“For the moment, you’re necessary. I need to put my bazar of anguish in order. I have committed to delivering a cargo of delirium. I have promised you a spectacle; you’ll get one.”
The latest issue of Contra Mundum’s Hyperion Magazine contains an excerpt from my translation of Linda Lê’s Les évangiles du crime.
The chapters in the extract come from REEVES C., the first in a suite of four stories that comprise the book. In it, Lê restages the relationship between Carson McCullers and her husband, Reeves, an aspiring writer who suffered in the shadow of Carson’s precocious success. Their story is retold through the voice of an anonymous caller, “the man who wanted to get back a taste for life”, whom the narrator encounters by chance outside the hotel in Paris where Reeves killed himself in 1954. Throughout these transcripts, themes and concerns that dominate the rest of the book, and indeed, Lê’s œuvre, emerge: literature, and engagements therewith, investigations into mysterious identities, doubles, madness and suicide.
Throughout REEVES C., not only are Reeves and Carson depicted as doubles, spiritual twins or halves of the same soul whose coming together necessitates their mutual destruction, so too is the caller a double of Reeves, and the narrator the double of Carson. Through these doublings, a scathing interrogation of literary identification develops, both an indictment and twisted celebration of how the material of life becomes the contents of a text.
Though not her first published work, Les évangiles du crime was the novel that Lê believed signalled her literary arrival. She would go on to publish thirty books, including essays, short story collections and novels, and win a litany of prizes. So far three of her novels have been translated into English Slander (tr. Esther Allen), The Three Fates (tr. Mark Polizzotti), and A Tale of Love (tr. Sian Robyns).
Following a long illness, Linda Lê died on May 9th 2022. She was fifty-eight.
Hyperion, Vol. XVI, No. 1 (Winter 2023) is available from Contra Mundum Press.