The Anomaly

Hervé Le Tellier has been a member of the avant-garde literary group Oulipo since 1992 and its president since 2019. Oulipo is short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or the Workshop of Potential Literature. It began as a literary movement in 1960, founded by Raymond Queneau, François Le Lionnais, and other writers and mathematicians. Members of Oulipo experiment with combining writing techniques and mathematics, adding arbitrary constraints to the creative process. Some of the more famous examples of Oulipo literature include Georges Perec’s 1969 novel A Void, which lacks the letter “e,” and the N+7 method, in which every noun in a text is replaced with the seventh noun after it in a dictionary. These arbitrary rules turn literature into a game between the writer and the reader; the reader observes the writer as the latter tries to solve the puzzle that they have created for themselves.

Le Tellier is the first writer of the movement to receive the Goncourt Prize. Though it does not seem so at first glance, The Anomaly is an Oulipian novel. The introduction of a second airplane and a copy of each of the novel’s characters transforms the novel’s linear stories into endless possible chance encounters and outcomes. Le Tellier challenged himself to keep track of the whereabouts and mindsets of two sets of identical characters as they diverge and evolve across 106 days. Meanwhile, each character corresponds to a different literary style or genre. For instance, Le Tellier writes the hitman Blake in a hard-boiled style, but he writes the interactions between Adrian and his love interest as romantic comedy. By intertwining multiple genres in this complex and arbitrary structure, Le Tellier allows the novel to generate its own readings.