Framed

Framed by Tonino Benacquista (1990, English translation 2006) ★★★☆☆

The start is slow. I suspect this book would have taken much longer to read if I wasn’t stranded at the airport with no better options. Not sure if it got better or I just got used to the unique writing style. Still, three stars! That means I liked it enough that it was not a waste of time.

I got it from Value Village for $5.49. Mostly because the reviews on the back kept mentioning “black comedy” and I’m not really sure what that means, and no, the Google definition doesn’t help.

However! The price sticker is covering much of the blurb. Here’s what it says:

“Antoine’s life is good. [He hangs art.] Evenings he dedicates to the silky moves and subtle tactics of billi […] But when he’s attacked by an art thie […] begins to fall apart. His maverick investiga […] he finds himself the prime susp […] as he uncovers a cesspool of art fraud. A ga […]”

Fun way to read.

Not too long ago I was wondering where the subjectivity of translating came from. There’s good translations and bad translations, right? Nope. Do you want to be literal or preserve the meaning? Do you want the foreign reader to receive it like a native would, or should it be preserved as other?

Antoine loses his right hand in the attack, and he’s very upset about that. His love for playing Billiards - gone. His art hanging job - gone. They do offer him a diversity hire job, but he rejects it. Page 171 has an absolutely diabolical number of hand puns. I’d love to see how the original French handled that.

There’s a scene where he infiltrates an art exhibit premiere. He’s a picture hanger. So while everyone else is oohing and ahhing at the actual art, he’s thinking about the quality of the hanging. It reminds me of the Trump video/photoshoot ten years ago where he dodges the bald eagle in his office. Most comments were about how Trump sucks, ooh eagle recognizes an enemy, ahh eagles are scary. My first thought was that the eagle had horrible feather condition. What an ugly wing clip!

Page 169

I’m not designed to be a slalom champion and I’ve never had a knack for running between the raindrops in a storm. That takes some dexterity, and I’m just not dextral any more. I’m fresh out of right hands.

This is a good example of the prose. And behold, the singular sex scene on Page 139:

Everything is jumbled together, her strange, crawling action against my chest, the twinkle of an eye and the matt surface of skin, my Surrealist amputation sliding against her armpit, and my third eye up above, watching the tableau.

Is there something about the French language that makes this sound natural, or does Tonino just write like that?

There’s a cool torture scene, except the ’torture’ is just destroying expensive works of art in exchange for answers.

Also, the book being about a French-Italian guy (written in French) and translated into English was mildly amusing.