Hocus Bogus

"Hocus Bogus first published in French as Pseudo by Mercure de France. Mercure de France, 1976. This translation David Bellos, 2010. Published by arrangement with the Estate of Romain Gary."--T.p. verso.

Airman, war hero, immigrant, law student, diplomat, novelist and celebrity spouse, Romain Gary had several lives thrust upon him by the history of the twentieth century, but he also aspired to lead many more. He wrote more than two dozen books and a score of short stories under several different names in two languages, English and French, neither of which was his mother tongue. Gary had a gift for narrative that endeared him to ordinary readers, but won him little respect among critics far more intellectual than he could ever be. His varied and entertaining writing career tells a different story about the making of modern literary culture from the one we are accustomed to hearing. Born Roman Kacew in Vilna (now Lithuania) in 1914 and raised by only his mother after his father left them, Gary rose to become French Consul General in Los Angeles and the only man ever to win the Goncourt Prize twice. This biography follows the many threads that lead from Gary's wartime adventures and early literary career to his years in Hollywood and his marriage to the actress Jean Seberg. It illuminates his works in all their incarnations, and culminates in the tale of his most brilliant deception: the fabrication of a complex identity for his most successful nom de plume, Émile Ajar. In his new portrait of Gary, David Bellos brings biographical research together with literary and cultural analysis to make sense of the many lives of Romain Gary - a hero fit for our times, as well as his own.

This book is about two intended weddings. A Saudi seeking Jesus tells his story covering the years 1999 to 2002 and ends with a haircut as part of his Arabic prenuptial traditions. Osman observes his roommates rehearsals for a very different wedding where the ritual haircut precedes martyrdom leading to carnal heavenly rewards. The hero is skeptical of this roommates belief where sensuality is mixed with fiery warnings against anyone daring to leave Islam. His San Diego based employer, Uncle Khaliil, a 1980s Afghan munitions dealer, does little to restrain his power over his 27 year old protg, especially interfering with Osmans romance with Marie, his Mexicana sweetheart. San Diego provides the glamorous seaside locations where the homemade mosque and community college scenes take place but these balmy images are often interrupted by Tijuana border crises. Other borders are in Amman, Jordan, where Osman lands on 9/11 while holding an illegal passport. He is further victimized by this disastrous terror attack on Manhattan during a Sinbad-the-Sailor flight to California where the rapturous Marie awaits him. From benign hocus pocus untruths to outright deceptions, this novel features a litany of human failings. However, for Muslims and Christians, the testing of the Prophet of God, Abraham, becomes a model for sacred trusts. The Bible and Quran record a Fathers offering of his Son upon an altar as a symbol of the similarity and the disparity of the two holy books. Several citations from the Biblical and Quranic texts touch upon some gritty issues like Osmans circumcision when he was 13 (Genesis 17:25, Quran 37:102); a delay based upon his mothers vow for pre-1967 Jerusalem. Maries effervescent kiss will ultimately revive Osman from a death by drowning, during which he hears Jesus speaking, prepping him for his wedding as a newly washed, hairless babe.

This is a book about what becomes of the truth when it succumbs to generational memory loss and to the fictions that intervene to cause and fill the gaps. It is a book about the impossibility of writing an autobiography when there is a prepossessing cultural and familial 'we' interfering with the 'I' and an 'I' that does not know itself as a self, except metastatically — as people and characters it has played but not actually been. A highly original combination of close readings and performative autobiography, this book takes performance philosophy to an alternative next step, by having its ideas read back to it by experience, and through assorted fictions. It is a philosophical thought experiment in uncertainty whose literary, theatrical, and cinematic trappings illustrate and finally become what this uncertainty is, the thought experiment having become the life that was, that came before, and that outlives the 'I am'.

Sonic Signatures is devoted to the representation of sound patterns and sound structures across a diverse range of typologically distinct languages with the overall aim of understanding the nature of linguistic data structures from a principled balance between representational economy and the interfaces of phonology with other domains, including acoustic and visual. The volume embraces data spanning from Nivkh vowel harmony to Maxakalí sign language, and from the representation of consonant clusters in adult Laurentian French and to those found in child Greek and child Brazilian Portuguese. The volume strives towards concrete commitments to the theoretical understanding of empirical territory both familiar but with a novel take (English stress) and novel but with immediate relevance (Hungarian suffix allomorphy). With authors contributing from five continents, the book offers a range of perspectives on the representation of sound patterns, while nonetheless retaining a tight focus on the core questions of which characteristics and signatures are specifically encoded for these patterns in the phonological component of the language faculty.

“Miller takes us on an exciting tour of postcolonial and world literature, guiding us through the literary maze of the real and the pretenders to the real.” —Ngugi wa Thiong’o, author of Wizard of the Crow Writing a new page in the surprisingly long history of literary deceit, Impostors examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation. This book looks at authors who posed as people they were not, in order to claim a different ethnic, class, or other identity. These writers were, in other words, literary usurpers and appropriators who trafficked in what Christopher L. Miller terms the “intercultural hoax.” In the United States, such hoaxes are familiar. Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree and JT LeRoy’s Sarah are two infamous examples. Miller’s contribution is to study hoaxes beyond our borders, employing a comparative framework and bringing French and African identity hoaxes into dialogue with some of their better-known American counterparts. In France, multiculturalism is generally eschewed in favor of universalism, and there should thus be no identities (in the American sense) to steal. However, as Miller demonstrates, this too is a ruse: French universalism can only go so far and do so much. There is plenty of otherness to appropriate. This French and Francophone tradition of imposture has never received the study it deserves. Taking a novel approach to this understudied tradition, Impostors examines hoaxes in both countries, finding similar practices of deception and questions of harm. “In this fascinating study of intercultural literary hoaxes, Christopher L. Miller provides a useful, brief history of American literary impostures as a backdrop for his investigation of France’s literary history of ‘ethnic usurpation.’” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York Times–bestselling author