Special Envoy
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Jean Echenoz’s sly and playful novels have won critical and popular acclaim in France, where he has won the Prix Goncourt, as well as in the United States, where he has been profiled by the New Yorker and called the”most distinctive voice of his generation” by the Washington Post. With his wonderfully droll and intriguing new work, Special Envoy, Echenoz turns his hand to the espionage novel. When published in France, it stormed the bestseller lists.
Special Envoy begins with an old general in France’s intelligence agency asking his trusted lieutenant Paul Objat for ideas about a person he wants for a particular job: someone to aid the destabilization of Kim Jong-un’s regime in North Korea. Objat has someone in mind: Constance, an attractive, restless, bored woman in a failing marriage to a washed-up pop musician. Soon after, she is abducted by Objat’s cronies and spirited away into the lower depths of France’s intelligence bureaucracy where she is trained for her mission.
What follows is a bizarre tale of kidnappings, murders and mutilations, bad pop songs and great sex, populated by a cast of oddballs and losers. Set in Paris, rural central France, and Pyongyang, Special Envoy is joyously strange and unpredictable, full of twists and ironic digressions-and, in the words of L’Express, “a pure gem, a delight.”
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Sam
Taylor
Sam Taylor is a novelist and literary translator. His five novels have reached an international audience, and his award-winning translations include works by Laurent Binet, Leïla Slimani and Marcel Proust. Born in England, Sam was a writer and editor at The Observer for eight years before spending a decade in France. He now lives in the United States with his family.
Sam Taylor is a novelist and literary translator. His five novels have reached an international audience, and his award-winning translations include works by Laurent Binet, Leïla Slimani and Marcel Proust. Born in England, Sam was a writer and editor at The Observer for eight years before spending a decade in France. He now lives in the United States with his family.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
This truly original and funny novel is a creative re-reading of the spy novel, playing with the codes and conventions of this literary genre. It’s a mocking pastiche filled with irony, digressions and twists. Jean Echenoz’s fanciful imagination gives birth to a plot full of rhythm, unpredictable events and zany characters : an ageing general, a young and naïve woman trained to destabilize North Korean Kim Jong-Un, spooks and oddballs. The use of stylistic devices, verbal creativity, puns, tongue-in-cheek-humour, is typical of Echenoz’s narrative virtuosity. In 2018, the Public Library of Information ( Bpi) organized an exhibition dedicated to Jean Echenoz’s inventive prose and extraordinary fictional universe.