One beautiful summer day in the U.S., a flight from France lands. The passengers are genuinely happy to be landing soon, as they are terrified of the severe turbulence that has occurred as they fly through a thunderstorm. And that would be all right, but their appearance in the airspace causes panic on the ground. Because the exact same plane landed three months ago… And "exactly the same" means "an identical copy": the same equipment, the same luggage, and the same passengers. They flew out in March and landed (suddenly) in June. And no one knows what to do about it.
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 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011).
And here is where the interesting problems begin. First, the immaturity of the human brain on a planetary scale becomes apparent, and its inability not only to solve, but even simply to perceive such global questions. Dozens of the world's scientific luminaries gather for a council, but no one can give a convincing answer to the question "what is it". Second, another human capacity emerges from this same point: the "normalization" of everything abnormal. To make it habitual, to get used to the thought, to accept it into everyday life, to ignore it - the consciousness seeks by all means to board up the exit from the comfort zone. You invite clones to a talk show: here, it seems, and they have harmoniously blended into human daily life. And why bother bothering with the reasons for their appearance?
Thirdly, the problem of meeting doppelgangers. Everyone perceives his copy differently: someone exchanges experiences, someone falls into aggression, trying to divide the child, someone learns that he is "three months old" is already dead, someone takes his twin brother as a gift of fate. But absolutely everyone is shocked by how different their real image turns out to be from the reflection in the mirror. And how you can see all the nuances of emotions when you observe yourself from the sidelines (and when "from the sidelines" is not a figure of speech).
Fourth, rampant intolerance. Despite the currently fashionable cult of tolerance, there is little of it in human nature. And when inexplicable situations occur, many try simply to destroy the source, thinking that they will solve the problem that way. Disputes of representatives of various religious confessions on the question, for example, whether the duplicate has a soul, and whether it can be recognized as a living being at all; activation of radical groups that endanger the lives of innocent people...about pesky journalists/just curious personalities, who stick their noses into other's private life, sometimes quite aggressively, I will not even mention. In an era of information glut, being a novelty/mystery/revelation is elementary dangerous.
"Anomaly" turned out to be a curious book. It has only one major disadvantage, in my opinion - it lacks volume. If we had delved a little deeper into the fates of each of the main characters, into reflections on various theories of what happened, and a more detailed look at the problems that arise, it would have been a large-scale, good-quality novel. It definitely has depth, but it lacks breadth) But the ending is great - unexpected, but logical. What, after all, is the right thing to do: to execute or to pardon?
This article was sponsored by Pete Werner
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