[Inpatient Press; 2025]
Tr. from the French by Kit Schluter
The Queens’ Ball opens with difficulty. The narrator/author Copi struggles for the third time in a year to write “this novel the subject of which mustn’t be very interesting to me, whenever I finish a notebook (I always write with a Bic pen in a special notebook) I lose it the very same day. And seeing as I forget everything that I write, I have to start over from zero.” We find ourselves, deceptively, in one of those novels in which a writer struggles to write the book we are reading, to find and hold the story. We also have been given the key to the map of the novel-in-progress: Copi’s tendency to misdirect, to state and retract, to move the game as he plays. We are in the hands of a born storyteller/exaggerator/fabricator who insists what he is about to write—fantastical, unspooling, strange, profane—can’t maintain his attention. Copi starts from zero with every paragraph telling of a fabulous, fabulist life comprised of wild digressions, emotional extremes, and torquing the crime novel: “And you’ll see from the start that this is a crime novel, that there are several crimes and two guilty parties, but no cops (I don’t like that part of crime novels), and so, no punishments.”
Fraying stories, if we’re being honest, are the best stories. Gathering them is the art, the only sense in life’s chaos. Some stories weave and some stories pluck threads like a spider’s web sensitive to every vibration, disturbances signaling danger or a meal. Copi performs the spider on every page in winding monologic paragraphs studded with short declaratives and parataxis that loosen and unspool into long lines. He’s vamping and riffing, but there is no dullness. Each page has been flensed to the bone, which Copi uses as a horn.
The Queens’ Ball covers roughly a decade and a half in 158 pages, changing cities and dodging fates every other chapter. The central struggle is a tumultuous love triangle between Copi, his Italian lover Pietro/Pierre, and Copi’s wife Marilyn, a clairvoyant drug dealer. The panting picaresque jumps between Paris, New York, and Ibiza. Along the way, Copi loses a leg below the knee after Marilyn’s pet snake attacks him. They are joined by Michael, Pietro’s deaf American lover, and Piggy, Moonie, and Rooney, seven-year-old hippie triplets whose mother has been jailed on drug charges. This rag-tag crew doesn’t last for long. Some are killed by a shark, others peel off, vanish. There is murder and sabotage and injury and more murder. These tragedies are treated as existential slapstick, random violence no more unexpected than breakfast.
The Queens’ Ball, published in 1977 in French and now by Inpatient Press for the first time in English, is a very queer story decades before queer and trans were used in their current vernacular. “Gay” simply doesn’t cut it for what’s at play in this novel. Kit Schluter, who translated the book, notes that he used travestis because “it felt truer to use the very term they would have used to describe themselves” and that “while the French verb se travestir does refer to crossdressing, it also pertains to general acts of disguise and more festive gestures, such as an actor dressing up as what he is not, or a party-goer preparing for a masked ball.”
Genders, partners, alliances are all in flux. Names too, including Copi’s—“because that’s what my mom has called me, I don’t know why.” That ambivalence is the thread through the churning mayhem of the book and through life. Copi was born Raúl Damonte Botana in Buenos Aires in 1939 to an illustrious family—his maternal grandfather was a publishing magnate and patron to Jorge Luis Borges; his grandmother was an aristocratic anarchist poet; his father was a Peronist who fled to Uruguay, then France, which is the country Copi settled in from 1962 until his death in 1987. These are the facts, but they hardly matter in Copi’s artistic world. History is a mythological plaything he uses and abuses, as it uses and abuses us all. The use of his name, the blurring of first-person narrator and author careening through havoc might befuddle some readers weaned on autofiction’s conflation of author and narrator and its exhibitionist truths. Copi is telling outrageous tales and theatrically performing, sometimes for the cheap seats. Not a page lulls. This actor never coasts for the Sunday matinee crowd.
Scenes are sketched quickly, impressionistically, for maximum velocity. In the Mediterranean, the roving troupe of Copi and his lover and the lover’s lover and three children and a wolf experience a violent shark attack. Copi’s prosthetic leg is thrown at the creature to distract and appease its bloodlust to no avail (“the shark is unmoved, the leg doesn’t have any smell”), their wolf companion makes the ultimate sacrifice to spare the others, but carnage ensues anyway, relayed bluntly in a hiccup of racing comma-splices:
The shark rips off one of his arms, his tiny body soars into the air, then falls into the sea. The shark streaks toward me. I await my death motionless, I can’t even react anymore, I let go of the inflatable boat and let myself sink. I watch the shark’s white belly from underwater as it leaps and digs into the little yellow plastic craft, which explodes, the shark gets scared, turns out toward the ocean, and vanishes, Michael and I swim out and gather the little bodies. Piggie has no arms, Moonie is missing half his chest, Rooney’s face is ripped apart, we find the wolf’s head floating in the shallows, and my metal leg, which has been carried to shore by the waves. Michael and I weep in silence, wrapping their remains in ponchos. Pierre presses his face into the sand to avoid having to watch the scene. A bell rings three times. Where am I? It’s the big clock in the Gare d’Orsay, ringing out three p.m. Children play in the basin at the Tuileries, one of them has fallen in, a woman is scolding him. I walk to Rue de Rivoli and grab a taxi, I go to my hotel room on Boulevard Magenta, I collapse on my bed, I toss my leg onto the floor, I fall dead asleep.
Are we in a dream, a nightmare, a horror that must be quickly forgotten? Time has glitched. A jump-cut and Copi is in a hotel room, breakfast is fumbled onto him by the landlady’s daughter who cries in an armchair because her psychic has been brutally murdered. A telegram arrives accusing Copi of the crime. He trims his incriminating mustache with a nail clipper, dons sunglasses, and takes flight. These incidents happen within pages of each other. We have traversed sea and land, horror and death, and ended in a taxi on the move to further convoluted misadventures.
Copi like an absurdist punching bag bobs back to life after every calamity. Not unruffled, because agitation is his nature, but ready and facing whatever the world doles out next, with a wild blend of tenderness, melancholy, pitch-black humor, and violence. Copi creates and lives with such abandon and so much abandonment. How can you grieve or even tally what you can’t slow down to feel or what is so wildly unhinged from realism? Realism here is simply another mist that falls and is forgotten. Inconsequential. If consequence is a product of sequence, of incidents being given the heft of event because of the results of what happens, Copi upends all, like an escape artist wriggling free of narrative’s straitjacket. Sequence for him is a series, a timeline on which anecdote, fabulisms, and public displays of disaffection are strung like dirty laundry. Shameless, and therefore exhilarating.
Nate Lippens is the author of the novels My Dead Book and Ripcord, both published by Semiotext(e) and in the UK by Pilot Press. My Dead Book was a finalist the Republic of Consciousness Prize UK in 2023. His fiction has appeared in many anthologies, including Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles.
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