The Anomaly...lies in that exciting Venn diagram where high entertainment meets serious literature. Its plot might have been borrowed from The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, but it movingly explores urgent questions about reality, fate and free will ... It’s a measure of Le Tellier’s masterful storytelling that he makes us wait all the way to Page 151 to find out what bizarre thing has befallen the plane in question ... it’s a second measure of Le Tellier’s skill that he seduces us into caring so much, even about characters who flit in and out of sight. He has a way of plunging us headlong into each story and then dragging us out, still blinking and obsessed, before immersing us in the next ... But his writing, well served by Adriana Hunter’s graceful translation from the French, is nimble and versatile. And it’s impossible not to feel tenderness toward the bewildered characters, with their valiant efforts to make sense of the unfathomable and to rewrite their stories according to the new reality.
It’s in the vertiginous conceptual abyss that opens up...that this already pacey and highly entertaining novel goes into narrative hyperdrive ... With increasing inevitability, police officers and spooks begin turning up to interrupt each scene. The reader must question everything that’s gone before, as this rollercoaster of a novel is also a gripping puzzle ... Le Tellier himself describes The Anomaly as a 'thought experiment', but if so it’s one that he pulls off with a rare lightness and aplomb. He and translator Hunter also tantalise with traces of hidden word games, with echoes of past literary greats ... With its thrillingly self-conscious genre fluidity, there are shades of Umberto Eco in this uniquely dazzling and thought-provoking, high-octane blockbuster.
Although Americans are frustratingly xenophobic when they make reading choices, The Anomaly, translated by Adriana Hunter, could be the rare exception. It’s French, but not trop francais. The book’s intellectuality is neatly camouflaged by its impish humor. Indeed, with its elegant mix of science fiction and metaphysical mystery, Le Tellier’s thriller is comfortably settled in the middle seat between Lost and Manifest ... Le Tellier writes with a heavy dose of his very French condescension ... But these broad bits of social and political satire — along with some silly drama involving emergency mathematicians — are the weakest elements of The Anomaly. (A scene showing a Trumpy American president struggling to understand string theory feels like shooting supernovas in a bucket) ... The novel soars, though, when it focuses instead on individual passengers from the Air France flight(s). In these chapters — each carefully dated to help us keep everyone straight — we see people struggling to comprehend this most incomprehensible moment of personal inflation ... In these clever stories and a handful of others, Le Tellier dares us to wonder if we could stand meeting the figure in the mirror. It’s what makes The Anomaly a flight of imagination you’ll be rolling over in your mind long after deplaning.
Each chapter of the book’s first section introduces a different cast member, mainly French or American, in a different novelistic or televisual style (deftly handled in Adriana Hunter’s clever translation) ... Other tableaux are by turns amusing and affecting ... It has been a bravura 100 pages of introductions and emotional or comedic complications before the conceptual inciting event happens ... After a suitably ludic ending, we are left with an after-echo, a feat of fiction informed by other fictions. Le Tellier describes a world flattened by the unbearable lightness of representation ... it seems fitting that the novel’s screen adaptation rights have already been sold.
Through the numerous passengers, Le Tellier explores the question of duplication from a personal, social, and philosophical perspective. By virtue of relying on so many characters, each one is largely inchoate and archetypal—profiles meant to explore the bigger questions at The Anomaly’s heart through different lenses ... Le Tellier writes with a self-conscious eye toward adaptation, as the book is intentionally evocative of blockbusters and polished streaming originals ... Despite alluding to the obvious religious and philosophical implications of the phenomenon, the book largely fails to explore them in the broadest sense. Any answers it offers come in the more personal, internal deliberations of its characters as they wrestle with what the duplications mean for them ... In the one-on-one character confrontations, Le Tellier does force the reader to reflect on some truly unnerving questions ... Perhaps it’s a testament to our times or Le Tellier’s instincts that the characters’ subdued reactions to meeting their twins don’t seem so unrealistic. It’s an anti-solipsism that feels relieving for a time of increased isolation and image-curation.
