The Monroe Girls

For readers of Thomas Pynchon, a conspiratorial adventure through a bleak future where the dead (and their political factions) never really die, from one of France’s most visionary writers

Breton has seen brighter days. Now his body sags as he pulls a pair of binoculars to his withered face. He peers from the grimy window of a near-empty psychiatric compound—one of the last buildings standing after an unspecified disaster—spying rue Dellwo below, dreary in perpetual rain. Into this world of devastation drop the Monroe girls—paramilitaries trained in the “dark place” by Monroe, a dissident executed long ago. Their mission to revamp the Party is futile in this bleak, decaying world. Breton, our schizophrenic narrator, is tasked (and tortured) by what remains of the Party to locate and identify the Monroe girls using special optical equipment and his powers of extrasensory perception. Breton’s journey through a bardo-like, hostile labyrinth invites us into a sensual swirl of bodily decay, political acquiescence, and civilizational collapse. In this derelict setting, Volodine ruminates on identity, surveillance, life after death, and love (which, alas, does not conquer all). An urgent and blistering tale, beautifully rendered with Volodine’s distinct pathos and humor."An elusive, centrifugal story of a grim near future that might stop George Orwell in his tracks . . . lively and beguiling." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Fascinating and sardonic . . . Volodine maintains control of the vivid images and wild flights of fancy, which range from spiders and sea urchins sprouting from human flesh to talk of cosmonauts and telepathy, thanks to his grounded and ironic prose. It’s a delight." —Publishers Weekly

"Navigating this farcical book of the dead, readers may glimpse elements of the dreary dystopia of George Orwell, the black-comic absurdity of Samuel Beckett, and the occult surrealism of Leonora Carrington, but this astonishing novel is a creature unto itself, a fever dream of haunted bureaucracies and the shamanistic psyops of strange political parties. Hilarious, bleak, incantatory, The Monroe Girls is a revelation." —Julia Elliott

"For over twenty-five years now, post-exotic literature has been making its mark on our pre-apocalyptic world. Its most illustrious representative, the only one whose face is known to us, is possibly Antoine Volodine . . . It is a laugh of despair and resistance that runs through this book, a chilling, terrible laugh, but one that is also innocence itself: he bears witness to mankind and never falters, even in the face of the worst indignities . . . In this sense, post-exotic literature is also, perhaps above all and fundamentally, an enormous, masterful joke." —Eric Chevillard, Le Monde

"The Monroe Girls is by turns grimly comic and brightly horrifying, one of the finest entries yet into Antoine Volodine's strange, moonlit, shapeshifting body of work. Like the Hirsch glasses that inaugurate its plot, it allows its readers to 'take a look at a street that doesn't exist on any map' and through that vision acknowledges the activities of existence that literature often disavows. In a publishing landscape with too few surprises, thank god for Antoine Volodine, and thank god for Alyson Waters, too." —Kevin Brockmeier

"Antoine Volodine is the most exciting and unique French contemporary writer. His work mixes an unapologetic shamanistic fabulism with a socialist political ethos. The result is an eccentric post-apocalyptic world in which a weirded-out struggle for the Party leaks between the world of the living and that of the dead, with unpredictable but satisfying results. The Monroe Girls is a perfect entry into his vertiginous work." —Brian Evenson

"Built up text by text, year after year, Volodine’s world—instantly recognizable but never quite the same twice—is always a dark delight to revisit. In Alyson Waters’ noirishly poetic translation, the singularly beautiful, achingly sad The Monroe Girls mesmerizes from first page to last." —Jordan StumpOne of the most important figures in France’s contemporary literary landscape, Antoine Volodine writes under at least four heteronyms, including Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger. He taught Russian in French secondary schools for many years before his debut novel, Comparative Biography of Jorian Murgrave, appeared in France in 1985. Most of his prolific output, including The Monroe Girls, take place in a post-apocalyptic world where members of the “post-exoticism” writing movement have been arrested for their subversive literary efforts.

Alyson Waters is a prize-winning translator of French and francophone literary fiction, art history, philosophy, and children's books. She has translated works by Albert Cossery, Louis Aragon, René Belletto, Jean Giono, Eric Chevillard, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Emmanuel Bove, Claude Ponti, and many others. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize twice. She taught literary translation at Yale for three decades and currently teaches at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn.