Book Review

Do Not Touch

By Eric Laurrent

Published by Dalkey Archive Press

Sometimes, even the most devoted reader of literature in translation is met with a work that makes them ask why – why was this translated? What, to ask a question popular in editorial meetings in publishing houses in London or New York, does this author bring to the table that is somehow different, better or more marketable than the home talent?

Do Not Touch wasn’t published in London or New York, but in a situation more germane to the publication of unusual world literature. A good thing, too, because Eric Laurrent is impressive, and risks falling between the cracks of saleable genres: he’s young, he’s arch, and he treats his reader to the kind of ten-dollar words that, while not strictly necessary, highlight the fact that this is no ordinary pulp fiction.

Boundary-crossing is always an issue for the translator, and Jeanine Herman has grappled very successfully with the purposely heady concurrence of Laurrent’s ostentatious language and the intensely sexual obsession of his protagonist. Sex and high language have their place together, of course, but here they do not so much work together as sit in surreal juxtaposition. This, Laurrent seems to say through a loop of Cuban smoke, is nouveau-noir for the thinking man, and Veronica Lux his muse.

The tale follows the fortunes of two men who seem inseparable. Though we barely see them together, Oscar Lux and Clovis Baccara are father and son, mentor and student, Virgil and Dante. Oscar Lux is more a force than a character in the novel, for barely wedded to the phenomenally voluptuous and carnal Veronica, he finds himself in police custody in Paris for embezzlement and money laundering of epic proportions – for these are the proportions of every aspect of the novel. He then remains noticeably off-stage for the rest of proceedings, while Clovis, his second in command, is instructed to take the new bride away on the honeymoon trip – to get her away from the ugly side of marrying into organised crime, it would seem. Clovis, it is immediately apparent, has grown into and exceeded his role; this is no buddy story.

From here, we cut to LA, into a more familiar milieu of ice clinking in whisky tumblers and a statuesque blonde in silhouette. Yet there is something darker, perhaps sexier, but definitely more exacting in the borderline pornographic descriptions of her seemingly endless charms, set off so seductively by her surroundings.

   ' … her figure stood out against the shadowy blue of evening, at the center of a large triangle formed by two sections of the curtain (curved and puckered like lips converging in deep, red, fleshy folds toward the wrinkled knot that gathered them at rod height), … her bent arm exposed the glabrous, albescent conch (glazed slightly by the moisture usually to be found in such a place) of one of her armpits.'

Seductively, that is, until we reach ‘armpits’, a word sure to quell any desire wrought by the very purple passage that it draws abruptly to a close. But herein, figuratively speaking, lies Laurrent’s talent for the new twist on the old genre; something is wrong, askew, her perfect beauty carries with it a cloud, a sting, a latent ugliness. What’s more, despite the predictable and trite manifestation of his obsession (attractive girl in tiny bikini), her power is negative, her biology all-encompassing, her very nature unnatural in its force: ‘Clovis Baccara was tormented by throbbing incursions of a subterranean concupiscence, which soon raged with a wild and inextinguishable erethism … pushed him toward a brutal, boundless curiosity each time Veronica Lux got out of the pool.’

There are elements of Chandler’s grotesque in the characters we meet only fleetingly, as poolside we see – with applause to Herman for keeping up with the gymnastics of alliteration at play:

'… two strapping and lascivious hustlers accompanying an elegant, older Englishman with a reddened mouth, powdered cheeks, and pomaded hair, who stood near the balustrade pulling on a cigarillo under his straw panama hat while caressing the ivory pommel of his cane and casting lingering glances at a pale and saturnine gigolo who himself was being chaperoned by a plumed, pearled, and prolix Italian dowager petting the three doddering and demented poodles ensconced on her lacy, pastel lap …'

Standard-issue noir does not, of course, indulge in such a vibrant circus palette, but this is a reality heightened by the deeply sensual nature of its characters. So deftly does Laurrent overwhelm with his tactile, multicoloured, hyper-sexed world that he succeeds early on in deflecting from the original questions suggested by the plot. Not being one for a spoiler, I shall leave it at that, but know that this book gives much more than the sum of its parts.

The press release quotes a fairly hip French cultural website, which describes Laurrent’s work as ‘conceived to delight and exasperate’. I wonder at this, and suspect that the author delights most at his own lexical pyrotechnics, but the exasperation on offer is of the most exquisite, lip-biting variety that his smugness can hardly be held against him – it’s warranted. Do Not Touch sees literary and pulp fictions come together with creativity and confidence.

Reviewed by Nora Mahony (from an uncorrected proof copy of Do Not Touch)

Nora runs Parkbench Publishing Services, which specialises in literary translation for publishers, agents and the arts.

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Translator: Jeanine Herman