The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Crab Nebula by Eric Chevillard
Ellen G. Friedman

Eric Chevillard. The Crab Nebula. Trans. Jordan Stump and Eleanor Hardin. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1997. 126 pp. $35.00; Paper: $12.00.

The celestial Crab nebula, in the constellation Taurus, is the debris of a supernova observed in 1054 and the source of strong radio waves. These astral facts serve as metaphor for Eric Chevillard’s The Crab Nebula, about a man named Crab: the volume is full of verbal debris contained between its covers, but beyond that, having little coherence. Its language signals are strong, mainly composed of exuberant and authoritative-seeming declarative sentences, making absolute statements that are subsequently contradicted and reversed. As we are told, “Crab is ungraspable, not evasive or deceptive but blurry, as if his congenital myopia had little by little clouded his contours.”
The Crab Nebula has fifty-two small chapters and if readers were so inclined, they could invent some thematic consistency within each one that would justify the isolation of those sentences into a chapter. Chapter 4, for instance, seems to be concerned with Crab’s body parts: a wax tongue, mercury eyelids, gold teeth, nails made of frost, scales, feathers, a saltpeter belly, feet of different lengths a scrotum under his chin. But, then, most of the chapters have something in them about Crab’s body parts.
Philosophically French, the book is existential and postmodern, since its outlook on life is both bleak and filled with non sequiturs: “Crab believes that he deserves a full day of rest tomorrow. . . . It will have to wait. It’s simply been too long since Crab was last tormented by his rheumatism. And there are other experiences he has yet to go through, experiences that count for something in the destiny of a man, and of which he has so far inexplicably been deprived. There are plans for a house fire. . . .” Yet The Crab Nebula is, despite its melancholy, light and humorous, a crazy dream full of terrors dressed like a sad, accepting clown who knows his part is to amuse. [Ellen G. Friedman]