linda coverdale – Three Percent

“The Lecture” by Lydie Salvayre and Linda Coverdale [Excerpt]

Chad Post — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 15:47:05 +0000

Today’s #WITMonth post is an excerpt from��The Lecture��by Lydie Salvayre, translated by Linda Coverdale, a wonderfully funny and playful French writer who Dalkey published for quite a while (, , The Company of Ghosts, ), and might again! Warren Motte has written about her on several occasions (stay tuned for a deeper read of her work from him), and I remember being absolutely delighted by Linda Coverdale’s rendition of the voice of this quirky, self-deluded, sad lecturer who is hiding his grief behind a pompous lecture for his campaign to correct the ills that have overtaken France and make the art of conversation great again.��

is available from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.

Take a French dinner party. In Paris. Chez Armand. A chic dinner. The kind I don’t go to. Pearls, crystal, the works.

Observe the guests. Scientifically. They turn to the left and right. Shake their heads. Gesture repeatedly with their right arms in a manner known as pronation. Devote themselves to mastication, mouths closed, I should add. And between two tiny mouthfuls, I should add, they move their lips constantly. Like this.

Because for them, ladies and gentlemen, conversation has replaced everything else. They neither laugh nor belch. Belching went out of fashion with regicide. That’s the remark my brother-in-law made just to mortify me. At the table. In front of everyone. The day of the funeral. As I was choking back a hiccup between two sobs.

In the time of the Bourbon Louis, he announced with ludicrous pedantry, there was an official called the hastener who was in charge of the king’s belches. Sometimes the king’s belch was slow in coming, and all the courtiers would wring their hands, quiver with impatience, and turn sorrowful countenances toward the royal valve: But let him hasten, then, let this hastener hasten the sacred belch of the king! The hastener and his king have been done away with. And belchery with them. Those are great losses indeed.

Still, I thought, not so great as Lucienne’s death. Forgive me, but my grief is as fresh, if I may say so, as a vegetable. I said vegetable. I really shouldn’t have. That’s the word I often use to evoke her, so calm, so—how shall I put it—so superbly lumpish. But let us stifle our grief. And let us return to that dinner party with which I opened my lecture. We may conclude, from our thorough investigation, that while it is generally admitted that speech is the achievement of all mankind, conversation is a specialty that is eminently French.

conversation is a specialty that is eminently French.

That is our first and most heartening axiom. A specialty, I emphasize this, that is not exportable. Because it is not merchandise. It is even quite the opposite. I shall come back to this essential point. At the proper time. With the methodical turn of mind that is my wont.

We French, I was saying, are champions at conversation. This distinguishing trait, long elevated to the status of a national virtue, made the reputation of France and secured its reign.

Well, that art at which we excel is today in peril. I am sounding the alarm in our little town in hopes of alerting the highest authorities. Mediocrity, ladies and gentlemen, is going international. The fear of offending prevails more and more over the taste for talking. A generous spirit is discredited, if not condemned outright. It is taken for weakness of intellect. From one end of the planet to the other, conversations are all the same. Their poverty of ideas is now in fashion. And their insipidness is sickening.

Conversation is going downhill.

That will be our second and most distressing axiom. We live, increasingly, without talking to one another. Is no life, then, worth the telling? We live without talking to one another and soon we will live without living, which gives me the shivers.

Conversation is going downhill and the country with it, they go hand in hand. And it is greatly to be feared, if nothing is done, that they will both wind up in the garbage. The vultures will finish the job. You can count on them.

So here, dear ladies and gentlemen of Cintegabelle, is my rescue plan, conceived in the utmost urgency and which I unhesitatingly declare to be of national utility, since by proposing to restore the luster of speech in the eyes of a world that has forgotten how to speak, it aims at nothing less than the civic renewal of our country and the polishing of its image so that, I’m catching my breath, so that, strong in its recovered prestige, the France of tomorrow may assure throughout the world the civilizing mission that has fallen to her from time immemorial. Might I ask you, children, to please stop snickering. And to stop moving your chairs around. It’s irritating.

The subtle art of conversation, however—to which, I venture to say, I have devoted my genius—offers, aside from that patriotic virtue I have just mentioned, other advantages no less excellent albeit less directly civic. And which to my astonishment have not yet been the object of any detailed study.

The first of these advantages is that conversation is very useful for seducing women.

The second is that it’s even handier for succeeding in society.

The third and most surprising is that in bringing joy to mankind, it contributes appreciably to reducing the deficit of the National Health Service. A subject of satisfaction for our government.

Lydie Salvayre

In the interest of clarity, my lecture will scrupulously observe each step of the following outline, which I ask you to please keep in mind.

Part One: The advantages of conversation, already noted, and upon which we will elaborate with a most mathematical rigor.

Part Two: Those conditions favorable to the flowering of conversation, which are ten in number:

—the presence of at least two persons;

—the comfort of the derrière;

—the ability to keep silent;

—c�ǳܰ��ٱ��;

—c��ٲ�;

—j�ǳ��ܱ��ٲ�;

—the principle of equality;

—a sense of proportion;

—an insouciant disregard for time;

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Part Three: Five examples of conversation selected from among the most common categories:

—amorous conversation;

—literary conversation;

—political conversation;

—patriotic conversation;

—conversation with the dead.

The whole thing enlivened by a number of axioms with which I am not at all displeased. I’m rather fond of axions.

So, Part One: The advantages of conversation.

The first of the advantages of conversation, as I was saying, and not the least of them, is that conversation always finds remarkable favor with women. Every last one of them goes into raptures before a clever conversationalist, be he cross-eyed, pot-bellied, warty, a journalist, or deformed. Take me: noticeably ill-favored, with big ears, and a cowlick I spend hours plastering down, I was an immediate hit with Lucienne (a woman impervious to poetry and little given to linguistic acrobatics) the second I began to babble. And I must confess that my verbal vivacity and florid declarations (I commanded, at the time, a whole battery of tricks, classified by genre) did more to lift up her redoubtable skirt than any fumbling gesture I’d never have dared make anyway. I wasn’t that stupid. And kew for a fact that

women’s genitals communicate with their ears.

If, gentlemen—for it is to you, men of Cintegabelle, that I speak—if nevertheless you prove unable to resist the summons of the flesh, if you are seized with the desire to place your hand on the knee of an altogether too concupiscible woman, I urge you most emphatically: under no circumstances interrupt your harangue. Without ceasing to chatter, keep gaining ground. Advance stealthily and with ingratiating ploys. Like the sinuous serpent of desire. Pursue your reputation garlanded with pretty turns of phrase. In perfect synchrony, lay compliments at her feet and hands on her modesty. From poems to promises, from promises to prattle, you will proceed without mishap to the inevitable place. Once there, stop talking! Pounce!

The second advantage of conversation concerns in particular those scheming, bloodthirsty youths who crave a brilliant career in the Arts and Letters. You will find such young men everywhere, and our town is no exception.

That’s right, my little wolf cubs in the first row, I’ll have you know that you will achieve more through a funny remark, a turn of phrase, or a flash of wit than through your girlfriend’s sex appeal, a complete familiarity with the twelve volumes of Quintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria, and even the outstanding dishonesty that in France ranks demonstrably among the most important factors of success.

You see, I have a friend (who shall remain nameless), a regional writer, an expert on the arts and crafts of Languedoc, who, whenever he goes out in society, flounders, stammers, stares like an idiot at his perfectly ordinary shoes, and can only bleat “Ah” and “Oh” and “Uh” and sometimes “Hee-hee.” Now, although each of these onomatopoeias contains a world of perplexity and terrifying apprehension, they do absolutely nothing to fuel the fires of literate conversation. As for the few times when this friend is invited to appear on a television program, it’s just pitiful to hear him sputter away! Result: he gets no name recognition, as the rabble say.

Lousy conversation is social suicide.

Through a quite common misunderstanding, his poor speaking skills make a poor impression on people, whose low opinion of him we find most unfair. But the world is made in such a way that

it is not enough to be talented,

one must also look the part.

This will be our inevitable axiom. The corollary to which is equally inevitable:

To appear to be what one is not is ridiculous,

like dressing up a monkey in a three-piece suit.

Linda Coverdale

Or wearing one myself. The results are guaranteed!! am grotesque. Lucienne always told me so. She preferred me in a track suit. To my great sorrow. So is better, it seems, to suit one’s style to oneself. And what’s more, one must know one’s own style. And oneself. And how to make them work together. All that isn’t easy. I feel I’m getting bogged down. Which happens whenever I try to think. I see no other way to land on my feet again (one couldn’t dream up a more appropriate expression), no other way than to quote Baltasar Gracián, a philosopher whom I’ve discovered since my Lulu left me (mourning has its good points, you must admit).

When the bottom has fallen out of everything, this thinker wrote, nothing can replace it. And although you can spruce up what the English refer to as the “packaging” (it’s me speaking now), try as you may to decorate the emptiness with ruffles, doll it up, swathe it in tissue paper, beribbon it with fancy words and frills, the emptiness stubbornly, imperturbably, remains. I will let you meditate a moment on what I’ve just said, before issuing the following warning.

Warning:

Whoever considers the subtle art of conversation simply a useful skill for social climbing is a fool and a cipher. For conversation presupposes, ladies and gentlemen (before swelling into chamber music, or jazz, or rock, depending), an incubation period when the riches of the mind ferment, I don’t like that image because it reminds me of cheese, whereas, we’ll get back to this, conversation is not a cheese, another French specialty along with champagne and the famous spirit of collaboration, and if we absolutely had to find a metaphor here, I’d propose that

conversation is a wine that improves with age.

Which means that in my eyes, it possesses every virtue.And not only does it not preclude either thought or culture. Which are not acquired in one day. Or a hundred. Or a thousand. Lucienne, for example, barely attained their outer edges. And died as lightweight as the day she was born. I’m not speaking of her body, that poor shell, but of her soul, which had the thickness of a blotter. And not only, as I was saying, does conversation not preclude either thought or culture. It positively requires them. Sanctifies them. And celebrates them. Just listen to me, for instance.

The preceding assertion might seem like a perfidious attack against certain modern writers whose profundity of thought and cultural capital—I love that last expression, simply saying it makes me feel rich, but not for long—whose cultural and more particularly syntactic capital is limited to pocket change. But God forbid we should wish them harm! Every poor man is our friend!

Slave Old Man [Why This Book Should Win]

Chad Post — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 19:35:14 +0000

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles .��

Sofia Samatar��is the author of the novels����Ի��, the short story collection,��, and��, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received several awards, including the World Fantasy Award. She teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

��by Patrick Chamoiseau, translated from the French and Creole by Linda Coverdale (Martinique, New Press)

Twenty years.

It was 1996 when Patrick Chamoiseau finished writing L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, 1997 when the novel was published, and 2018 when Linda Coverdale’s translation, Slave Old Man, appeared in English.

Those two decades, during which Slave Old Man was not yet here, seem to me like a mysterious abyss. They seem like the forest spring at the heart of the novel, where the old man, enslaved for as long as he can remember, tumbles in his flight from the master’s vicious mastiff (the molosse of the French title). The spring is a place of death and rebirth. It’s a well of utter passivity, where time stops, where the exhausted flesh gives up hope. It is also a place of vision. Language erupts here, and red crabs swarm. It’s not how long the old man is held in the water that matters, but what he will become.

This is a radiant novel of fugitive life—of those who remain, in the face of terror, “catastrophically alive.” Coverdale renders Chamoiseau’s complex language beautifully into English, developing her own surprising strategy for Creole words, both translating them and leaving them in place. So the word molocoye, “tortoise,” becomes “molocoye-tortoise.” The old man is “djok-strong”; the memories of enslaved Africans form a stew, a murky “calalou-gumbo.” The method delivers clarity without sacrificing the richness of Chamoiseau’s two languages, and by creating new constructions, Coverdale gives standard English a lively, improvisational, oral feeling. It’s an approach that suits this experimental novel, which is both fable and philosophy, deeply engaged with the work of Chamoiseau’s fellow Martinican, Édouard Glissant, whose writings are quoted at the head of each chapter. The chapter titles lay out the novel’s themes, like a path into the forest. Matter. Alive. Waters. Lunar. Solar. The Stone. The Bones.

How current it seems—prescient, even—this novel written more than twenty years ago! It’s a book that seems to have emerged from its own afterlife. It doesn’t feel timeless, but futuristic—like a ray cast backward into 1996 from what Black Studies would become twenty years later. So Slave Old Man gives me a buzzing, disoriented feeling, because the old man’s broken, persisting flesh is the living-dead matter of Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus (2016), because his watery memories of the hold, echoed by his rebirth in the spring, seem written in the wake of Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake (2016), because his exuberant voice, issuing out of a body marked for disposal, echoes the transformative trash-heap poetics of Fred Moten’s Black and Blur (2017), and because the bloodthirsty mastiff, carried to the Caribbean on a slave ship, might have been drawn from the pages of Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog (2018).

What is going on here? Did everybody read L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse in French twenty years ago and I was the only one who missed it? Or is it that I’m looking at an Édouard Glissant constellation (thinking especially of Moten’s kinship with Glissant)? Or—to quote the epigraph to Slave Old Man—“DOES THE WORLD HAVE AN INTENTION?”

Whatever the reason, Slave Old Man deserves to win the Best Translated Book Award, both for Linda Coverdale’s brilliant inventiveness as a translator, and for Patrick Chamoiseau’s achievement in writing, back in 1996, a novel so uncannily ahead of its time that it appears to have arrived in English not late, but early.

Why This Book Should Win – 1914 by BTBA Judge Monica Carter

Monica Carter — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 15:11:27 +0000

Monica Carter is a writer and freelance critic.

– Jean Echenoz, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale, (France)
The New Press

Jean Echenoz’s novel, 1914, delivers the punch of a heavyweight yet moves with the speed of a flyweight. In fewer than 120 pages, Echenoz gives us the exhausting thirteen rounder full of power and finesse, each word making an impact, their total making a lasting impression on the reader. Like a well-trained fighter, Echenoz’s prose is spare, lean, not an inch of fat to be found – only the muscle of self-discipline can be seen.

1914 is his version of the requisite war novel for men of a certain age, or plainly, the stories of five young men sent off to be ravaged by the horrors of World War 1. The novel begins quietly enough with a detailed description of the idyllic countryside as the twenty-four year old protagonist, Anthime Sèze, cycles through it to the top of the hill as he surveys his town below. Then, from the distance, “up in those church towers, the bells had in fact begun tolling all together, ringing out in a somber, heavy and threatening disorder in which Anthime, although still too young to have attended many funerals, instinctively recognized the timbre of the tocsin, rung only rarely, the image of which had reached him separately before its sound.” Thus, war begins. Anthime, his older brother Charles, Padioleau, Bossis, and Arcenal – his “café comrades” – don their ill-fitting uniforms as if in a game of dress-up, boot through town amidst parade fanfare, wave and smile as they march off to one of the worst wars in world history.

With that set-up, a reader would expect a 600-page novel. Yet, this is where Echenoz’s mastery of language shows what brevity can do. The Echenoz brand of wit is subdued while his detached, meticulous eye for detail lets us in to every scene as if he and the reader were watching everything unfold through high-powered binoculars. Echenoz’s details are hypnotizing, seemingly innocuous at first, almost wasteful, but when the scenes of war appear, that same eye for detail makes you wince, want to look away from the image in your mind that he has created.

Then you turn the page and encounter one of his devastating conclusions about war:

The sweat from fatigue and fear, take off the greatcoats to work more freely, and might hang them on an arm sticking out of the tumbled soil, using it as a coat tree.

All this has been described a thousand times, so perhaps it’s not worthwhile to linger any longer over that sordid stinking opera. And perhaps there’s not much point either in comparing the war to an opera, especially since no one cares a lot about opera, even if the war is operatically grandiose, exaggerated, excessive, full of longueurs, makes a great deal of noise and is often, in the end, rather boring.

It’s true; we know it all to well – the death and destruction of war. With the centennial anniversary of World War 1 and the focus on its literature, Echenoz confidently creates an intense, gripping narrative that is just as heartbreaking as first person accounts from soldiers who actually fought in it. Equally important and no less creative is Linda Coverdale’s translation. When a novel such as this is translated, it requires a translator who can rewrite the novel with the same economy of prose and richness in description. Coverdale’s ability to remain so loyal to Echenoz’s style and tone feels effortless, which makes the translator all the more gifted. Also, Coverdale’s notes at the end of the text are fantastic. She tells you the historical context of a reference as well as the exact phrase to google to see a particle painting Echenoz is referring to or what the soldier’s rations looked like.

1914 should win the Best Translated Book Award because it has all the marks of an epic but is scarcely over one hundred pages. To create that kind of emotional depth of character and expansive narrative is more challenging to do in fewer pages than when a writer is allowed five hundred-plus pages. It should win because it takes World War 1, a much written about topic, and makes the distillation of Anthime represent the horrible damage that any war does to a soldier. It should win because the novel wouldn’t have the significance that it does have without the superb translation of Linda Coverdale. It should win because the message is too important to ignore – even if it’s a beautiful day out, we still carry the possibility of war within ourselves.

Weekend Reading: "Viviane" by Julia Deck

Chad Post — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 18:13:24 +0000

Like most people in publishing—or most readers I know—I have approximately a hundred million books on my “to read” shelves. Which in no way stops me from buying more and more books, or, in this case, setting aside everything I “should” be reading to check out a book that won’t be available until April of next year.

The sort of cryptic, yet promising opening of the jacket copy first caught my attention:

Viviane is both an engrossing murder mystery and a gripping exploration of madness, a narrative that tests the shifting boundaries of language and the self. For inspiration, author Julia Deck read the work of Samuel Beckett, because, as she says, “he positions himself within chaos and gives it coherence.”

But it’s this line from the second paragraph that convinced me that I should read this right now:

You are not entirely sure, but it seems to you that four or five hours ago, you did something that you shouldn’t have.

Writing in the second-person is tough to pull off, but that sentence is basically perfect.

Aside from that, I don’t know too much more about this book. It’s published by Minuit—which is surprising, since they don’t often publish debut novels—and will be coming out New Press next year in Linda Coverdale’s translation. And it was nominated for the Prix Femina, the Prix France Inter, and the Prix du Premier Roman, three of France’s ten thousand literary awards.

Also of importance: This is a slim 149 pages, which is the perfect length for me to read tonight, seeing that most of the rest of my weekend will be consumed with baseball watching . . . I’ll let you know on Monday if it’s as good as Wacha’s postseason.

"Lightning" by Jean Echenoz [25 Days of the BTBA]

Chad Post — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:37:37 +0000

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next five weeks highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and informative posts that prompt you to read at least a few of these excellent works.

Click here for all past and future posts in this series.

by Jean Echenoz, translated by Linda Coverdale

Language: French
Country: France
Publisher: The New Press

Why This Book Should Win: Tesla, duh. And Linda Coverdale. But mostly Tesla.

This was one of the first books we included in the currently-on-hiatus “Read This Next” project. As part of that, we ran a preview of the book, and interviewed Linda Coverdale, and ran a review of the book. And then, on the the Three Percent podcast on the Best Fiction of 2011, I plugged this again. As I did in last week’s podcast. In other words, I am fond of this book. (Worth noting that on last week’s podcast, Tom chose this as the book he thinks will win the award.)

Unlike similarly constructed sentences, such as “everyone likes a reenactment,” or “haven’t you always wondered what it would be like to live in Ireland in the 1800s?,” it’s FACT that everybody is interested in Tesla.

Just look at that shit! That is totally wicked insane. And named after TESLA. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg—this guy invented EVERYTHING.¹

In addition to all the awesomeness of his experiments (dude almost destroyed most of New York when he was just fucking around) and his strange obsessions with electricity and pigeons, one of the reasons Tesla keeps resurfacing every few years (most recently in Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else) and seizing the public imagination is his captivating life story and how it can be interpreted into so many different archetypal myths.

For instance, there’s the idea of the solitary, eccentric inventor. Someone who is maybe a bit socially awkward (recluse), has some odd quirks (pigeons obsession), but can see the world in ways that no one else ever has (death ray).

Also, the thing that struck me in reading this book, and in reading about Tesla in general, is how he was one of the last pure inventors outside of the corporate world. Part of that was because he was THE WORST at business matters, some of that is because Edison was a total bastard (electrocuted an elephant), and because capitalist assholes have seemingly always taken advantage of the brain-muddled and trustworthy.

Getting to the book itself, this is part of Echenoz’s “Eccentric Genius” trilogy that includes Ravel and Running. These are very different from his earlier works, which are a bit more noirish and funny. Here’s what Linda Coverdale had to say in the aforementioned interview that we did:

Chad W. Post: Were you excited when you first started translating Echenoz? These books are pretty different from his earlier works.

Linda Coverdale: When I picked up Ravel, I thought, oh goody, here we go, we’re going to have this sort of rambunctious circus-like atmosphere, it will be rollicking and lots of fun, let’s see what happens. Well, it was Ravel. My first reaction was, what? Now I’m translating Echenoz and he’s gone into a monastery? It was delightful but it certainly was a surprise. It was as if he were playing around, doing his homework, taking his exercise in all sorts of ways. But it was always Echenoz, and he was working on his style and how he would manipulate the language. It seemed that he had taken along the two things that I had most enjoyed about his writing before: that it was very antic, he had a wonderful sense of humor, and yet, it was very elegant—even when it sprawled, he was in control. He took those two aspects and he, in a way, compressed them, and raised them to a higher level, and started tackling what one might call more serious things. Which isn’t to be nasty to previous novels at all, no, he likes change, he’d been playing with different genres before and he said he was ready for a change, so, as I understand it, he was actually trying to do something different in the way of time, because previous books had always been set in the period in which they were written, so he thought he might try his hand at something else. But he didn’t want to do a historical novel, some sort of bodice-ripping thing. He wanted to set it—and this was the particular allure of this idea—in the period between the two wars, which was very rich, and he was going to have all sorts of real characters in there, real people, Ravel among them, and Ravel ended up walking off with the book that Echenoz eventually wrote. So that’s how he got into that. He was making a change, and he was experimenting with it, the experiment fizzled, but there was a by-product that proved to be, from my point of view, solid gold. That’s how he started with the Three Lives.

Partially because it’s Tesla, partially because his style really fits the content, but of the three “Eccentric Genius” books, Lightning is the most successful and captivating. It recounts the life of Tesla (referred to as “Gregor” in the book) from birth to death in a chatty, informed narratorial voice.

To give you a taste, here’s a bit from the beginning when Gregor is born right around midnight:

We all like to know, if possible, exactly when we were born. We prefer to be aware of the numerical moment when it all takes off, when the business begins with air, light, perspective, the nights and the heartbreaks, the pleasures and the days. [. . .]

Well, that precise moment is something Gregor will never find out, born as he was between eleven at night and one in the morning. Midnight on the dot or a bit earlier, a bit later—no one will be able to tell him. So throughout his life he will never be sure on which day, the one before or the one after, he has the right to celebrate his birthday. [. . .]

Gregor’s birth proceeds like this in the clamorous darkness until a gigantic lightning bolt—thick, branching, a grim pillar of burnt air shaped like a tree, like its roots or the claws of a raptor—spotlights his arrival and sets the surrounding forest on fire, while thunder drowns out his first cry. Such is the bedlam that in the general panic, no one takes advantage of the frozen glare of the flash, its instant broad daylight, to check the precise time according to clocks that, cherishing long-standing differences, have disagreed among themselves for quite a while anyway.

A birth outside of time, therefore, and out of the light, because in those days the only illumination comes from candle wax and oil, since electric current is as yet unknown. Electricity—as we employ it today—has yet to impose itself on custom, and it’s about time for someone to deal with that. It’s Gregor who’ll take charge, as if sorting out another item of personal business: it will be his job to clear the matter up.

This one is a MUST READ for any and everyone. It’s short, charming, and utterly enjoyable. And, I think, a definite finalist.

¹ Because this is absurd, yet makes the point, here’s a list from Wikipedia of “Electromechanical devices and principles developed by Nikola Tesla”:

Various devices that use rotating magnetic fields

The Induction motor, rotary transformers, and “high” frequency alternators

The Tesla coil, his magnifying transmitter, and other means for increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations (including condenser discharge transformations and the Tesla oscillators)

Alternating current long-distance electrical transmission system (1888) and other methods and devices for power transmission

Systems for wireless communication (prior art for the invention of radio) and radio frequency oscillators

Robotics and the electronic logic gate

Electrotherapy Tesla currents

Wireless transfer of electricity and the Tesla effect

Tesla impedance phenonomena

Tesla electro-static field

Tesla principle

Bifilar coil

Telegeodynamics

Tesla insulation

Tesla impulses

Tesla frequencies

Tesla discharge

Forms of commutators and methods of regulating third brushes

Tesla turbines (e.g., bladeless turbines) for water, steam and gas and the Tesla pumps

Tesla igniter

Corona discharge ozone generator

Tesla compressor

X-rays Tubes using the Bremsstrahlung process

Devices for ionized gases and “Hot Saint Elmo’s Fire”.⁵⁵

Devices for high field emission

Devices for charged particle beams

Phantom streaming devices⁵⁶

Arc light systems

Methods for providing extremely low level of resistance to the passage of

electric current (predecessor to superconductivity)

Voltage multiplication circuitry

Devices for high voltage discharges

Devices for lightning protection

VTOL aircraft

Dynamic theory of gravity

Concepts for electric vehicles

Polyphase systems

Three Percent #23: Nonfiction Books Are Books Too

Chad Post — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:10:13 +0000

In this week’s podcast we learn the following: Chad is working through the five stages of grief about Albert Pujols and MSU (he is filled with ANGER); Tom doesn’t read a ton of nonfiction, but when he does, it tends to focus on all things violent (see a theme?); faux-karaoke singers on the subway might suck, but Karaoke Culture is awesome; and book people like to totally flip out at most every opportunity (we are an unstable people).

Anyway, in terms of our actual “Best Nonfiction of 2011” lists, you have to listen to the full podcast to get all the details, but here are a few highlights:

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos

Along with The Hour of the Star and Scars, I won’t stop talking about this until my tongue is ripped from my mouth. (So violent!)

My Life As a Russian Novel by Emmanuel Carrere, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

Carrere is on my proverbial list of “authors I must read,” especially this book, the one he wrote about Philip K. Dick, Lives Other than My Own, The Adversary, Class Trip & The Mustache.

Rich People Things by Chris Lehmann

I think everyone in America should read this book. Especially people enrolled in Business School. And anyone who doesn’t get the Occupy Movement.

El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin by Molly Molloy and Charles Bowden

For those who became interested in Mexico and Ciudad Juarez via Bolano’s 2666 . . .

This week’s intro/outro song is “Midnight City” by M83, the first song to be featured both on a Three Percent Podcast and a Victoria’s Secret commercial. Not much of a spoiler here, but I’ll be talking about M83’s epic Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming on next week’s “Best Music of 2011” podcast. And although we don’t usually post videos, I feel obliged to share the video of this song with anyone who hasn’t seen it. It’s a perfect complement to the song itself—triumphant and a little spooky, with glowing eyes and a bit of smashing. Enjoy!

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

Latest Review: "Lives Other Than My Own" by Emmanuel Carrere

Chad Post — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:00:00 +0000

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on this week’s Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrere, which is translated from the French by Linda Coverdale and forthcoming from Metropolitan Books.

Monica Carter is a contributing reviewer to Three Percent, and a member of the Best Translated Book Award fiction panel. She lives in Los Angeles where she used to work at the wonderful Skylight Books and is now concentrating on her writing.

Here’s the opening of her review:

France’s Emmanuel Carrère, filmmaker, novelist and biographer, attempts to hit fate below the belt in his latest effort, Lives Other Than My Own. Difficult to classify—it could be memoir, it could be fiction, it could be a treatise on compassion—Lives Other Than My Own presents stories of grief about people the author knows. We’re not talking about typical down-on-your-luck stories either; we are talking gut wrenching and life-altering stories of grief brought on by the cruelty of fate. Under the guide of Carrère’s nuanced prose, simultaneously journalistic and emotionally astute, you will journey through this book only to rise up out of your chair shaking your fists and screaming towards the heavens, “Why, fate, why?” by the turn of the last page.

Carrere opens this book with the tragedy of the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka in 2004. On vacation with his wife and their two boys in Sri Lanka, the hotel they are staying at is untouched by the disaster. Yet a couple, Jérôme and Delphine, they have befriended during their trip loses their four-year-old daughter, Juliette. As devastating as the summary of this loss sounds, Carrère’s style brings us to the edge of this loss to witness the irrefutable void of mourning:

“A few dozen yards from us, in another bungalow, Jérôme and Delphine must be lying down as well, wide awake. He has taken her in his arms, or is that impossible for them as well? It’s the first night. The night of the day their daughter died. This morning she was alive, she woke up, she came to play in their bed, called them Mama and Papa, she was laughing, she was warm, she was the loveliest and warmest and sweetest thing on earth, and now she’s dead. She will always be dead.”

Click here to read the entire piece. And to read an extended preview of Lives Other Than My Own.

Lives Other Than My Own

Chad Post — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:00:00 +0000

France’s Emmanuel Carrère, filmmaker, novelist and biographer, attempts to hit fate below the belt in his latest effort, Lives Other Than My Own. Difficult to classify—it could be memoir, it could be fiction, it could be a treatise on compassion—Lives Other Than My Own presents stories of grief about people the author knows. We’re not talking about typical down-on-your-luck stories either; we are talking gut wrenching and life-altering stories of grief brought on by the cruelty of fate. Under the guide of Carrère’s nuanced prose, simultaneously journalistic and emotionally astute, you will journey through this book only to rise up out of your chair shaking your fists and screaming towards the heavens, “Why, fate, why?” by the turn of the last page.

Carrere opens this book with the tragedy of the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka in 2004. On vacation with his wife and their two boys in Sri Lanka, the hotel they are staying at is untouched by the disaster. Yet a couple, Jérôme and Delphine, they have befriended during their trip loses their four-year-old daughter, Juliette. As devastating as the summary of this loss sounds, Carrère’s style brings us to the edge of this loss to witness the irrefutable void of mourning:

A few dozen yards from us, in another bungalow, Jérôme and Delphine must be lying down as well, wide awake. He has taken her in his arms, or is that impossible for them as well? It’s the first night. The night of the day their daughter died. This morning she was alive, she woke up, she came to play in their bed, called them Mama and Papa, she was laughing, she was warm, she was the loveliest and warmest and sweetest thing on earth, and now she’s dead. She will always be dead.

