A Thousand Pearls (for a Thousand Pennies)

By Hervé Le Tellier

The answers are spontaneous, revealing, ominous, insignificant, grotesque, amusing, lecherous, tragic and trivial by turns, and lovable in their cheerful imperfection. This is a book about the basics: love, sexuality, death, and all the other things that lurk in our everyday thoughts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781564786609

Book preview

A THOUSAND PEARLS (FOR A THOUSAND PENNIES)

Other works by Hervé Le Tellier in English translation

The Sextine Chapel

The Intervention of a Good Man

Enough About Love

A THOUSAND PEARLS (FOR A THOUSAND PENNIES)

HERVÉ LE TELLIER

Translated by Ian Monk

Originally published in French as Les amnésiques n’ont rien vécu d’inoubliable

by Le Castor Astral, 1997

Copyright © 1997 by Le Castor Astral

Translation copyright © 2011 by Ian Monk

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Le Tellier, Hervé, 1957-

[Amnésiques n’ont rien vécu d’inoubliable. English]

A thousand pearls (for a thousand pennies) / Hervé Le Tellier; translated by Ian Monk.--1st ed.

p. cm.

Originally published in French as Les amnésiques n’ont rien vécu d’inoubliable by Le Castor Astral, 1997.

ISBN: 978-1-56478-636-4

I. Monk, Ian.

PQ2672.E11455A83413 2011

843’.914--dc22

2011012846

Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la culture – Centre national du livre

This work has been published, in part, thanks to the French Ministry of Culture – National Book Center

www.dalkeyarchive.com

Cover: design by Danielle Dutton, illustration by Nicholas Motte

Contents

Begin Reading

Penny for them?

I was thinking about you.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that when I was a kid, I used to write to Santa Claus, and even today I sometimes imagine what my three wishes would be if I met my fairy godmother.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how hard I find it to sleep if I drink coffee in the evening, and yet I always end up having some.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that several years went by between the moment when I realized that I would die and the moment when I realized that I would first grow old.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that a caterpillar never suspects that it will turn into a butterfly.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how you can have a perfect ear for music, but not a perfect nose, a perfect eye, or even a perfect sex, and I wonder what it would be like if you could.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how I just saw, written in the dirt of a filthy car, Also available in white.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how I’m incapable of resisting a woman who finds me attractive, and I don’t care about being an easy lay.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how lies can often be detected because they’re always told using exactly the same words.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that, no my dear, Porthos, Athos, and Aramis aren’t Greek Islands.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that nothing’s serious, so don’t ask me if you and I are.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how when I’m no longer hungry, I’m quite incapable of imaging what I’ll want to eat next.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how all mushrooms are edible, but some only once.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how the fly that splashes around in your glass and which you save from drowning never looks grateful, the bitch.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how I worked out that I was pretty good-looking only when I’d started to lose my good looks.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that the best age is never the age you now are, and that things go from bad to worse.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how when driving on a highway you sometimes notice beautiful country houses, where you’d like to live, until you realize that they’re just beside a highway.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how, given that half the people I meet are younger than me, then I must have reached the midpoint in my life.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how straw men were perhaps once straw fetuses.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that chickens have no idea why they cross the road.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how, when I’m waiting for a woman I desire, I’m attentive to the slightest sound in the hall, I look out for her with my eye pinned to the peephole, and I can hear my heart beating dumbly.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how I’ve been criticized for writing love letters on my computer and then printing them out. What am I supposed to do? Copy them down from the screen?

Penny for them?

I was thinking that if perfume recalls memories most powerfully, then it is because your nose is nearer to your heart than your eyes.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that I’m sad and I don’t know why.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how no one is surprised by soliloquies in the theater, even though talking to yourself is the first sign of madness.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how I never get angry, and when I argue with someone I never completely believe what I’m saying.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how sorry I am to have learned that cooks spit on their frying pans to check if they’re hot enough.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how, just before flushing the toilet, even the President of the United States of America checks out the content of the pan.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how I can’t stand you using that stupid expression of yours: Some friends I know.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how I never really forgive anyone, I just forget that I’m mad at certain people.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how I’m never sure if other people find you attractive too.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that nurses should remember they’ve got the last female legs you’ll ever see.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how when dogs look at their masters, they have the same lovelorn expression as when cat owners look at their cats.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that I’ve no idea whether a hermaphrodite should be described as a he, a she, or an it.

Penny for them?

I was thinking that I’d go mad during the six months of winter in Sweden, with its four hours of pallid daylight and twenty hours of night.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how the Sun never has the slightest idea of what is happening on Earth, at night.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how hard it is, at the beginning, to remember the name of a woman you love, because the love you have for her has no name.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how I’d quite like to change existences with someone else on a regular basis, especially if I was sure I could backtrack.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how if I was seriously ill, I wouldn’t insist that my doctor told me the truth.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how people who shell their prawns and then pile them up on the edge of their plate before deciding to eat them, when everyone else has finished theirs, deserve having theirs stolen.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how, right now, you must be thinking that I’m a real bastard.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how, on my birthday cakes, the candles are starting to cost more than the cake.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how it is quite illogical to affirm that being buried alive is the worst way to die.

Penny for them?

I was thinking how I preferred early twentieth-century physics, when