I was once privileged enough to meet one of Europe’s greatest novelists – Kirios Quebec – in the men’s room of an expensive Parisian hotel. As he began to relieve himself in the next door urinal, I chanced to ask him a question, knowing that he could not escape with speed. Considering the length of his novels, his prolific journalistic output and his famously ‘loose’ style, I was hoping to discover whether he had ever had any trouble writing, or whether it had always come naturally to him. ‘Ah!’ he sighed, ‘Writing does not come naturally to anyone… If only writing was like peeing!’ I was content to echo this sentiment, but argued that surely he found it easier than most other writers. ‘Maybe’ he conceded, adding ‘I’m certainly no Xa Xov’. I did not know what he meant by this, and asked ‘who or what is Xa Xov?’. Quebec turned to me for the first time, furiously pulling up his flies as he spoke. ‘You are a critic and you have not heard of Xa Xov?’ I shook my head. Quebec’s frown filled the room. ‘You are good for nothing’ he said and marched off without even washing his hands. I was so humiliated that I managed to walk as far as the fourth floor foyer before realising that I had neglected to reconfigure my trousers.
The humiliation I suffered was well deserved. How could I call myself a literary critic without even registering the name of a writer indispensable to its central medium? My ignorance was foul: my career, I presumed, at an end. Only one thing could save me. Trusting that my negligence was restricted to this single literary figure, the possibility of resurrecting my worth as a critic could yet become a reality, so long as I could acquaint myself with this Xa Xov as hastily as possible. This day would not come until I fully understood what Quebec was suggesting when he claimed he was ‘no Xa Xov’.
To my relief, I have since succeeded in fulfilling my literary duty and, having done so, cannot help but implore all of those who read these words to do the same (if they have not already done so). Though I abhor the principle of cultural snobbery, I heartily support the type of strategic humiliation that makes it impossible for those of a certain class to leave the house without having read certain books. The adroit proposal that those people who have not read anything by Xa Xov should be ostracized from society does not displease in me in the least.
Fortunately, the task that befalls the Xov-ignorant reader is not an especially difficult one. Only one novel by Xov has been published in English and it is by no means an epic. In fact, it is the type of book that can be easily read in a single afternoon, unencumbered as it is by any sort of stylistic awkwardness or exceptionally convoluted verbiage. Xov is an honest writer; he does not conceal references, nor trade in excessively philosophical insights. He is old fashioned in that he tells a story, rarely pausing to reflect on the ‘meaning’ of the actions he describes and when doing so, managing it in a manner that does not require the reader to be familiar with the principles of Nietzschen theory. To a certain extent, Xov’s first novel ‘Xenophobic Xavier’ appears to present few talking points. A frequently amusing and quaintly quirky bildungsroman, charting the struggles of a boy growing up in Nice in the 1960s. Such a summary does as little justice to the novel as any such synopsis, but at first glance it may seem to suffice. And yet if you turn to the title page of the English translation of Xenophobic Xavier you begin to sense that there is another way of looking at this book. For those who do not have a copy of the book to hand, I shall enlighten you as the page’s contents:
‘Translated by Edgar Rolf from the French, translated by Georges Madison from the Dutch, translated by Marie Lermoncé from the Hobokian’
At first sight, this information appears to be relatively uninteresting; a simple inventory of translators designed to satisfy the curiosity of a select few. It appears merely to tell us that, if we so desired, we could read the same novel in three other languages, though few of us probably choose to do so (most readers prefer not to consider the fact that books exist in different languages, for fear of destroying the illusionary concept that an author is in absolute control of his/her words, which he/she never is). Nevertheless, there is evidently more to the above information than meets the eye. To begin with, there is the word ‘Hobokian’. This is not a language that most people in the word are familiar with, and certainly not a language we expect a relatively obscure book to be translated into. But was Xenophobic Xavier ever translated into Hobokian? The answer, of course, is no. It has been translated into three languages: Dutch, French and English. It was originally written in Hobokian. What’s more, the three translations of which I talk were not all translations from the original. Only one of them was. Of the other two, one is a translation from the first translation, the second a translation from the translation from the original translation of the original novel. Thus the English translation is removed from the original novel by three translations, none of which were made by Xa Xov. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Xov is a Frenchmen. Why then was not Xenophobic Xavier originally written in French? The answer to this question leads us inexorably closer to the crux of the Xov phenomenon.
