The Anomaly

by Hervé Le Tellier

He’s watched so many films—no one realizes how much hit men owe to Hollywood scriptwriters.

At forty-three, having spent fifteen years writing, he views the small literary community as a farcical train where crooks without tickets ostentatiously take first-class seats with the complicity of incompetent conductors, while modest geniuses are left on the platform—and the latter are an endangered species to which Miesel does not claim to belong.

The truth, with love, is that the heart knows straightaway, and shouts it from the rooftops. Of course, you’re not going to come straight out and tell the person you love them. They wouldn’t understand. So, to disguise the fact that you’re already hostage to them, you make conversation.

Victor Miesel, overcome by a piercing anxiety that he cannot identify, steps over the balcony, and falls from it. Or throws himself from it.

It is April 22, 2021, at twelve noon.

But love means not being able to stop your heart trampling all over your intelligence.

“Hope keeps us waiting in the corridor to happiness. If we secure what we hope for, we enter the anteroom of unhappiness.”

I would have liked the two of us to walk the longest possible path, together, and even the longest of possible paths.”

ALL SMOOTH FLIGHTS are alike.

Blazing sunlight suddenly streams into the cockpit, the Boeing accelerates dramatically and silence returns; the disruption is instantly behind them. Markle checks the controls in astonishment. The plane’s flying perfectly well, with a steady thrumming sound, but all the instruments are malfunctioning.

Markle’s jaw drops open. Never in his entire career has an air traffic controller asked for a pilot’s name.

The lowest trash always have the option of taking refuge in patriotism.

In a managerial world where any literary erudition is incongruous, he has made it a powerful instrument of symbolic domination.

imprecaution,

What is this word...

And as I sink today, my eyes open onto an abyss where no theorem holds sway.”