Radiant Terminus Read online

  praise for

  Antoine Volodine

  “His quirky and eccentric narrative achieves quite staggering and electric effects. . . . Dazzling in its epic proportions and imaginative scope.”

  —The Nation

  “Clever and incisive.”

  —New York Times

  “These wonderful stories fool around on the frontiers of the imagination.”

  —Shelley Jackson

  “He delights in breaking down our well-honed meters of what’s supposed to happen.”

  —Believer

  “The Dalai Lama himself would probably approve.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “His talent surfaces time and again in luxurious, hypnotic ways.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The Volodinian cosmos is skillfully crafted, fusing elements of science fiction with magical realism and political commentary.”

  —Music & Literature

  also in english by

  Antoine Volodine

  (a.k.a., Lutz Bassman & Manuela Draeger)

  Bardo or Not Bardo

  In the Time of the Blue Ball

  Minor Angels

  Naming the Jungle

  Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven

  We Monks & Soldiers

  Writers

  Copyright © Editions du Seuil, 2014

  Translation copyright © Jeffrey Zuckerman, 2017

  Foreword copyright © Brian Evenson, 2017

  First published in France as Terminus radieux

  First edition, 2017

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-53-3

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

  Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  Foreword

  by

  BRIAN EVENSON

  Radiant Terminus, which received the 2014 Prix Médicis, is Antoine Volodine’s most recently published novel. At least under that name. In 2015, he published a book under the heteronym Manuela Draeger, who also appears as a character in some of the books published under the name Volodine. And the name Volodine itself is a heteronym for an author who prefers not to have his real name revealed.

  I use “heteronym” instead of “pseudonym” because “Draeger,” or “Volodine,” or “Lutz Bassmann,” or “Elli Kronauer” (two more of the names he’s used) function as much more than pseudonyms (someone named Kronauer, who may or may not be the same as the heteronym, is in fact the central character in Radiant Terminus). As with Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, they each take on a life of their own, with distinct interests and concerns, and together they make up a collective of authors who write “post-exotic” literature.

  Volodine’s post-exotic writing often has the emphasis on world-building of fantastic fiction, science fiction in particular, though it brings a series of very different generic and literary elements to the table along with this. Volodine’s innovation comes in going about this world-building more intensively and more eccentrically than most fantastic fiction, over multiple books and multiple authors, inventing new and different genres—imagining not only a fantastical world, but also envisioning many different generic representations of such a world, and even overlapping, slightly different worlds. Volodine’s books present worlds in which various struggles have failed, in which a good percentage of the world’s population seems to exist in camps, and in which radiation has infected large chunks of the planet. His worlds are rife with incarceration and interrogation, but are also ones in which dream and reality meld, in which the fantastic and the real shade into one another, and in which the line between life and death is so thin that you don’t always know when you’ve passed from one to the other. More than any other writer I know, Volodine manages to create worlds that feel at once palpable, multivalent and real, and yet discontinuous and constantly shifting, as if threatening to fade from existence. His work, like Gerald Murnane’s, demands we move beyond the logic that we tend to rely on to understand fictional worlds. Not only can Volodine be simultaneously read as oneiric and palpable, as pre- and post-death, as real and unreal; he erases the distinctions between these categories, ultimately demanding that we simultaneously manage the impossible task of simultaneously seeing a both/and and a neither/nor.

  The “Radiant Terminus” of the title is the name of a kohlkoz, a failing collective farm in a part of Siberia so sickened with radiation that even the spiders have died. The novel is full of soldiers and citizens who seem to be occupying a phantasmic state, or who maybe persist after their deaths, or who perhaps have been dreamed or reanimated by the kolkhoz president, Solovyei, who seems also capable of strolling around inside people’s heads, peering into all their nooks and crannies, violating them. Violation is one of several of the major thematics of Radiant Terminus, as is the relation of art to reality, and an examination of the remnants of failed political struggle.

  Volodine’s title also seems at least partly a response to the notion of l’avenir radieux, a dream of a glorious and radiant future that allows one to maintain faith in communist or Marxist ideology and see one’s immediate sacrifices as enabling one’s fellows to continue to march arm in arm toward a better place.

  The characters in Volodine’s novels seem to have acknowledged the impossibility of this radiant future, something which turns their adherence to ideology into a sort of paradoxical ritual behavior, with affinities on the one hand to mysticism and Tibetan Buddhism and on the other to Beckett’s “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” These are people who continue the struggle despite knowing that the struggle has failed. They persist not only in the face of the political futility, but in the face of death. Indeed, in many of Volodine’s works the characters may be dead, existing in the space of the bardo, caught between nothingness and reincarnation. Or they may be experiencing a kind of oneiric state. Or maybe what they think is happening is not real after all. Or maybe some combination of all the above. They themselves are not certain. In the balance that Volodine strikes between these possibilities—the suspension of the states of his characters and his worlds, the sudden feeling that you (and they) might not have understood their “true” state after all—the most wonderfully startling moments of his work can be found. Various of Volodine’s (and his heteronyms’s) works touch on this in different ways: someone we thought to be human suddenly appears to be a rampaging giant insect, animals speak with a human voice, a train journey goes on for days and we still haven’t left the city. Are we really on a train at all? we might ask ourselves. Did that woman suddenly sprout feathers? Is she a woman or in fact a bird? Is that narrator exorcising a family of ghosts or is it in fact he who is the ghost?

  Volodine’s worlds are vertiginous and strange, sometimes absurd, sometimes funny, often disturbing. But nothing is arbitrary in them—and this for me is what makes Volodine’s work so much more resonant than that of many absurd or surreal writers. Even if the situation is absurd, you get the sense that Volodine is playing for keeps, that the philosophical and political investigations he is engaged in are real and that he cares deeply about the people who populate his fiction. Zuckerman’s very fine translation captures not only this aspect of Volodine’s work, but also that of Volodine’s musicality.

  The more Volodine you read, the more you appreciate the intricacy of what he is doing. One of the key features of Volodine’s work comes in the echoes that operate both within individual books and between books. The more you read, the more you come to understand, and even reconsider, what you have already read. Each book tr
ansforms slightly the books read before it.

  There is no other writer I know of so able to conjoin non-realist fiction with such honest revelation of the political unconscious of our time. There is no other writer who destabilizes narrative in a way that seems so absolute and so firmly connected to his project. And, in addition, there is no other writer whose project seems at once so consistent from book to book and yet so unique from book to book. Indeed, Volodine’s work gives the impression of being a living, breathing thing, a constantly developing and changing creature. His is a major, necessary work, and Radiant Terminus is a wonderful and powerful entry into it, a perfect place to start.

  CONTENTS

  part one

  KOLKHOZ

  part two

  ODE TO THE CAMPS

  part three

  AMOK

  part four

  TAIGA

  part one

  KOLKHOZ

  1

  • The wind came toward the plants again and it caressed them with nonchalant strength, it bent them harmoniously and it lay upon them with a purr; then it ran through several more times, and, when it was done with them, their scents sprang back up: savory sage, white sage, absinthe.

  The sky was covered with a thin varnish of clouds. Just beyond, the invisible sun shone. It was impossible to look up without being dazzled.

  At Kronauer’s feet, the dying woman groaned.

  —Elli, she sighed.

  Her mouth half-opened as if she was about to talk, but she did not say anything.

  —Don’t worry, Vassia, he said.

  Her name was Vassilissa Marachvili.

  She was thirty years old.

  Two months earlier, she was walking deftly down the streets, skipping, in the capital on the Orbise, and it wasn’t uncommon for someone to turn as she passed, because her appearance as a joyful, egalitarian fighter made hearts warm again. The situation was bad. Men needed to see faces like hers, to come close to bodies filled with freshness and life. They smiled, and then they went to the outskirts to be killed on the front lines.

  • Two months earlier—an eternity. The downfall of the Orbise had happened as predicted, immediately followed by exodus and a completely empty future. The city centers flowed with the blood of reprisals. The barbarians had reclaimed power, just like everywhere else on the planet. Vassilissa Marachvili had wandered with a group of partisans for several days, and then the resistance had dispersed, and then died out. So, with two comrades in disaster—Kronauer and Ilyushenko—she managed to get around the barriers erected by the victors and enter the empty territories. A pathetic fence had forbidden her entrance. She crossed it without the slightest tremor. She would never go back to the other side. There would be no return, and the three of them knew it. They were fully aware that they were trailing the Orbise’s decline, that they were sinking with it into the final nightmare. The path would be difficult, that too they knew. They wouldn’t meet anyone, and they’d have to depend on their own strength, on what would remain of their own strength before the first burns. The empty areas harbored no fugitives or enemies, the radiation levels were terrifying, they hadn’t diminished for decades, and they promised every interloper radiation death and promised nothing else. After having crawled under the second fence’s barbed wire, they began to make their way southeast. Forests without animals, steppes, deserted villages, abandoned roads, railroad tracks invaded by plants—nothing they passed unnerved them. The universe vibrated imperceptibly and it was calm. Even the nuclear power plants, which had rendered the subcontinent uninhabitable through their bouts of insanity, even these damaged reactors—sometimes darkened, always silent—seemed harmless, and often, out of defiance, it was those places they chose to bivouac.

  They had walked twenty-nine days in all. Very quickly they felt the consequences of radiation exposure. Sickness, weakening, disgust at existence, not to mention vomiting and diarrhea. Then their degradation sped up and the last two weeks were terrible. They kept progressing, but, when they lay down on the ground for the night, they wondered if they weren’t already dead. They wondered that without irony. They didn’t have any facts for an answer.

