Bad Eminence
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Meet Vanessa Salomon, a privileged and misanthropic French-American translator hailing from a wealthy Parisian family. Her twin sister is a famous movie star, which Vanessa resents deeply and daily. The only man Vanessa ever loved recently killed himself by jumping off the roof of her building. It's a full life.
Vanessa has just started working on an English translation of a titillating, experimental thriller by a dead author when she's offered a more prominent gig: translating the latest book by an Extremely Famous French Writer who is not in any way based on Michel Houellebecq. As soon as she agrees to meet this writer, however, her other, more obscure project begins to fight back – leading Vanessa down into a literary hell of traps and con games and sadism and doppelgangers and mystic visions and strange assignations and, finally, the secret of life itself.
Peppered with 'sponsored content' providing cocktail recipes utilizing a brand of liquor imported by the film director Steven Soderbergh, and with a cameo from the actress Juno Temple, Bad Eminence is at once a sexy, old-school literary satire in the mode of Vladimir Nabokov, as well as a jolly thumb in the eyes of contemporary screen-life and digital celebrity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Musician and screenwriter Greer (Everything Flows) delivers a zany and messy story of a literary translator hired by an infamous French author referred to as "Not Houellebecq." Vanessa Salomon, 29, lives in a New York City apartment once inhabited by photographer Francesca Woodman, and carves out a life in contrast to her movie star twin sister, Angelique. Vanessa obsesses over Woodman's 1981 suicide at age 22. She also assumes responsibility for the recent suicide of her lover Thomas, a poet who, like Woodman, jumped to his death. She travels to France to meet Not Houellebecq, whose work she despises, and learns he has yet to finish the book she is meant to translate. The situation presents a convenient opportunity for Vanessa to test her theory that the best translations are written before the original text, but before she gets very far, the "rapey" Not Houellebecq drugs her, and she wakes up back in her apartment in New York without knowing what happened. The prose is often overwrought and dilletantish, with Vanessa expounding on literature and sharing her pessimistic views, and the esoteric journal entries from Thomas add nothing. Still, an absurdist action-packed third act involving a rescue operation of Angelique in the Alps turns out to be fun, kind of like watching that old Bruce Willis caper Hudson Hawk. The author's fans might dig it.
