Lutz Bassmann, We Monks and Soldiers, Trans. by Jordan Stump, University of Nebraska Press, 2012.
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From one of the most original French writers of our day comes a mysterious, prismatic, and at times profoundly sad reflection on humanity in its darker moments—one of which may very well be our own. In a collection of fictions that blur distinctions between dreaming and waking reality, Lutz Bassmann sets off a series of echoes—the “entrevoutes” that conduct us from one world to another in a journey as viscerally powerful as it is intellectually heady.
While humanity seems to be fading around them, the members of a shadowy organization are doing their inadequate best to assist those experiencing their last moments. From a soldier-monk exorcising what seem to be spirits (but are they?) from an abandoned house, to a spy executing a mission whose meaning eludes him, to characters exploring cells, wandering through ruins, confronting political dissent and persecution, encountering—perhaps—the spirits once exorcised, these stories conduct us through a world at once ambiguous and sharply observed. This remarkable work, in Jordan Stump’s superb translation, offers readers a thrilling entry into Bassmann’s numinous world.
“Between a fragile lyricism and an almost silent poetic expression of an absolute, inevitable devastation.”—Hugo Pradelle
“A continually changing, continually new poetic force.”—Christophe Kantcheff
Written in a tersely descriptive prose appropriate for its grim context, this interconnected series of stories by Bassmann (a pseudonym for the French writer Antoine Volodine), is set in an indeterminate future when the human race is dying out, and the Organization—run by remnants of the Communist Party—is sending out trained monks and soldiers to assist anyone about to cross the threshold between life and death. Despite this intriguing premise, a leaden monotony quickly sets in and rarely abates, though Bassmann manages to conjure both disarmingly tender and decidedly odd moments along the way. In “An Exorcism Beside the Sea,” a monk/soldier sent to exorcise the demons from a house finds his resolve is no match for his memories when he finally encounters what is hiding inside. A soldier, in “Crisis at the Tong Fong Hotel,” discovers that the little girl he tries to save from a burning building may actually be “a strange spider.” The post-human future is well-trod territory in speculative fiction, and the element of surprise is needed to keep it fresh. Unfortunately, there’s not enough of that to save Bassmann’s latest (after Minor Angels, as Volodine) from its own portentous and derivative devices. - Publishers Weekly
Translated from the original French text, this collection of short stories presents a dark peek at humanity’s possible future. The seven tales are roughly connected by the general threads of being set at a time when humanity is dying out and the remnants that remain are controlled by the all-encompassing Organization. Agents are sent out on spy missions and assignments yet have no clear direction who they should be keeping under surveillance or what their assignments are. Insurrections are dealt with using a heavy hand while staging performances that have little to do with the truth. One solder-monk sets out to exorcise a home but with highly questionable results as it becomes apparent that things are not quite how they appear.
The boundaries between reality and dreaming become blurred and continually shift throughout this collection leaving readers wondering right along with the characters, which perspective is true and whether it matters. Bassmann’s view of the future is decidedly grim as a couple of the stories are set during mankind’s last remaining generations yet all is not lost as it opens the way for a new species to rise up. Vividly imagined, thought provoking and spare, this is an unusual collection is worth searching out. - Sandy Amazeen
Lutz Bassmann is not Lutz Bassmann. That is to say, Bassmann is not a flesh and blood author who needs sleep and food and who makes semi-regular bowel movements. Lutz Bassmann isn’t real. He’s an imaginary author invented by the French writer Antoine Volodine, who is, we can only assume, a real-life being who actually does eat snacks, go to the bathroom, and write books. To understand the intention behind We Monks & Soldiers, we must also understand why Volodine would create a work of fiction written by a work of fiction. What does this extra layer of guise add to the book itself? It is a method that calls to mind some of the playfully Dadaist identities assumed by Bob Dylan, like “Jack Frost” or “Sergei Petrov,” co-writer of the movie Masked And Anonymous, in which Bob Dylan stars as “Jack Fate,” who, of course, is really Bob Dylan. Volodine, too, keeps a stable of fictitious writers, each with his or her own interests, flaws, and voices. But more than just an empty accumulation of artifice, the method seems to be a way to emphasize the freedom of uncertainty, and it’s a move that fits thematically with the collection.
Weighing in at under 200 pages, We Monks & Soldiers is a slim book. And it’s better that way. Composed of seven interconnected stories, the work combines nebulous atmospherics with taut, professional control. It begins with the story of an errant monk, dispatched to exorcise spirits from an abandoned beachside home. But when things begin to go wrong (or do they?), Bassmann simply moves on to the next story. In this short time, however, Bassmann establishes some very important themes that will carry through the rest of the book.
One of these themes is ambiguity. We’re not exactly sure what sort of world the monk is living in. It’s not the same world that we live in, but it does rhyme with it. There are roads and beachfront property, for instance, but there’s also a sad sense of monotonous detachment that marks Bassmann’s world as being entirely its own. As the monk says when introducing himself to the reader, “Let’s call me Schwahn. Names and nicknames make useful labels, but they don’t tell you much. There’s more or less nothing behind them.” Of course, this is a clever nod towards the Volodine/Bassmann authorship, but it is also a fundamental pronouncement on ambiguity. In fact, it’s an ambiguous statement about ambiguity.
Mood is also important to the collection. The mechanics of creating mood depend upon the author keeping a fully realized world, complete with a cohesive emotional timbre, in her mind. Everything that happens has to participate in this new reality, and when the author mentions characters or locations, their relationships to each other, however disjointed, must be communicated without being made explicit. In We Monks & Soldiers, this reality is one of loss, desolation, confusion, and despair. There is a sense that civilization has ended, and the best we can hope for is gloom.
Gloom may not seem like a common mood for us, here, but for Bassmann’s characters, it is the atmosphere of broken worlds, an ever present fact of reality. It is the mood of the spy who finds himself on the coast of a dingy, vaguely East Asian town for unknown purposes. It is the mood of political radicals using strange mantras to will new realities into existence. And it’s certainly the mood that reverberates as the monk at the beginning of the book undertakes his strange rituals.
Ambiguity and gloom blend in this collection of stories to work the reader into a wonderful confusion. But it’s a useful confusion, one that expresses something fundamentally true about the world. And to add a bit to it, Volodine isn’t a real name either. - Scott Beauchamp
Lutz Bassmann belongs to a community of imaginary authors invented, championed, and literarily realized by Antoine Volodine, a French writer of Slavic origins born in 1950. Volodine’s many celebrated, category-defying works include the award-winning Minor Angels (Nebraska, 2004), which blends science fiction, Tibetan myth, a ludic approach to writing, and a profound humanistic idealism. Jordan Stump is a professor of French at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of The Other Book (Nebraska, 2011), has translated numerous texts, including Minor Angels, and was awarded the French-American Foundation’s translation prize.