Omega Minor

L'excellent éditeur Dalkey Archive, dirigé par l'inventif John O'Brien, publie ces jours-ci l'impressionnant Omega Minor, le roman de Paul Verhaeghen, traduit par l'auteur himself en anglais (du hollandais). Publié par Harold Polis chez Meulenhoof/Manteau en 2004, il vient également d'être publié en langue allemande par Eichborn Verlag (traduit par Stefanie Schäfer). Comme dirait Pugnax: mais que foutent les éditeurs français? (Vous le saurez bientôt…) L'ami Fausto avait déjà évoqué brièvement ce livre sur son site. Rappelons que l'auteur, Paul Verhaeghen, s'était vu décerner le Flemish Culture Award for Fiction, mais avait refusé l'argent du prix pour signifier son désaccord avec la politique va-t'en-guerre des Américains.
Voici, en attendant mieux, une petite accroche…

Berlin, Spring of 1995. While a group of neo-Nazis are preparing an anniversary bash of disastrous proportions, an old physics professor returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoc designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and, in a room at Le Charité, a Holocaust survivor tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist. Who is that talking cat, why do ghosts of SS soldiers roam the city, and what is Speer’s favorite actress up to?
Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century—Berlin united and divided, Boston, Los Alamos, Auschwitz—Omega Minor is a novel of big ideas, a tale of survival of the soul cast in a whirlwind plot that is in turns smart, inquisitive, funny, violent, nutty, pornographic, moving, deeply compassionate, and profoundly moral. Or not.
Do scars ever heal? Can history be transcended? And will love, for once, save the world? Welcome to Omega Minor, where nothing is ever what it seems and nothing ever ends.

Et un extrait (in english…):

Im Anfang war die Tat – In the Beginning was the Act.
And to conclude the act – that serpentine pas-de-deux so skillfully performed against the satin backdrop of the blackest night – a lightning bolt hurls itself upward, a blinding curve of pristine white, the laws of gravity suspended for a quarter-second. A gushing garland spouts into the springtime air pregnant with moonlight, a string vibrating with unbound energy, and then a scream of triumph – and with a dull thud the alabaster blob flops on a silken belly, smoothly shaven, tan and taut. In the panting silence after the touchdown the room echoes with the silent howl of half a billion mouths that never were: 23-chromosome cells thrash their tiny tails in terror on the barren skin. The illicit hand elicits another power surge from his penis, fiercer still than the first, and a compassionate tongue descends, its trembling tip dipping into the basin of his navel. A sticky thread of pearls connects the woman to the Center of the man’s Being (his hara? Hare Krishna! Silver-blue G*d of futile Creation!), but only for an instant, for then she swallows – she drinks my seed, he thinks, she WANTS my seed, and the thought makes his heart swell, not with love but with misguided pride – and then her lips slide full over his lingam and the last fruit of her labor slides down her shiny throat. And while the man’s mouth is still screaming in triumph the gametic hordes yell out in Todesangst, for their worst nightmare has come true: In the woman’s churning stomach the cell membranes break open, the molecules dissolve, and the strands of the Code itself unwind, and naked lies the Blueprint, the secret of who Goldfarb is – the nucleic acids adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine swirl in irreparable chaos; their alchemy forever lost. Here lies a man, and he exults over the demise of a world population.