Pigeon Post

Some of the best novels, sad as it sounds, are about the impossibility of writing a novel. They all seem to be European, too, as if such self-reflexivity comes over in English as unbearable pretension, or just bare-faced cheek. Dumitru Tsepeneag's Pigeon Post, first published in French in 1989 and now released in a new English translation by Jane Kuntz, certainly has plenty of cheek, and quite a bit of pretension too: but it carries both off with an aplomb that makes it well worth reading.

What makes Pigeon Post stand out is that its first-person monologue of writerly inertia goes to so many places, ranging wide territories of time and memory to interrogate the real and imaginary pasts of its cast of characters; meanwhile, its short and disjointed paragraphs flit over such an extensive frame of cultural reference and linguistic playfulness that the reader follows along behind, exhilerated and panting to keep up. For all the tricksiness, though, it's by no means dry or aloof: what comes through, in the end, is a profound and melancholy meditation on memory and forgetting: as if all that laughter, the mucky jokes, the lyricism and the madcap digressions was held together all along (you realise as you finish reading) by an undertow of sadness and exile.