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language: Arabic (French tr. Nathalie Bontemps)
country: Lebanon
year: 2007-2016
form: short fiction
genre(s): speculative, mundane
dates read: 9.5.24-14.5.24
Zaki Beydoun’s Organes invisibles (translated by Nathalie Bontemps, including the complete text of one of Beydoun’s collections and selections from two others) was just kind of boring.
the blurb claims that “Le caractère fantastique de l’œuvre de Zaki Beydoun n’est pas sans rappeler l’univers de Kafka ou de Borges”, and I must say. that is simply not true. firstly, I have rarely been bored while reading Borges or Kafka; secondly, both Kafka and Borges wrote, for the most part, unequivocally speculative stories, whereas many of the stories here aren’t even liminal fantasies but are just about someone experiencing some subjective break with consensus reality (“Paranoïa”, for example, about a person convinced his coworkers are reading his mind, signals this in its title).
beyond this — and I will say, to be fair, that there were a few of these essentially-mundane stories that I did like well enough, like “Mister K.” (although its conclusion was rather predictable) — most of the stories felt incomplete, like sketches of ideas that weren’t fully realized.
emblematic of this is “L’Éveil”, about a man who has become literally incapable of perceiving his girlfriend — he can, he discovers, observe her indirectly by seeing her effects on other people and objects, but she simply doesn’t register for any of his senses. this premise is excellent, but as soon as the narrator comes to the realization that his girlfriend’s therapist wasn’t exaggerating what she’d told him, instead of pursuing its premise the story becomes the narrator’s rather diffuse musings on his inability to remember or distinguish faces and sense of distance between him and the world. I could forgive the nombrilisme if it were at least interesting, but it’s not — it doesn’t even really succeed in giving me access to his feeling of alienation. it’s just boring!
this pattern is repeated throughout the collection, exacerbated by the fact that most of the stories are no more than four pages, so they already have minimal time to develop their premises and seemed to be focused on their punchline-like last sentences, most of which just fell flat for me. the only story I’d say I unequivocally enjoyed is “Le Départ du ciel”, where the sky simply disappears one day — it’s very short but it had the only punchline sentence that actually worked for me, and I think it would pair interestingly with some of Clare Winger Harris’s short fiction. I also liked “L’Empereur et la porte en chêne” — up until the punchline, which was bad.
moods: reflective (read: boring)