Title:  Constellation

Author:  Adrien Bosc

Translator: Willard Wood

Publisher:  Other Press, New York (2016)

ISBN: 978 1 59051 756 7

Is it on one of these bottomless nights that the airplane falls asleep and goes into exile?

Well-written prose can excuse a lot. That isn’t hyperbole – I truly believe it.  Portions of Adrien Bosc’s novel read like a historical report describing the 1949 crash of the Air France F-AZN, also called the Constellation.  A notable event mostly because the plane’s passenger list was filled with wealthy celebrities.  A champion boxer, a world renowned concert pianist, the inventor or the Mickey Mouse watch and a young woman from a poor family being whisked off to America by a rich, fairy godmother – together they amount to a metaphor no writer could resist.  Stars falling from the sky.

In his Almagest, a summation of mathematical and astronomical knowledge, Ptolemy offered the first analytical map of the celestial vault, identifying 1,022 stars and forty-eight constellations. In the Azores, after dusk, in an airplane named for a grouping of stars, forty-eight people went missing. At 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m., 5:00 a.m., no sign awakens the Atlantic. Reflected in the infinite puddle are the Big and Little Dippers, Orion, and Scorpion.

The light and lyrical prose that runs through Constellation is typically French. Bosc’s sentences flow into each other as carelessly as events become memories. For this he will, inevitably, be compared to authors like Houellebecq and Laurent Binet. And it’s a fair comparison. He writes beautifully. But this is a book of isolated vignettes that never resolve themselves into a novel.  And I have to believe resolution was the author’s intention – to somehow create meaning out of tragedy; to find a pattern that will feed the symbolism; or (if we’re being cynical) to further invite those comparisons to Houellebecq and Binet.  Why else would Bosc inserts himself into the text, in textbook meta fashion, other than to bind together his stories of the dead.  Because his jarring and persistent presence has no other function. What his actual relationship is to the events he describes is never explained.  The ending, in which he speaks of his own birth, is particularly self-indulgent.  Readers will ultimately become confused.  It’s like spotting an ex at a cousin’s wedding, and wondering, what the hell are they doing here?

But Bosc does other things extremely well – all of which helps dilute Constellation‘s flaws. Willard Wood’s translation captures the elegance in Bosc’s digressions. The epigraphs used as headings for each chapter were thoughtfully chosen by the author. The lives of the passengers, even those few who weren’t famous (a group of shepherds being flown from Italy to work in the American West), are treated as equally fascinating. Bosc writes them all mini-obituaries. He builds memorials to the dead.  The anecdotes he provides for each passenger make for a pleasurable afternoon’s reading.

That morning, she sees the great posters to her glory. In one stroke of the paperhanger’s brush, a SOLD OUT strip extends across each ad. Ginette chose her fate. It is easy to attach the label of “prodigy” to her precocious career and miss, through facile stereotyping, the child’s implacable will, hard work, and discipline, the mailed fist of her genius. A staccato like no other, fruit of the obstinacy of a serious child. We like fairy tales, Newton’s apple, Eureka moments, grace conceived as a punctual, innate, and ineluctable event, and we erase, because of our penchant of the marvelous, the prior groundwork, the tedious chores, the doubts. At seven, after a first concert at the Salle Gaveau, Ginette trains hard to overcome her anxiety, stop the trembling in her knees, conquer the sweat on her forehead and palms. In the evening, standing on the kitchen table practicing, she tells her astonished mother: “It’s to get used to performing onstage. The other day, I had stage fright, it was probably vertigo.”

There really isn’t very much else to the story otherwise. There’s no mystery sixty odd years after the crash of Air France’s Constellation to solve.  Without a black box there’s no way to be completely certain what happened, but the investigation at the time came up with a very reasonable theory of events. I was convinced. Bosc should perhaps take an example from another French writer, George Perec, who he quotes at the beginnings of both chapters 10 & 16. Perec was at his most brilliant when he was describing things without embellishment. Allowing the reader to see and experience them just as they were.