The Investigation
Philippe Claudel
[MacLehose Press]
Who holds the reins in a translated work, author or translator? Philippe Claudel’s beguiling novel The Investigation triggers this question. When a novel is successful, we credit the author. Where it lets down, we assume that it’s the translator’s fault; maybe the overlong similes are less leaden in French? When, over the course of two chapters, a character changes gender, we immediately think that translator Daniel Hahn has let his pronouns slip. But when this gender reassignment is revealed to be a purposeful plot point, it becomes a coup for the author. The translator can’t catch a break; his role is as put-upon and ill-defined as something out of Kafka – or The Investigation for that matter.
Claudel’s Investigator must investigate several suicides at The Firm, but things aren’t made easy. The Firm is like a dilapidated Kafka’s Castle – a huge corporation badly managed, where characters with trades for titles moonlight for added income, The Guide turning into The Cleaner. The Investigator’s every trial – like crossing the street, or ordering breakfast – is rendered in comic, painstaking detail. Before writing, Claudel worked in a prison, witnessing the hemmed frustration and containment captured in The Investigation every day. There’s something of the sadistic prison warden in the pleasure Claudel takes – and enjoyment the reader feels – at tormenting The Investigator in every way conceivable.
Words: Eoin Tierney
