Phrases of small apparent significance occur again and again with some kind of cumulative effect: “something wrong there,” “bits and scraps,” “quaqua,” “when the panting stops,” etc. The meanings present in this language are not valid outside the book, being mostly the products of intensive internal references and repetitions. At its climax the story virtually disclaims its own authenticity, and this uncertain commitment to ordinary criteria of meaningfulness is also characteristic of the language in which it is told.
It eschews marks of punctuation, although the novel is divided into paragraphs of unequal length, signifying, why not, the fluttering of some moribund intellectual pulse, rather than successive stages of meaning. This language goes indifferently into French or English. The syntax is neither English nor French, but that of some intermediate tongue in which “ordinary language” cannot be spoken. Where the English looks wrong the French looks just as wrong: “of the four three quarters of our total life only three lend themselves to communication” sounds as if the first “three” has got in by mistake, but the French says quatre trois quarts and adds to the muddle by saying deux seuls for “only three.” It seems unlikely that the reader loses much in clarity by using the English version. Where the English is obscure the French in general helps little: “the history I knew my God the natural” comes from l’histoire que j’avais la naturelle. And since Comment C’est are the last words in the book, they impart to the design a circularity which is, perhaps not too unhappily, lost in English. It is on the whole about as literal as a comparison of the titles will suggest, though one notes a lost pun ( commencez). How, if this novel were by an unknown author, would one set about the reviewer’s task of giving some notion of its contents, and throwing in an appraisal? First, perhaps, by dealing in certainties: for instance, this book was written in French under the title Comment C’est.
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