In the Time of the Blue Ball by Manuela Draeger (Book Review)

In the Time of the Blue Ball (Three Post- Exotic Stories)
By Manuela Draeger
Translated by Brian & Valerie Evenson
Published by Dorothy Project, 2011
Print: $16

Bobby Potemkine is a young kid trying to make his way in a world of eternal winter, burning ruins, meteorite showers, and the absence of any kind of authority. The entire police force of his city has entirely disappeared with no rhyme or reason to say where they've gone. In the new Dark Ages in which he lives, some of the most rudimentary common knowledge has been lost. For instance, only a very few, maybe even ONE person, knows how to make FIRE! Before the cops vanished, Bobby's specialty was helping them solve their most perplexing cases. Left to his own devices, he tries to find meaning in the city by investigating mysteries nobody else can solve. All three of the stories feature Bobby and his talking dog, Djinn.

In the first story, Bobby investigates the disappearance of the only woman who knows how to make fire and somehow gets involved with a fly orchestra....yes an orchestra whose players are actually flies. In the second story, Bobby makes it a priority to save a pasta noodle named Auguste Diodon from being eaten, with the help of the love of his life, a cute batte with black braids named Lili Niagara and a blue crab named Big Katz. In the last story, Bobby tries to find out why mysterious baby zombified pelicans are appearing all over the city with no mothers!

As you can tell from the subjects of the short stories, these works aren't exactly rooted in reality. I was sorta cast adrift at first and didn't know what to make of this author. But somewhere during the reading of the second work in the book, I started to GET IT. The way I began to think about Bobby and this world was that this book is what you would get if Lewis Carroll had made Alice a private investigator in Wonderland. In the real world, what she would investigate would seem mad, but in Wonderland it would make perfect sense. By the end of the book, I was really digging the surreal dreamscape Bobby moves through and wanted more of the author's works to read.

Manuela Draeger is a pseudonym of Antoine Volodine which is itself a pseudonym of a pseudonym. In fact, Manuela Draeger is a character in one of Volodine's other books, a librarian in a post-apocalyptic  prison camp. In that book Draeger invents stories for the children of the camp. So taken that way, the stories in this book are stories invented by a character masquerading as an author masquerading as a character. Brain hurting yet?

I hope to see more of Bobby Potemkine in English. In France, there are ten volumes of the Potemkine stories and they are marketed to adolescents.

My Grade: A