Free Trio by Robert Pinget Page B

makes my arteries throb.
    And that is why I am now convinced that in a work of art we do not try to conjure up beauty or truth. We only have recourse to them—as to a subterfuge—in order to be able to go on breathing.
    September 6
    A person of medium height, by my side, stepped onto the automatic weighing machine. We’re always interested in other people’s weight. With apparent nonchalance, I watched the needle. It went all the way around the dial, once, twice, three times   …What does that mean? One ton, two tons, three tons! I was at a loss. The person wasn’t upset. And then I heard, coming from her ribcage: “Hallo, hold the line. I’m connecting you with Warsaw. Who’s speaking? Shares, 320-4, debentures   …, etc.”
    This woman was a telephone exchange.
    September 8
    Blizzards, while they do not occur every day, are nevertheless so frequent that they have had an influence on their habits and customs. And in particular on their diet—with the reservation that they only cook hailstones for very precise purposes.
    If a little girl, or a boy, shows signs of irascibility or violence, they cultivate this tendency and elevate it to the dignity of a national virtue—by giving them a surfeit of explosives. Of these, hail is one which has the advantage of operating by delayed action.
    The moment the blizzard has abated, cooks, nursemaids, and mothers are to be seen everywhere, rushing out of doors and filling tubs with hailstones.
    They make them into puddings (by adding baking powder and other ingredients) which the child devours. There must be an idiosyncratic phenomenon here, a need inherent in these choleric temperaments, for I never heard tell of any child who made the slightest fuss about taking this tonic. Where are the dramas associated with cod liver oil!
    They persevere with this treatment for three or four years. The child grows “in age and in anger.” He becomes insufferable, but he must be treated with the greatest circumspection. At puberty, he becomes subject to trances: to demolish a street door, a party wall, a drainage system— this is mere child’s play to him.
    His virulence then decreases until his thirtieth year. But the diastase operates in depth. So it’s far from rare for the storm to flare and the blizzard to blow up his gizzard.

THAT VOICE
P REFACE TO THE A MERICAN E DITION
    The structure of this novel is precise, although not immediately apparent. The different themes are intermingled. One cuts into another point-blank, then the other resumes and cuts into the first, and so on until the end. The first example of this procedure, at the beginning of the book, is the theme of the cemetery, cut into by that of the gossip at the grocery, then resumed shortly afterwards.
    Apart from this peculiarity, as from the middle of the book the themes are taken up again in the inverse order of their appearance. The last themes of the first part, that is, become the first of the second part and are thus retold in reverse. A procedure resembling anamnesis.
    Further, to give the impression of the interdependence of the different inspirations and the multiplicity of the sources of the voice heard by the ear, the French text was written with no other punctuation than a period at the end of each paragraph.
    In order to make the book easier for the Anglo-Saxon public to read, I put the commas back. To my surprise, the text has lost nothing of its impact. On the contrary. But just a moment! This is very largely due to the art of Barbara Wright, whose profound knowledge of French enables her to render its slightest inflections into English. She recreates in her own language, which is of remarkable flexibility, richness and subtlety, the exact tone of this novel.
    I thank her with all my heart for the work she has done with such care and enthusiasm, and I should like to take this opportunity to pay her the tribute she also deserves for her translations of three of my other novels. I also thank Joanna