One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(66)
But Audetat’s grandest statement was simply the fact of the work itself: the fact that he was somehow able to do this work, and had chosen these works, and that now, on the bestseller lists and bedside tables alike, one could find Don Quixote by Cervantes and The Search for Lost Time by Proust and Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, one stacked on top of the next, all excellent, all relevant, all because of Audetat.
“Just as Tolstoy had a perfect ear for the language of his day, Audetat has a perfect ear for the language of his.”14
“Anna Karenina has once again become the modern story it had always been meant to be.”15
“Admit it: you started Audetat’s Anna Karenina as a hate-read. You wanted a front-row seat to this overdue literary monster-truck pile-up. Who is this Romance-language proficient American—some friendless kid who opted to take both Spanish and French in eighth grade, fine, good for him—to try to delve into eighteenth-century Russian? Admit it: you were excited for Anna Karenina to be his Interiors, his 1941, his Funny People or (depending on your point of view) This Is 40—basically, the one that finally gives you permission to stop waking up in a panic-sweat of misery in the middle of the night to cross-check his Wikipedia bio against your own life and obsess over exactly what they had accomplished by the age you are now. Well, sorry. This motherf***** is as perfect as ever. Come for the hate, but stay for the love. Just don’t read the last few chapters on the F train, or you might be tempted to jump off it.”16
“The question that must necessarily paralyse the world of writers and readers alike, in the wake of the incomparable artistic and commercial success of J. C. Audetat’s Anna Karenina, is simply: what next? If the past is prologue, we know that one of the greatest books in the history of the world is about to be released and rightfully dominate the planet’s conversation. How can any reader—let alone writer—think of any other question in the meantime?”17
What other languages did he know? What other interests did he have? What other great books were most worthy, or most ready, or most easily mistaken as such?
The speculation over the next book J. C. Audetat would introduce to his age itself became a guessing game with obsessive echoes in the literary world and beyond. Book clubs turned into betting pools. Graphic designers drew up new covers for old classics, just as daydreams. Professors and high-profile fans around the world campaigned exuberantly for their favorite works. A rumored Audetat translation of The Metamorphoses briefly crashed servers at the University of California at Berkeley before it was debunked as a hoax. Philip Roth composed an open letter to the New York Times, humbly requesting that Audetat consider translating Milan Kundera; Michel Houellebecq, apparently knowing no other tone, published a blistering and inexplicably misogynistic open letter to Le Monde, rudely daring Audetat to translate one of his own books, a gambit for attention that went widely ignored. A consortium of undergraduates and professors at Yale University started an online petition for “J. C. Audetat to Translate an Emerging Voice of Color and/or Gender” that received more than 140,000 distinct units of social media approval online.
The most attention and interest came from a full-page advertisement that ran across many publications and was signed by a notably wide-ranging group that included Bill Clinton, the Aga Khan, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Noam Chomsky, Salman Rushdie, Mos Def, Richard Dawkins, former pope Joseph Ratzinger, and over three hundred prominent others who might at first glance seem to have contradictory or at least divergent agendas. “Dear J. C. Audetat,” it began—as though there could be a pretext of anything either traditional or intimate about this group sending this message in this way—and then proceeded to lay out the case for Audetat that “a true translation of the Koran for the present day could carry a power even beyond the grandness and beauty of the text itself; it might inspire all sides of a fractured world to understand itself better. Consider using the light of your brilliance to brighten the pages of the book that is more discussed while being less understood than any other. We do not intend to place any pressure on the delicate and mysterious force of your talent, but merely to inform you of a way by which the fate of the world may well be moved by the hand that holds your pen.”
J. C. Audetat was a different person now. His light had been replaced by a glow. He was forty-four years old and lived far from the center of this activity, in a house near a lake with the loveliest person he had met on his adventures and their two-year-old son. He had chosen both Tennessee and Aurelia in large part for the sounds of their names, and his lifelong trust in the poetic had not led him astray; his life was soaked in brunette tones and accidental music, and he was, for the most part, a happy person.
He took walks most mornings and most evenings on a ragged path that led from his house to the lake and around it and back, letting his mind drift in similarly ragged circles. He walked the path alone, except for a few welcome occasions when he was joined by the one neighbor he knew, a kind and curious man obsessed with the prospect of moon travel whom Audetat came to like and one afternoon helped to compose an unsolicited editorial on the subject for a local newspaper.
Once in a while, Audetat came across something that made him want to write—a flash of ambition, or a filament of beauty that momentarily longed for replication. If he still felt that way when he returned to the house, he would write a note to himself describing in the sparest of terms what the thought had been.