... fascinating ... The novel is full of zigs and zags, and while fans of television programs like France’s Les Revenants or the U.S.’s Manifest may anticipate certain narrative twists, Le Tellier’s playful writing, as well as his takes on existence, second chances, and personal identity, push his ambitious narrative into realms rarely encountered in popular culture ... The Anomaly is a difficult novel to discuss without accidentally revealing swerves designed to simultaneously hook the reader and make her question everything she previously read. Le Tellier achieves plenty of these swerves with his fractured timeline and commitment to blending genres. While overall literary in voice, the author toys with sci-fi tropes, whodunits, and motifs typically found in paperback thrillers. There is also a kitchen sink quality to the novel’s form, as straightforward narration and dialogue are occasionally usurped by chapters shaped as epistolary documents ... the result is something akin to literary slipstream fiction, a work of reality that, as time passes, exposes itself as equally fantastic ... meticulously arranged and presented, and on the page, the novel rises above the flash of its mysterious premise to deliver a series of intertwining tales of triumph and failure, joy and sorrow. It is a book built for initial awe and lingering meditation, and The Anomaly succeeds on both levels.
... pleasingly Gallic, with chapters weaving together comedy, melancholy, tragedy and a strand of noir ... No doubt you'll find yourself wondering how you would react if you were a passenger on Flight 006. Would you find your situation intolerable? Would you try to live with this new reality to the best of your ability? It is to Le Tellier's credit that these questions linger long after you turn the last page.
... a disappointment. This is a novel of two genres and, put together, they curdle ... the book often reads like a low-budget Hollywood script ... The book’s questionable metaphysics might be forgivable if it didn’t revert to blockbuster devices ... Le Tellier is excellent at examining the minutiae of human relationships. But he should have left the big explosions to the experts.
The Anomaly takes the narrative form of a script for a post-modern sci-fi made-for-television series. There are also elements of literary thriller and social satire. Unifying all these strands is Le Tellier’s admirable skill at keeping readers in suspense: for a long time it is not clear what this story is 'about,' yet he continues to draw us into an increasingly complex plot, which is laid out in a succession of clues and strange coincidences ... Le Tellier offers plenty of clever insights into the worlds of flawed people whose lives have now become matters of scientific curiosity ... The most absorbing aspects of The Anomaly are not generated by its complicated plot, but the world Le Tellier immerses us in. Each chapter is filled with exacting detail ... an entertaining philosophical critique, suggesting that nothing is as it seems, knowledge is imperfect, and the human predicament will perhaps always be more inexplicable than we can admit to ourselves.
The prolific Le Tellier returns with a novel both epic and small in scope...introducing a dizzying number of characters ... For many pages, it’s unclear why these people are connected, beyond the fact that they once got on a plane together. A shocking turn of events sends the novel in a different direction, leaving readers to contemplate what actually happened on that flight. While the high-concept twist might intrigue some genre readers, this book is better suited to those who are interested in literary fiction and works in translation. At times both sardonic and serious, it’s a lot to take in, but makes for a rewarding journey overall.
... [a] methodically crafted story ... Le Tellier withholds the details for long enough that revealing the mystery here would spoil the entrancing quality of the book. Hunter’s brilliant translation from the French—her fifth collaboration with Le Tellier—transforms Le Tellier’s distinct French voice into a distinct English one. More importantly, Hunter captures the playful exhilaration with which Le Tellier marries his audacious plot to a deep concern for existentialist philosophy ... Humorous, captivating, thoughtful—existentialism has never been so thrilling.
... an extraordinary mix of existential thriller and speculative fiction ... Questions of philosophy, mathematics, and astrophysics bend this novel far from the typical mold, and Le Tellier’s characters must confront the deepest questions of existence. This thought-provoking literary work deserves a wide readership.
