The Anomaly

by Hervé Le Tellier

Victor also translates entertaining English-language bestsellers that reduce literature to the status of a minor art for minors.

The mathematician studies this unsophisticated man, and reaffirms the soul-destroying notion that by accumulating our individual obscurities, we rarely achieve collective brilliance.

Neither of them is prepared to sacrifice herself on the altar of the child’s sacrosanct “emotional stability” that the child psychologists keep trumpeting, but what do they know? In a mother’s love, the darkest selfishness battles furiously with the most dazzling generosity.

“Nothing. Nothing will change. We’ll wake up in the morning, we’ll go to work because we still have to pay the rent, we’ll eat and drink and make love just like before. We’ll carry on behaving as if we’re real. We’re blind to anything that could prove that we’re fooling ourselves. It’s only human. We’re not rational.”

Take climate change. We never listen to the scientists. We spew out virtual carbon unchecked from fossil fuels that may or may not be virtual, heating up our atmosphere, that may or may not be virtual. And our species, which again may or may not be virtual, will be wiped out. Nothing’s changed. The rich fly in the face of common sense and reckon they can save themselves, and themselves alone, and everyone else is reduced to living in hope.”

“That evil was Elpis, the expectation of good—hope. It’s the most destructive of all evils. It is hope that stops us being proactive and hope that prolongs people’s suffering because, as they always say and in spite of all the evidence, ‘it will all come right in the end.’ What is not meant to be cannot be…The real question we should always ask is, ‘How does it benefit me to accept a received idea?’ ”