Street battles are recurring and important motifs in contemporary literature. That Alain Damasio’s novel The fugitives, who staged the subject of the uprising with narrative force and literary virtuosity like hardly anyone before, now comes from France of all places, but is in no way surprising. While movements critical of capitalism are hardly talked about in this country, in Paris and other French cities black blocs and yellow vests have regularly streamed through the city centers in recent years. The government even got the water cannons, which had been mothballed since 1968, out of the depots for counterinsurgency. It sometimes looked as if the booklet published in France in 2007 was there The coming uprising of the Invisible Committee, which had also caused a sensation internationally, has become a bit of a reality. The French protests were already literary by Jerome Leroy in his novel The blacked out (2018) edited. Celebrated in France, Alain Damasio’s almost 840-page novel has not really been discovered here. Fantastic literature sometimes ekes out a niche existence in Germany, especially when it is formally demanding. Because Damasio does not produce one-dimensional sci-fi prose.
Damasio provides the detailed late capitalist horror scenario of a digitized consumer and control society in the year 2040. The entire public space is commercialized, the residents are only allowed to use it in a strictly regulated manner, depending on their status. The fugitives but also stages the motif of the human-animal hybrid, which is currently so important in science fiction, for a mass audience in the Netflix series Sweet Tooth as also for a niche audience, most recently in Dietmar Dath’s novel Gentzen or: clean up while drunk showed up. At the center of Damasio’s sprawling work is an intimate and dramatic family story. Lorca and Sahar Varese, who live in the city of Orange, have lost their four-year-old daughter Tishka, who suddenly disappeared one morning. Was she kidnapped? Have the eponymous Fugitives took her or did the four-year-old join them? Because, according to an urban legend, there are beings that exist outside of common human perception, the size of weasels or dogs.
Cryptic signs on the nursery wall suggest something like this, which is why Lorca Varese joins an army unit that specializes in hunting these creatures in the hope of finding his daughter again. Lorca is actually a declared enemy of the state and capital and makes a living as a consultant and mediator for self-organized municipalities, of which there are quite a few in this future world, despite or perhaps because of the radical commercialization of public space. His wife Sahar is a teacher and gives seminars on the history of movements critical of rule such as the Traverse, which originally consisted of architects and has now organized large-scale occupations to fight for SOZs (Self-Organized Zones). There is also “the firmament”, a movement of traceurs who work acrobatically through the cities, occupy the roofs of houses and whose activists move at lofty heights over the public space that has been radically restricted by commercialization. And in the Rhone Delta there are self-organized municipalities that live on small occupied islands. Many of these free spaces are repeatedly threatened, attacked, cleared, but then simply occupied again by private militiamen or the state police with drones, narcotic gas and nerve-paralyzing shock bullets.
The translation: tricky
In the midst of this never-ending political struggle, Lorca tries to find his daughter, first against the resistance of his wife, then finally with her support. His work as a state hunter of the fugitives, the associated research for knowledge about the mysterious beings who live undetected among the people, and the private search for Tishka soon mix. Lorca meets Balinese esotericists in a remote community who allegedly communicate with the refugees using certain rituals. He makes contact with a scientific cell that tries to read the mysterious signs of the fugitives in public space. And he meets the legendary philosopher Tang, who is even friends with a fugitive. Slowly Lorca and Sahar uncover the secrets and finally even find their now strongly transformed daughter, whom they are not allowed to look at under any circumstances. Because as soon as the fugitives are seen, they solidify to stone or ceramify, as it is called, and die. Are these beings, who evade the society so obsessed with control, possibly longer than humans and are they important components of evolutionary developments and leaps? Because the fugitives are able to assimilate everything, whether organic or inorganic, and constantly change their form.
Alain Damasio also translates this process of constant change, adaptation and transformation into language. The fugitives is told from many different perspectives, which alternate as if in a fast editing technique. Each narrator’s voice is given its own visual identity in the text through its own characters. As soon as Lorca’s colleague Saskia, an expert on sound waves and tones, says something, the entire text is provided with so-called cedilla, i.e. hooks under the letters, as they are in French or Portuguese.
It gets even trickier with the fugitives, also known colloquially as curses, who combine different words, spoil them and develop their own language and a corresponding typeface. But people who are in contact with them also start to speak differently and twist letters for a moment, because they are spellbound by them and their connection to reality changes for a short time. Some of what daughter Tishka utters reads like the prose of an Arno Schmidt novel.
The translator Milena Adam reports in her own, extremely readable online journal, which the publisher has linked on its website, how complicated it was to translate this exceptional text into German. Alain Damasio, who was born in Lyon in 1969 and is the first to publish a title in German and whose books are not only selling well in France, but also have cult status, uses very different language registers in this book. There is a lot of cursing here, and some characters repeatedly speak colloquial Spanish, but also regularly discuss intellectual left theory in order to offer fast-paced action again when squatters bring down the police helicopter with ropes on a high-rise roof and then use an improvised cable car to crash it flee the next building.
Alain Damasio backt in The fugitives no small rolls. His voluminous novel impressively explores those rebellious spaces of possibility that the already mentioned manifesto The coming uprising than brought theses to the public so effectively. The fugitives has so far received little attention from literary criticism in this country. This novel, which is not always easy to read, could become the literary canon of an entire generation of protest, like Nanni Balestrini’s books for the struggles of the 1970s. The much-invoked uprising has hit the narrative with great force, at least in the narrative literature.
The fugitives Alain Damasio Milena Adam (translator), Matthes and Seitz 2021, 838 p., 28 €
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