or what year it might be, or even very many personal names.
This difference made it all the more remarkable that the two books definitely seem to be the work of the same author (even though I read this in translation and am reading Les Bienveillantes in French). The novel's narrator, Maximilien Aue, has the same eye for the same kind of detail, the same cool equanimity even while describing shocking events, the same willingness to let a sentence unwind to its end, however long it needs, that the narrators of these fictions have.
The back cover copy mentions Kafka and Blanchot, which sounds about right, both in the suppression of precise localizing detail and in the tone of eerie calm in the face of irrational events that teeter between comic and horrific. We might mention Lispector and Beckett as well. "Fait Accompli" could almost be the Beckett version of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants."
"An Old Story" made the strongest impression on me. The book's longest story at just under eighty pages, it makes a loop: its ending capable of being seamlessly joined to its beginning. It could, theoretically, become an infinite repetition (which may be what makes the story "old."). The events are dreamlike, swift and shifty and arbitrary, yet the narrator accepts whatever happens and steps into whatever role circumstances offer with scarcely a hesitation or demur. Episodes include an encounter with a Joseph Kony-like child army, a troupe of marauding Cossacks, a luxurious party, and a sex club; they dissolve rather than end, the narrator finding himself at the conclusion of each in a track suit, running down a corridor, until the next door opens on yet another scene in which he will play yet another role.
The story begins and ends at a swimming pool, which makes me wonder whether "An Old Story" is an elaborate homage to John Cheever's "The Swimmer."
The story's import? I know not, but I would say it is altogether safe from Oprah's blessing, and that's something these days.
Most striking to me, coming to this after having read 860 pages of Les Bienveillantes, is the near-perfect absence of the kind of contextual framing historical fiction provides. Les Bienveillantes is painstaking about names, places, dates; in these fictions, while the details of a scene are usually vibrantly precise, we have no orientating information about where we are, or what year it might be, or even very many personal names.
This difference made it all the more remarkable that the two books definitely seem to be the work of the same author (even though I read this in translation and am reading Les Bienveillantes in French). The novel's narrator, Maximilien Aue, has the same eye for the same kind of detail, the same cool equanimity even while describing shocking events, the same willingness to let a sentence unwind to its end, however long it needs, that the narrators of these fictions have.
The back cover copy mentions Kafka and Blanchot, which sounds about right, both in the suppression of precise localizing detail and in the tone of eerie calm in the face of irrational events that teeter between comic and horrific. We might mention Lispector and Beckett as well. "Fait Accompli" could almost be the Beckett version of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants."
"An Old Story" made the strongest impression on me. The book's longest story at just under eighty pages, it makes a loop: its ending capable of being seamlessly joined to its beginning. It could, theoretically, become an infinite repetition (which may be what makes the story "old."). The events are dreamlike, swift and shifty and arbitrary, yet the narrator accepts whatever happens and steps into whatever role circumstances offer with scarcely a hesitation or demur. Episodes include an encounter with a Joseph Kony-like child army, a troupe of marauding Cossacks, a luxurious party, and a sex club; they dissolve rather than end, the narrator finding himself at the conclusion of each in a track suit, running down a corridor, until the next door opens on yet another scene in which he will play yet another role.
The story begins and ends at a swimming pool, which makes me wonder whether "An Old Story" is an elaborate homage to John Cheever's "The Swimmer."
The story's import? I know not, but I would say it is altogether safe from Oprah's blessing, and that's something these days.
December 20, 2023
El año pasado leí ‘Las benevolas’ de Littell y me pareció no bueno, sino toda una obra de arte que va que vuela a convertirse en un clásico de la literatura francesa.
En ‘Los relatos de Fata Morgana’ se reúnen cuatro historia breves que Littell publicó en una pequeña editorial francesa después de ganar el Goncourt, pequeños libros que se publicaron una sola vez y que llegaron a ser casi clandestinos.
Cuatro relatos surrealistas llenos de poderosa prosa y reveladora verdad. Relatos que se van tejiendo con lo absurdo, y se tejen bien, a veces sin nombrar lo que sucede -o mejor dicho por qué no da nombre a lo que sucede-
Enorme escritor que es Littell.
November 23, 2025
On retrouve dans ces différents récits le style de Littell, à l'écriture précise, belle et sans apprêt. On y retrouve aussi des thèmes récurrents : étrangeté à soi-même, solitude, pulsions, sexualité à tendance pornographique.
Les premières Etudes ne sont pas très intéressantes mais la suite le devient. Toutefois, Une Vieille Histoire prendra beaucoup plus de force dans sa version "nouvelle", publiée plus tard.
Ce recueil est clairement mineur dans l'oeuvre de l'écrivain mais donne un éclairage sur sa manière de travailler.
Les premières Etudes ne sont pas très intéressantes mais la suite le devient. Toutefois, Une Vieille Histoire prendra beaucoup plus de force dans sa version "nouvelle", publiée plus tard.
Ce recueil est clairement mineur dans l'oeuvre de l'écrivain mais donne un éclairage sur sa manière de travailler.
April 21, 2019
Smart and sexy.
January 20, 2022
Weird nightmare. Mostly, I just felt numb and confused, but sometimes I vibed so hard. But then I completely lost the vibe, which might just be the vibe, I don't know.
November 12, 2013
A Fata Morgana, for those not in the know, is a superior mirage, which means that the optical phenomenon that’s occurring appears above the real image on the horizon rather than below it. Caused by a temperature inversion of warm air over cooler which combines with bent rays from a lower lying object, these mirages are constantly changing in appearance and tend to wildly distort the objects on which they are based, to the point of making them almost unrecognizable. This is sort of like what author Jonathan Littell does with characters, settings, and situations in his novellas. It’s a lot like it actually.
Swimming pools lead to mansions that lead to battlefields that lead to bathrooms and back again. Hermaphrodites, – heck, I’m not even sure that’s the right word, I’m not sure that there is a right word to describe them – displaced souls and doomed lovers navigate these ever shifting landscapes determined to fill the ever increasing, seemingly insatiable void created by their sexual desire. The strangest part, as if things need to get any stranger, is that each protagonist is calm, cool, and collected as they narrate their tale, as if everything occurring around them is completely natural and wholly expected.
READ MORE:
http://www.typographicalera.com/fata-...
Swimming pools lead to mansions that lead to battlefields that lead to bathrooms and back again. Hermaphrodites, – heck, I’m not even sure that’s the right word, I’m not sure that there is a right word to describe them – displaced souls and doomed lovers navigate these ever shifting landscapes determined to fill the ever increasing, seemingly insatiable void created by their sexual desire. The strangest part, as if things need to get any stranger, is that each protagonist is calm, cool, and collected as they narrate their tale, as if everything occurring around them is completely natural and wholly expected.
READ MORE:
http://www.typographicalera.com/fata-...
December 13, 2023
К сожалению, остались смешанные чувства. Только ловила суть и получала удовольствие, как начиналась фантасмагория и я терять нить и интерес к развитию сюжета(если это можно назвать сюжетом) 🫣
Возможно, вернусь спустя какое-то количество времени и точно возьму его Магнус опус в будущем
Возможно, вернусь спустя какое-то количество времени и точно возьму его Магнус опус в будущем
April 8, 2015
A modern, dirty Kafka. Great book!
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews