{"id":301036,"date":"2015-04-15T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2015\/04\/15\/why-this-book-should-win-fantomas-versus-the-multinational-vampires-by-btba-judge-madeleine-larue\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:22","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:22","slug":"why-this-book-should-win-fantomas-versus-the-multinational-vampires-by-btba-judge-madeleine-larue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2015\/04\/15\/why-this-book-should-win-fantomas-versus-the-multinational-vampires-by-btba-judge-madeleine-larue\/","title":{"rendered":"Why This Book Should Win – Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires by BTBA Judge Madeleine LaRue"},"content":{"rendered":"

Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of<\/i> Music & Literature<\/a>. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires<\/i><\/a> – Julio Cort\u00e1zar, translated from the Spanish by David Kurnick
\nSemiotext(e)<\/strong><\/p>\n

It almost feels unfair to make anyone compete with Julio Cort\u00e1zar. His fantastically irreverent novel Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires<\/i> was originally published in 1975, and yet it has more life in its bones (or rather, in its sixty-nine pages) than many works of our own time. Subtitled \u201cAn Attainable Utopia,\u201d Fantomas<\/i> is at once a tongue-in-cheek response to the violence of the late twentieth century and a serious critique of corporate and governmental oppression. <\/p>\n

The book opens with \u201cour narrator\u201d (later revealed to be Cort\u00e1zar himself) on his way to his home in Paris. On the train, he reads a comic book starring the masked hero Fantomas, whose latest mission is to stop a band of anti-culture terrorists from burning down the world\u2019s great libraries. After our narrator\u2019s arrival in Paris, the borders between life and comic strip rapidly collapse: Fantomas himself comes crashing in through the narrator\u2019s window, and Cort\u00e1zar must help him realize the magnitude of this global problem \u2014 at least, when he\u2019s not lusting after the superhero\u2019s miniskirt-clad assistants or being yelled at on the phone by a convalescent Susan Sontag. <\/p>\n

These conversations with Sontag \u2014 all carried out over \u201cthat technological decapitation known as the telephone\u201d \u2014 are half comedy routine and half sadly prescient analysis. At one point, the narrator presents the difficulty of their task: \u201cSusan, the people are alienated, badly informed, deceptively informed, mutilated by a reality that very few understand.\u201d She responds:<\/p>\n

Yes, Julio, but reality makes itself known in other ways, too \u2014 it makes itself known in work or the lack of work, in the price of potatoes, in the boy shot down on the corner, in the way the filthy rich drive past the miserable slums (that\u2019s a metaphor, because they take care never to get anywhere near the goddamn slums). It makes itself known even in the singing of birds, in children\u2019s laughter, in the moment of making love. These things are known, Julio, a miner or a teacher or a bicyclist knows them, deep down everyone knows them, but we\u2019re lazy or we shuffle along in bewilderment, or we\u2019ve been brainwashed and we think that things aren\u2019t so bad because they\u2019re not flattening our houses or kicking us to death\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nThat paragraph, like most of Fantomas, has not aged a day since 1975. Cort\u00e1zar\u2019s highly original adventure story, his commentary on the power of literature to imagine alternative worlds (and, equally, the human failure to realize those worlds), bears a political message as relevant today as it was forty years ago. And the author, for all his revolutionary fervor, seems to have understood that in advance: \u201cLook, mister,\u201d a newspaper seller tells our narrator early on in the book, \u201chistory is like steak and potatoes, you can order it everywhere and it always tastes the same.\u201d The same goes, apparently, for the present. <\/p>\n

David Kurnick\u2019s translation is nimble, confident, and pitch perfect; like Groucho Marx, he always gets the right amount of syllables for the joke. (One dialogue, between the narrator and Sontag: \u201c\u2018But this isn\u2019t going to be easy, baby.\u2019 \u2018No shit,\u2019 said Susan.\u201d) Fantomas<\/i> isn\u2019t just a marvelous read, though; as publisher Semiotext(e) presents it, it\u2019s also a marvelous object. The book is nearly half images, and far from interrupting the flow of the text, they define it. Pages from the narrator\u2019s comic books, bleary mass-reproduced photographs of urban landscapes, and a hilarious sequence of drawings by the lovechild of Goya and Gorey, whose central figures are all identified as the shapeshifting Fantomas, are indispensable to the storyline and account for a good deal of its jaunty charm. <\/p>\n

That a \u201clost\u201d work can waltz in so unexpectedly and become such a formidable contender is, I think, testament enough to its quality. For its intellectual honesty and sheer panache, Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires<\/i> deserves the Best Translated Book Award;<\/a> moreover, I suspect it\u2019s a title its competitors would be able to lose to with grace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of Music & Literature. Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires – Julio Cort\u00e1zar, translated from the Spanish by David Kurnick Semiotext(e) It almost feels unfair to make anyone compete with Julio Cort\u00e1zar. His fantastically irreverent novel Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires was originally published in 1975, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[60346,2226,59416,60416,13826,58046,57956,36],"class_list":["post-301036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba2015-fiction-longlist","tag-argentina","tag-david-kurnick","tag-fantoms-versus-the-multinational-vampires","tag-julio-cortazar","tag-madeleine-larue","tag-semiotexte","tag-spanish"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333656,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301036\/revisions\/333656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}