The Review of Contemporary Fiction
An Evening at the Club, by Christian Gailly, translated by Susan Fairfieldreviewed by Clarissa Behar
Christian Gailly. An Evening at the Club. Trans. Susan Fairfield. Other Press, 2003. 133pp. $22.00.
An enigmatic painter-narrator tells the story of his friend, a middle-aged former jazz musician and alcoholic who, one night, starts drinking and playing again after ten years of abstinence from both. The plot is reather clichéd, but it is interesting to see how Gailly, taking up the age-old reflection on the sister arts, tries to creat a verbal version of jazz. Gailly uses three methods to build the unique rhythm that, I believe, holds his book together. First, his prose is terse (short verbless sentences, interjections, etc.) and anaphoric, unfolding in elaborate parallels, generating subtle contrasts and, hence, rhythm: “His glasses weren’t on his nose. Normal. He always takes them off to go to bed. His watch wasn’t on his wrist. Not normal. He never takes it off to go to bed. What did I do with it?” The shift from the third to the first person points to the second direction in which Gailly works, juxtaposing direct, indirect, and free indirect speech. In this manner he creates another type of interval, smooth here, more strongly perceptible there, as in the following example: “She was telling me how once she got back home: Once I got back home, she said.” The third aspect of rhythm in A Night at the Club is the contrastive use of tenses, as in the liminary break between the narrator’s present-tense introduction to his fiction and its second beginning, in the past. Although Gailly’s play with tenses is not always translatable (the English preterite corresponds to two different past tenses in French, which Gailly systematically contrasts), on the whole, the vivd presence and purely rhythmic susppense characteristic of Gailly’s prose are well conveyed in the English translation.