While he lays forth the catastrophic circumstances of the tsunami, he questions his own ability to love and whether he has the strength to withstand grief and loss of this magnitude. Focusing mainly on the wake of disaster, these personal questions bring immediacy to the reader as to how we would react in these situations. As self-important as this may seem—chronicling the grief of someone else as an impetus for creativity and personal reflection—the reader can’t help but empathize with Carrère as a witness but also respect his compassion for his subjects as he does in this somber passage:

There we are, neat and clean, untouched, while around us cluster the lepers, poisoned by radiation, shipwrecked souls reduced to a savage state. Only yesterday evening they were like us and we like them, but something happened to them and not us, so now we belong to two separate branches of humanity.

After Carrère returns home from Sri Lanka, they are met with their own loss. Carrère’s wife, Hélène, loses her younger sister, also named Juliette, to cancer. Juliette leaves behind a dedicated, sweet and earthy husband and her three young daughters, the youngest only fifteen months. Through interviews with Patrice and Juliette’s friend and business colleague, Étienne, Carrère constructs the life of an ambitious, intelligent woman who was loved for her determination and fairness. What becomes most compelling about this story of loss is that it focuses mostly on Étienne, a fellow judge of Juliette’s, who was automatically drawn to her because of their physical handicaps. Etienne lost a leg and Juliette was unable to walk without crutches because of an earlier treatment of radiation that damaged the nerves in her spine.

It is clear that Carrère respects, and is somewhat mystified by, the strength and love Etienne and Patrice have for Juliette. Again, he questions his devotion to Hélène but realizes that after seeing Patrice lose the woman he had married, Carrère wants to grow old with Hélène. The story of Juliette’s cancer is brutal and takes up most of the book’s length. It does digress into the details of her work as a judge who protects clients from creditors but I am not convinced it is a necessary addition. It undermines the contemplative and somber tone set in the beginning by Carrère and takes it into the drier arena of legal mechanics.

Obviously, Carrère wants to highlight the seemingly limitless value of human connection with these two lives other than his own. The exploration of grief, shock and survival dominate the narrative while Carrère flounders for his own sense of worthiness as a person capable of offering emotional support and sustenance. He brings to light that none us truly know our limits until we have to face the death of our loved ones or our own mortality. This includes an emotional mortality that plagues some from the beginning which he purports that this emotional turmoil can develop into a life force of its own, namely cancer:

. . . but I do believe that certain people have been damaged at their core almost from the beginning and cannot, despite their courage and best efforts, really live. I also believe that one of the ways in which life, which wants to live, works its way through such people can be in disease, and not just any disease: cancer. That’s why I am so stunned by people who claim that we are free, that happiness can be decided, that it’s a moral choice. For these cheerleaders, sadness is in bad taste, depression a sign of laziness, melancholy a sin. Yes, it is a sin, even a mortal sin, but some people are born sinners, born damned, and all their courage and best efforts will not set them free.

There is a profundity and truth to many of the conclusions he draws from bearing witness to the pain of others. There is also a sense of self-exploration that deepens from his proximity to all this mourning.

As Carrère delves into grief head first, the reader has no chance to turn back. What doesn’t work for the reader is not the onslaught of damage and survival, but that the stories do not feel connected. It’s as if they should be two different books or tied together in a way that doesn’t come across so tonally different. Perhaps this was his goal in highlighting how loss can be different. There is the soul-numbing shock of sudden death as in Jérôme and Delphine’s case, or the grinding misery of a gradual loss as in Juliette’s case. The tonal shifts are so abrupt that the reader can’t help but feel they are reading two different books. Once we meet Étienne, we are taken into the world and history of someone who is still living, whose job inhabits part of Juliette’s story and whose presence is lively and vivid, almost a distraction from the loss of Juliette.

This is a powerful book filled with honest and beautiful passages that showcase Carrère’s abstract gift as a writer. Lives are disjointed, but the job of the writer is not to replicate life as is, but present a seamless version that appears as is. Rightly, he reminds us that loss takes the person away, but the survivor still carries them around in their own way and in a way that will metamorphose as they grow in life. And as Carrère points out in this apt quote from Céline, “The worst defeat in everything is to forget, and especially what did you in.”

"Lives Other Than My Own" by Emmanuel Carrere [Read This Next]

Chad Post — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:15:00 +0000

For this week’s we have chosen a book by French author and screenwriter Emmanuel Carrère, who began his career writing fiction but has transitioned to a particularly self-examining non-fiction. His last book was the revealing autobiographic My Life as a Russian Novel, and the one before that The Adversary, the story of Jean-Claude Romand, the notorious French criminal who pretended to be a doctor for almost two decades and then killed everyone who might expose him, including his parents and family. But even within The Adversary, Carrère keeps himself in the text, including much of his correspondence and incidents in his own family life, and questioning his motives in writing the book.

In Lives Other Than My Own, the subject matter is tragic—Carrère is present at the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, and a couple whom he and his girlfriend, Hélène, have befriended lose their young daughter to the wave; Helene’s sister is diagnosed with cancer, a relapse from her teenage years. Throughout all this, Carrère suffers no personal misfortune other than his connection to these sad tales, and like an ethnographer striving for full disclosure, he presents himself, his jealousies, his sympathies, in the very telling of the stories of those the book is titled after.

