Fatale - Jean-Patrick Manchette [43]
Nor is it a common occurrence that an emblematic place-name, invented for the purposes of a novel, should, in reality, have another literary association. Yet this too is a characteristic of Fatale, whose action unfolds in a place called Bléville. Rather as with Dashiell Hammett, the reason for this choice is clear: Bléville means town of wheat, of dough, a town where—like everywhere else, but even more so—money rules. And this imaginary port town is where Aimée Joubert comes to practice her art. But it was also in Bléville, in the actual commune on the outskirts of Le Havre, that Raymond Queneau was baptized and later, in May 1914, that he took his first communion. Is there not something poignant about this odd geographical connection between two writers to whom some of us owe perhaps not everything, but almost everything?
“Whichever way you go,” writes Manchette, “there is a big hill to climb before you get out of Bléville.” In Fatale, as elsewhere in Manchette’s books, we are liable to find such sentences freighted with strange metaphorical ambiguities. There is another one here too, which leaves us wondering whether it refers ironically to the bloody cleansing undertaken by Aimée or to the moral orderliness required for harmony to reign in Bléville. I refer to a simple injunction, a leitmotif written on weighing machines, public telephones, and municipal wastebaskets: KEEP YOUR TOWN CLEAN!
—JEAN ECHENOZ
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
The translator wishes to thank Robert Chasse, Doug Headline, Mia Rublowska, and Alyson W. Waters for their precious assistance.
Copyright © 1977, 1996 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris
Translation copyright © 2011 by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Afterword copyright © by Jean Echenoz
All rights reserved.
Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis.
This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the United States.
Cover photograph: Neil Krug, Bonnie-6, from Pulp Art Book
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Manchette, Jean-Patrick, 1942–1995.
[Fatale. English]
Fatale / by Jean-Patrick Manchette ; introduction by Jean Echenoz ; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 978-1-59017-381-7 (alk. paper)
I. Nicholson-Smith, Donald. II. Title.
PQ2673.A452F313 2011
843'.914—dc22
2010034848
eISBN 978-1-59017-572-9
v1.0
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