“WHY SUCH A FRENZY?” This question is asked by “the Blotno,” a celebrity journalist and police collaborator who stalks the margins of Antoine Volodine’s newly translated novel Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven. In a proceeding that combines elements of a celebrity interview and an interrogation, Blotno questions a series of prisoners about their literary output, a body of writing they call “post-exoticism.” These prisoners are defeated revolutionaries who have since turned to writing, intransigent combatants in a lost struggle “against the capitalist world and its countless ignominies.” The reporter wants to know why the prisoners have undertaken such a frenzy of invention: new forms, new genres, new literary terms. A similar question might occur to Post-Exoticism’s readers; why this baroque complexity? Even the book’s title displays a tendency toward neologism and paradox, a tendency borne out in the succeeding pages of fractured narrative. So the question isn’t a bad one, despite its being asked by one of the novel’s proxy villains.
You can see why the journalist/collaborator/interrogator in Post-Exoticism starts there. The literary movement called “post-exoticism,” practiced in this novel by a group of imprisoned revolutionaries in a devastated world, fairly bursts with invention: there are dozens of authorial heteronyms that collocate different nationalities and languages (“Roman Nachtigall”; “Türkan Marachvilli”; “Erdogan Mayayo”); fake paratexts such as fictional frontispieces, fictional back matter, and the 11 “lessons” that theorize the movement (and the book one holds in one’s hands); and, above all, myriad newly invented post-exotic literary terms, such as “murmuract” and “narrative apnea” and “reticular progression.” Volodine’s entire body of work evinces this same prolific inventiveness: some 42 books, often in such post-exotic genres as “narracts” and “Shåggas” and “interjoists,” have so far been published under the names Antoine Volodine, Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger, and Elli Kronauer.