Between experiment and distemper falls the shadow, and there we are in Eric Chevillard’s mordant dusk, expected to laugh too. In The Crab Nebula (1993), a man called Crab is likely going insane and decides to go with it, and as he goes, Beckettian questioning (“How to proceed, and where to begin, to begin what?”) veers into humor by turns sophomoric and revelatory (“Killing yourself is like beating down an unlocked door”). Sight gags rule On the Ceiling (1997), about an unassuming revolutionary who wears a chair on his head, softening the blow of the already oblique social commentary. But the persistent funnies of Palafox, written in 1990 and recently translated into English, are something else. Just skirting wit and the visual, bald and useless, they’re too integral to be easily disposed of and too disconcerting to avoid. Most arise from confusion over the classification of a rare beast, Palafox, who inexplicably hatches from an egg at the breakfast table of former British ambassador Algernon Buffoon.
In a send-up of competing narratives (“It’s all a question of point of view”) and objectivity so pure it won’t discriminate, the experts kick off the confusion. Professors Zieger/Ziegler (ornithologist), Cambrelin (ichthyologist), Pierpont (entomologist), and Baruglio (herpetologist), provisionally suggest that Palafox is a bird, a starfish, an insect, and a snake respectively. (How else to explain his beak, crest, antennae, fins, wings, tail, and stinger?) There are some laughs in the subsequent glut of contradictory description, but by page eighty or so, after he’s been a croc and not a croc (a crock?), in size “close to a fat wasp or a little cheetah,” and weighing “nine tons” and “two hundred tons,” etc., it’s like watching a guy with Tourette’s work through the last hour of dinner with his fiancée’s parents—excruciating or perversely funny, depending on your human quotient. Meanwhile there’s a war going on, which is noted at times for plot’s sake—when the Buffoons are forced to take sanctuary farther from the fire, or when the neglectful yet painfully fastidious narrator (whose habit it is to “remind” us of things never tendered in the first place) comes out with something like, “We are at war, lest we forget.” (He’s also prone to elaborate on the literary conventions he employs and proffer jarring analogies like “With certain game, it is awkward to use the same strategy, as with killing...
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