PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIts pulsating pyrotechnic narrative, though hard to keep up with at times, delivers an array of amusing twists and turns ... The various levels of narrative fuse together, and, in turn, reality dissolves entirely ... But the novel’s execution makes up for much of its seemingly false promises. For readers intimately familiar with French literature, Matthieussent’s style falls markedly closer to that of Perec on a spectrum that stretches to Proustian floridity. The French author, who’s translated many English-language novels, such as Less Than Zero, into French, boasts a meticulous but pragmatic approach, and Ramadan remains faithful to his clarity. The translation gets most amusing in Ramadan’s renditions of the endless puns that cap the ends of Trad’s footnotes ... Even more amusing is how Ramadan takes on the voice of our masculine narrator and willfully reproduces the text’s rampant chauvinism ... For Ramadan, those problems involve deep-seated assumptions about sex and gender as well as the distinction between writing and performance. In her appropriation of the voice of our rapacious male narrator, she transforms the text’s dramaturge into its principal actor—and in her own image, no less. Refusing to settle for reverence, Ramadan opts for unabashed provocation, uprooting the text from its cultural stasis and holding it up to the piercing scrutiny of today’s most inflammatory concerns. It’s a work that amounts to a critical reinvention that aspires not to a spot among the translated literary canon, but to the unraveling of the very standards by which that canon is praised.
