Antoine Volodine
Antoine Volodine, one of the most important figures in France’s contemporary literary landscape, writes under at least four heteronyms, including Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger. He taught Russian in French secondary schools for many years before his debut novel, Comparative Biography of Jorian Murgrave, appeared in France in 1985. Most of his prolific output, including The Monroe Girls, take place in a post-apocalyptic world where members of the “post-exoticism” writing movement have been arrested for their subversive literary efforts.
The colors that come to mind when reading Antoine Volodine, both here in The Monroe Girls and in his excellent 2017 novel Radiant Terminus, approach those of Francis Bacon: I see phthalo greens, cadmium red spikes, and the possibly-carcinogenic purples derived from coal tar. As in the work of Bacon, Volodine's fundamental materials seem to carry some kind of psychic weight. Can one describe hell in a non-pejorative sense, as a blurring between the living and the dead, as a matter-of-fact erasure of stability itself with the background hum of electricity and an ever-present urge to howl? If so, this seems to be the territory Volodine is mapping, which I recommend following closely.