  Vassilissa Marachvili fell into something that barely resembled life. Exhaustion had carved her features; the radioactive dust had attacked her body. She had more and more trouble talking. She couldn’t keep going.

  • Kronauer leaned over her and walked his hand over her forehead. He didn’t know how to soothe her. He pressed at the sweat that was seeping from the ends of her eyebrows, and then he set to disentangling the black strands of hair stuck to her feverish skin. A few hairs stayed between his fingers. It had started falling out.

  Then he got up and looked around the countryside again.

  The panorama had something immortal about it. The immensity of the sky overpowered the immensity of the meadow. They were on a small hill and they could see far. Iron tracks cut the image in two. The land had once been covered with wheat, but over the course of time it had returned to the wilderness of prehistoric grains and mutant plants. Four hundred meters from the spot where Kronauer was hiding, at the bottom of the slope, the rails went along the ruins of a former sovkhoz. On the place that, fifty years ago, had been the heart of a communal village, agricultural facilities had endured the assaults of time. Dormitories, pigsties, or warehouses had collapsed upon themselves. Only the nuclear power plant and a massive doorway were still upright. Above the pharaonic pillars, a symbol and a name could be made out: “Red Star.” The same name was inscribed on the small power plant, half worn away but still legible. Around the buildings intended for habitation, roads and paths etched geometric residue. A flood of ryegrass and shrubs had ended up dissolving the original tar layer.

  • A bit earlier on, a train had appeared on the edge of the horizon. It was so unexpected that they had first thought they were experiencing a collective delirium on their deathbeds, only to realize that they weren’t dreaming. They cautiously hid themselves in the plants, Vassilissa Marachvili stretched out on a bed of crackling stalks. The convoy slid slowly into the meadow, going from the north directly to its mysterious destination, but instead of continuing its route it rolled to a stop just before the starred door, right by a building that would, in the heyday of the sovkhoz’s splendor, have housed a poultry farm.

  The train braked, like a boat docking, without any metallic screeching, and for a protracted minute, the diesel motor wheezed softly. Apparently a freight train or a transport for troops or prisoners. A locomotive, four windowless cars, all dilapidated and dirty. Minutes went by: three, then five, then a few more. Nobody appeared. The engineer was nowhere to be seen.

  Above the steppe the sky glittered. A uniformly and magnificently gray vault. Clouds, warm air, and plants all bore witness to the fact that the humans had no place here, and yet they made people want to fill their lungs and sing hymns to nature, to its inexhaustible force, and to its beauty. From time to time, flocks of crows flew over the dark strip that marked the beginning of the taiga. They went northwest and disappeared somewhere above this universe of black trees where men seemed even more unwelcome than in the steppe.

  • The forest, Kronauer thought. All right for a short trip, so long as we stick to the edges. But once we go deep within, there’s no longer any northeast or southwest. Directions don’t exist anymore, we’ll have to make do with a world of wolves, of bears, and mushrooms, and we won’t make our way out again, even when we walk in a straight line for hundreds of kilometers. He was already imagining the first rows of trees, and he quickly saw the gloomy thicknesses, the dead pines, fallen to their natural death thirty or forty years earlier, blackened with moss but resistant to rot. His parents had escaped camps and gotten lost there, in the taiga, and they had disappeared there. He couldn’t think of the forest without recalling the tragic image of this man and this woman whom he had never known. Ever since he had been old enough to think of them, he had imagined them as a pair of nomads, forever neither ali
ve nor dead—just lost. Don’t make the same mistake they did, he thought. The taiga can’t be a refuge, an alternative to death or the camps. It’s vastnesses where man has no place. There’s only shadow and bad encounters. Unless we’re animals, we can’t live in there.

  He took a few seconds before abandoning the idea. Then he came back to the steppe that was rippling once more under a gust of wind. He saw the stopped train again, and, above the world, the cloudy and infinite sky.

  The diesel motor wasn’t groaning anymore.

  He squinted.

  The dying woman moaned again.

  • With his too-hot and too-long felt coat, ill-suited to the weather, his too-big boots, and his head shorn of hair that wouldn’t grow again, Kronauer looks like many of us—I mean that at first glance he looks like a corpse or a soldier from the civil war, running away without having won a single victory, an exhausted and suspicious-looking and strung-out man.

  He sits on the balls of his feet in order to stay unnoticed. The plants come up to his shoulders, but as he squats down they close over his head. He has spent his childhood in orphanages, in urban zones, far away from meadows and, theoretically, he ought not to know the names of the plants surrounding him right then. But a woman had given him some knowledge of botany, a woman expert in plant nomenclature, and, out of nostalgia for this dead lover, he gazes thoughtfully at the steppe grasses, focusing on whether they have ears, oval leaves, lyrate leaves, whether they grow in bulbs or rhizomes. After examining them, he labels them. Downwind and nearby great ogronts, clumps of kvoina, zabakulians, septentrines, Jeanne-of-the-Communists, foxbarrens, and aldousses are whispering.