Thus begins the rather incredible – at times unbelievable – story surrounding the birth of Xenophobic Xavier, a project that Xa Xov began as far back as 1972, but did complete until the year 2000. Already we are able to get a sense of why Kirios Quebec may have claimed that he was ‘no Xa Xov’, though we must understand that the explanation as to why it took almost thirty years to write a novel of barely two hundred pages is hardly as simple as saying that Xov is a slow writer. Indeed Xa Xov has frequently claimed that Xenophobic Xavier was completed in French as early as 1973, albeit inside his head. Unfortunately he not only struggled to transfer the words from head to paper, but found it equally impossible to dictate, as he was at this time living in fear of all humans, having suffered a particularly severe nervous breakdown earlier that year. His failure to put the words onto paper was undoubtedly connected to his generally fragile psychological condition, a condition not unrelated to autism. A brief history of his childhood may reveal the source of this malady.
Xa Xov was born in Marseilles in 1952. He was the only child of Rudolph and Kim Xov; his faintly peculiar forename a reference to Great Xa, the Mexican God of Wood, who he said to have resembled as a baby. He seems to have been a quiet child, with a natural distrust for almost everything and everyone. Even if he had made more concerted efforts to socialise, there is some doubt whether he would have succeeded, for certain of his quirks and aversions disabled any chances of his achieving any level of normality in the context of his environment. I am referring especially to the fact that he was allergic to the sea, a condition that would be tough for any child, but must have been particularly challenging for someone whose family home was only four hundred yards away from the Mediterranean (the fact that his parents chose not to move house says a lot for their regard for little Xa). There was also his general lack of enthusiasm for anything that did not begin with the letter ‘X’, which resulted in him becoming one of the only five-year olds I have heard of to have developed an addiction to dry sherry (xérés in French) and swordfish (xiphias). He was also the first person to have passed xylophone diploma grade at the age of seven and is to this day credited with having amassed the world’s largest collection of dead carpenter bees (xylocope).
Remarkable and unique though these achievements may have been, his ‘X’ obsession inevitably led to the appearance of sizeable gaps in his education. His local school were unwilling to compromise (they consistently refused to recognise Xylophone and Wood Studies as a subject) and he began to garner both appalling marks and a poor reputation amongst his fellow pupils, who are said to have called him ‘Monsieur X-crément’. It was not unknown for him to turn up to lessons drunk on sherry. The school implored his parents to remove him, or at least make some attempt to improve his condition through medical means, but they chose to ignore all advice. Either they were blinded by love in believing that he was a perfectly normal child or, more likely, they simply couldn’t give a damn. It has been frequently said that they used to spend more money on their goldfish than their son. This fact is verified in part by a passage in Xenophobic Xavier in which Xavier’s father is described as lovingly reading Keatsian odes to his pet frog, feeding the creature with luxurious delicacies, all the while ignoring the plaintive cries of his son, who chews upon a rotten swordfish in the other room.
Xa Xov has never tried to deny that he has had mental problems since birth, yet he has always maintained that his situation might at least have been better dealt with by his family, his school and society in general. As the narrator writes in the final chapter of Xenophobic Xavier:
‘Xavier finds that he has always been described as being full of hate. However, he feels that if someone gave him even half a chance of loving them, maybe even a quarter of a chance, perhaps even an eighth, then he would almost certainly have gone for it. The fact is, he has never been given that chance’
As we can see, Xavier’s xenophobia does not relate to a hatred of foreigners as we would usually term foreigners. To Xavier, everyone is a foreigner, even his own parents. He does relate to anyone or anything, except perhaps his xylophone and his carpenter bees. His life is strange and desolate; seemingly too surreal to be true.
As you have probably gauged, Xenophobic Xavier is pretty thinly veiled biography, albeit seen through the eyes of a third person narrator. Otherwise, fiction perverts fact by the simple reorganization of words. Xa Xov becomes Xavier Xoix, Marseilles becomes Nice, a pet goldfish becomes a pet frog, and so on. We can presume that the emotional trajectory of Xavier’s life, however, remains intact. Love remains the word for love, hate the word for hate. Also unchanged are Xavier’s obsessions: xylophones, sherry, carpenter bees and the study of wood. The central theme of the novel remains, I am sure, the central theme of Xa Xov’s childhood. It is thus a deeply personal work, a piece of writing driven by the desire to sort through the wreckage of life itself; an attempt to understand what makes us what we are and how things might have been done differently. As is often the case, this piece of writing is cathartic in origin; less a novel and more a large cask of healing medicine designed to relieve its creator of psychological aches and pains. Despite this, it also offers a lot to its readers, as Xavier’s pain, no less painful for being recreated in words, is at least beautifully expressed. The style is also very natural, all the more curious considering its colossally complex conception.
