Next month, NYRB will publish the first ever English-language translation of Jacques Abeille’s sci-fi cult classic The Statuary Gardens. I read the first forty pages of Alex Andriesse’s translation this afternoon. (I skipped Brian Evenson’s introduction, but look forward to reading it when I finish the novel.) The Statuary Gardens is very-much, so far anyway, a branch of Kafka’s strange tree; it also reminds me a lot of Anna Kavan’s stuff and Dino Buzzati’s 1940 novel Il deserto dei Tartari (which I read as The Stronghold in Lawrence Venuti’s translation). There’s also a strong whiff of Calvino. Anyway, I’m pretty hyped about this one. For now, here’s NYRB’s blurb:
In an unnamed country where the men cultivate statues and the women are nowhere to be seen, a traveler, staying at a lonely inn, is taken on a tour of the walled estates and introduced to the gardeners’ elaborate cultural practices and traditions. But all is not well in the statuary country. Rumor has it that a renegade has rallied the violent nomadic hordes on the northern steppes to his cause. But what is this cause? And will this world of men, which has sealed women away behind walls within walls, survive the injustice eating at its roots? The traveler is on the road to find out.
A cult classic in France—and the inaugural book in Jacques Abeille’s semilegendary ten-volume Countries Cycle—The Statuary Gardens appears here in English for the first time. It is a science-fiction novel that builds, in beautiful language, a meticulous, almost primeval world, bearing comparison with the work of Franz Kafka, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Hayao Miyazaki.
