Electrico W (25 page)
I haven’t had any luck with women, or haven’t known how to seize it if I did. Let’s say the ones I liked didn’t like me enough, and the ones I could have attracted were too ready to be attracted by pretty much anyone. Still, I’d have liked to have a child. Children. I’m sixty-five now and I’m not Picasso. The question stopped arising. There was never a Lena Balmer.
I may also know why Dad hanged himself. I’m growing steadily blind and, according to the doctor, it’s a hereditary condition. This book is a result of that sense of urgency and terror, I’ve called it
Eléctrico W
—although the tramline no longer exists—and I don’t know if it’s good or bad. All bad novels are alike, but every good one is good in its own way.
And every day I look at the map of the Okavango Delta, that river that doesn’t know how to find its way to the sea.
HERVÉ LE TELLIER
is a writer, journalist, mathematician, food critic, and teacher. He has been a member of the Oulipo group since 1992 and one of the “papous” of the famous France Culture radio show. He has published fifteen books of stories, essays, and novels, including
Enough About Love
(Other Press, 2011),
The Sextine Chapel
(Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), and
A Thousand Pearls
(
for a Thousand Pennies
) (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011).
ADRIANA HUNTER
studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than fifty books including
Enough About Love
by Hervé Le Tellier. She won the 2011 Scott Moncrieff Prize and has been short-listed twice for the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize. She lives in Norfolk, England.