The fact that Xenophobic Xavier exists at all is a miracle. In 1973, as I have already mentioned, the book was trapped inside its authors head, with no chance of escape. Xov could not transfer a word of his life story onto paper without suffering from some sort of nervous attack and had no desire to dictate the tale. Whenever he tried to set down words he believed that they would turn against him and immediately felt obliged to screw up the paper on which he was writing. He was a walking paradox: a writer with a pathological fear of words. The only words that he ever felt safe around were those that rarely found their way into sentences in the first place: words that began with the letter ‘X’. Otherwise, he felt intimidated by words. By the end of 1973 the situation had got so bad that he began to believe he would never be able to write anything. He resorted instead to reading, something he was still able to do without inciting a heart attack, though he never read more than three pages of text in a day. Then he got a break. One day in January 1975 he was reading through a newspaper and came across a piece of writing about a French author called Georges Perec, which mentioned a novel, published five years previously, from which Perec had wholly excluded the letter ‘e’. He did not know why Perec had chosen to do such a thing, but it got him thinking nonetheless. Perhaps he too could banish letters from his writing. But which letters? He mistrusted them all equally, except ‘X’, and you couldn’t write a novel using only one letter. And yet he had recently discovered that, so long as a word began with the letter ‘X’, he didn’t so much mind what other letters took part. But how many French words did begin with the letter ‘X’? Very few, as he well knew. Not enough to tell his story, not by any measure. After continuous ruminations, however, he struck upon another idea. If French would not allow him to indulge in the letter ‘X’ then he would have to find a language that would. This was to be no easy task.
At long last he settled on the aforementioned Hobokian, a language that he had not previously known existed, though the place of its origin was not a world away. Hobokian was a language invented as late as the nineteenth century in a small village outside Antwerp, whose citizens were so sick of alternating between Dutch and French that they decided to make up a new language entirely. As it happened, the people that had invented this new language were exceedingly excited by the letter ‘X’, exploiting it as a prefix for approximately forty six percent of their text. Within this percentage Xa Xov found enough words to be able to retell his story. Before he was able to do so, yet, he had to spend at five years in the aforementioned village, where he was laboriously taught the language by reluctant locals. Having achieved this feat, he then had to write the book itself, which took a further eight years, for in the time spent learning the language he had forgotten much of what he planned to write. By 1986, he had finally completed the work. But things were not about to get any easier. To ensure its readership might extend beyond a small Belgian village, Xov now needed the book to be translated back into French. For this assignment he required the help of a villager, but there were no volunteers. The majority of the locals had already lost patience with Xov, distracted either by his vehement misanthropy or by his habit of playing the xylophone late into the night, not to mention the fact that none of them wished to have such a close association with the French language from which they had long extricated themselves. For a year or so, things looked horribly bleak, until Xov finally convinced an elderly woman to do the job for him, though she agreed only on the condition that she would translate the novel into Dutch, a language for which she secretly harboured passion. Though it was to take the woman a lengthy seven years to complete the job, Xov had no other options. The Dutch translation was completed in 1994, at which point Xov considered the possibility of having it published, deciding against it at the last minute, as he faced the fact that he didn’t know a word of the language. Instead he sought out someone to translate the work from Dutch to French, a relatively easy mission made difficult by the fact that Xov was finally running out of funds, though god knows how he had survived thus far, since it is generally doubted that he ever held any type of job.
The French translation of Xenophobic Xavier was finally published in the year 2000, translated from the Dutch. It was politely dismissed by the national newspapers and riotously received by the literary magazines. The English translation followed shortly after, unexplainably derived from the French rather than from the Dutch version, clearly the closer relation to the original Hobokian. Exactly how the story has suffered from these multiple translations is hard to tell. Some argue that it bares no resemblance to the original whatsoever, whereas I am inclined to disagree, though I speak not a word of Hobokian, let alone Dutch. It seems to me, though, that the spirit of Xa Xov still breathes through every word of the English, even when those words do not begin with the letter ‘X’. Nevertheless, if there does exist somewhere in the world someone who can write both Hobokian and English, another translation would not be unwelcome.
To conclude. Xa Xov and his great novel Xenophobic Xavier stand as a lesson to all writers. No one finds writing easy, just as no one finds life easy. But Xov provides us with consolation: few people can ever claim to have struggled as much as he has. His highly unique brand of literary constipation undoubtedly out shadows all others. It is with baited breath that I await his next work, due to be with us sometime in the next thirty years.
Extract from ‘Xenophobic Xavier’ (in the original Hobokian):
‘Xchiet xh xitey xbachd xioh xoo. Xanji xva xh ‘xdah xdah xdoh’. Xig xaewhy xasagharad? Xoahe xorth xh xhatatatat, xgatr xh xoogh xva xdashilopefay: xgate xpaapd Xtha Xelep. Xavier xterh xghs xbipp. Xadshe Xavier xiek xh xoiythens xuthe, xiywme xoo xhsthenss – xgate xoykkk xkoeyjeje – xha xqthehe xoepa xj, xhaoeuuu. Xoak xaoojjo xva, xwit xh xtovo, xaquu xh xrtuy xfethhe xipso xithqie xomonthz.’
Review by Sebastian Cheraz
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