This week, we have an interview with Carrère, a full review, and an excerpt from the text in which we start off by situating ourselves in Sri Lanka and becoming familiar with the complications that have arisen between Carrère and Hélène.

Click to read an extended preview of Lives Other Than My Own, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale and coming out in September from Metropolitan Books.

"There Are Things I Want You to Know" Ģ��ý Stieg Larsson and Me

Chad Post — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 15:30:00 +0000

I will admit, right off the bat, that I have never read anything by Stieg Larsson. Not a word, not a page, not even the back of a book cover. Yes, I am aware of the existence of the Millennium Trilogy, with the movies and the books and the commercials and whatnot, and I have perhaps eavesdropped on a few hushed, excited conversations; I am aware of the franchise that is approaching a kind of cultural phenomenon and of its rising popularity. But I haven’t read a word of it.
Really.

And now that I have established my unbiased-ly biased position, I have some things to say about Eva Garbrielsson’s “There Are things I want you to know” Ģ��ý Stieg Larsson and Me.

The book itself is meant to be a “biography“—take that as you will—of the late author’s long time partner Eva Gabrielsson, whom he met at age nineteen (she was eighteen), and stayed with for over 30 years. Eva chronicles the ups and downs of their life together, the different political movements and counter movements the couple was involved in, the roots and creation of the Millennium Trilogy, and their reasons for avoiding marriage. The last part of the book is also devoted to Eva’s loss of control over Stieg’s legacy and the downward spiral of his estate.

Gabrielsson writes “This book . . . I wish I hadn’t had to write it. It talks about Stieg, and our life together, but also about my life without him.” Reviews call the book “poignant,” “romantic,” and “touching”; and it is. There are moments of great accomplishment and personal danger mixed with the little everyday couples’ rituals that keep a relationship alive. But there is, of course, another tension.

The book admits early on, in both a foreword by Marie-Francoise Colombani and in the first chapter, that Eva is “today fighting to obtain control over Larsson’s literary estate.” An estate that is according to some sources worth $15 million dollars or more (over 97 million Swedish kronos), the sixth largest estate attributed to a dead celebrity after Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, JRR Tolkien, Charles Schulz, and John Lennon. But that is not to say that the book does not have its moments of emotion and poignancy.

I was an animal acting on instinct—a protective measure that kept anyone harmful to me a t a distance. I went through life like a zombie. Every morning I woke up in tears, although my nights were dreamless. Absolute darkness. The animal in me was restless and kept me constantly in motion. I did a lot of walking, but never alone, because I no longer dared to go out on my own. Not recognizing the woman I’d become, I had no idea what she might be capable of doing, to myself or to the people I might meet. Like a hunted beast, I fed only on little things picked up in passing: dates, nuts, fruits.

All the while Erland kept saying that he didn’t want any part of Stieg’s estate.

While the potential for gold digging and a character assassination of the Larsson family is there it is, as Eva promises, not the focus of the book. Short chapters further break down into vignettes on the couple’s life together and their experiences both political and personal, snapshots of 32 years, including the daily threats and phone calls from extremist groups retaliating against Stieg’s investigative journalism writing. Within this the writing is at some times fantastically picturesque and on point and at others of absolutely no relevance.

The writing itself has a kind of choppy, almost stilted quality. For someone who apparently spent many years translating magazine articles as well as doing editorial work, Eva’s work is somewhat unpolished and, in a few spots, clearly unedited. Whether this is due to a flat out refusal to make any changes, as some rumors have suggested, or simply Eva’s style, it is for the reader to decide.

And I suppose, in the act of reviewing this, that if I were a more suspicious person I would note that her writing becomes more fluid, coherent, and lyrical—and readable—in the second half of the book where she focuses on the creation of the Trilogy and her eventual loss of control over the Stieg Larsson estate. But that might be my small inner cynic talking.

However, it must be said that never in the book does Eva Gabrielsson write of a time when she asked for control of the estate’s money, only its intellectual property rights to protect, as she says, Stieg’s vision and his work’s integrity. Nor does she ask for money outright to continue her crusade, although a short chapter is devoted to her website which has stopped taking donations as of January 10, 2011.

Bottom line, while “There Are things I want you to know” Ģ��ý Stieg Larsson and Me is no Millennium Trilogy novel (I am guessing) it will be an interesting read for book fans and people who are interested in Stieg Larsson’s life. Information is included on the backgrounds of the series’ characters and the real life inspiration for the plots, places, and names as well as some information on the unpublished fourth novel. If the book is perhaps not a great piece of writing, it is at least an intriguing read.

linda coverdale – Three Percent

“The Lecture” by Lydie Salvayre and Linda Coverdale [Excerpt]

Slave Old Man [Why This Book Should Win]

Why This Book Should Win – 1914 by BTBA Judge Monica Carter

Weekend Reading: "Viviane" by Julia Deck

"Lightning" by Jean Echenoz [25 Days of the BTBA]

Three Percent #23: Nonfiction Books Are Books Too

Latest Review: "Lives Other Than My Own" by Emmanuel Carrere

Lives Other Than My Own

"Lives Other Than My Own" by Emmanuel Carrere [Read This Next]

"There Are Things I Want You to Know" Ģ����ý Stieg Larsson and Me

"There Are Things I Want You to Know" Ģ��ý Stieg Larsson and Me