Read and Respond

As You Were Sayings opens with a preface by Jean-David Lévitte, French Ambassador to the US.

Yes, the French Ambassador to the US—writing a preface to a Dalkey Archive Press collection of short fictions, writing that he actually worries about the unwillingness of American publishers to list translated books, writing about the need to reverse this trend, so that French authors, in particular, can "reach new readers...[and] be read in translation in the U.S."

And, it seems as if Lévitte (not some consultant copywriter) actually wrote the piece—and as if, as he says, he himself really loves "books and was educated by reading literature from all over the world."

Let's compare this to the latest "Op/Ed" released by the US Ambassador to France, Craig Roberts Stapleton. In it, he does not celebrate the arrival of a new American intellectual effort in France; rather, he cheers about an upcoming visit from "an American vessel not seen in a French port since May 2001: an aircraft carrier." No kidding.

Okay. Point made, and maybe it's an easy point, even a cheap shot, but it deserves making because it suggests that while a variety of writers will attempt to create interesting, thoughtful, and successful art—art that develops communication and collaboration between cultures—only some of them have the genuine interest and encouragement of their social leaders.

So we find, in a way, only one voice in what should have been the first collaborative part of this book.

Not so, of course, in the book's remaining conversations, where French authors Marie Darrieussecq, Camille Laurens, Jacques Roubaud, Lydie Salvayre, Grégoire Bouillier, Philippe Claudel, and Luc Lang compose joint texts with American writers (respectively) Rick Moody, Robert Olen Butler, Raymond Federman, Rikki Ducornet, Percival Everett, Aleksandar Hemon, and John Edgar Wideman. Two more-than-impressive groups working together (with the help of translators) under the following, very open-ended arrangement: "The French novelists [composed] the first part of each text, which [was] then translated into English and given to the Americans," who responded "to it in any way at all: continuation, variation, juxtaposition, contradiction, digression, closure—whatever reaction the initial text inspired."

The results: Luckily, everything one would hope to find with these writers and these premises. In the Darrieussecq/Moody piece, a female, first-person narrator recounts her complicated, even pathological, love for a horribly disfigured man—a love that centers on his injuries and diminishes when he receives cosmetic surgery that makes him more "normal." We then receive an interestingly skewed version of events from the point of view of the male character, who desires to become "normal" mostly because he resents the pity fueling his partner's love. In both, a shared focus on the depths of characters, and on the psychology of attraction, and love, and even the power of fetish.

Equally cooperative about exploring common characters and themes—Laurens and Butler, who created a unified piece that starts with a lyrically beautiful recitation on the many, many things for which one woman waits, and then builds to a tonally different, yet equally charged, dramatic scene that reveals why she waits, and waits, and waits; and Bouillier and Everett, who pass a narrative thread almost seamlessly to explore the desire driving one man's obsessive pursuit of an unavailable woman.

Some pieces take different, but equally engaging approaches—those by Claudel and Hemon, for example, trace narratives tied more by context or theme than specific characters or plot. In Claudel's piece, we receive the story of the sterility of upper-middle-class life. In Hemon's follow up, one immigrant man's struggle to achieve just such station (the flaws of which he can't know). Or, Lang's and Wideman's pieces have in common, mostly, shared images and styles.

A few of the pieces don't seem to connect. From Roubaud's version of a classical puzzle, the...