The Anomaly

“He’s watched so many films—no one realizes how much hit men owe to Hollywood scriptwriters.”

Blake is a professional hit man who steals strategies from TV and movies. Le Tellier here is admitting that he has based Blake on hit men that he has seen in TV shows and films as well as drawing attention to the fictionality of the Blake chapters themselves. They do not resemble the real world so much as they resemble other fictional representations of characters like Blake.

“Having spent fifteen years writing, he views the small literary community as a farcical train where crooks without tickets ostentatiously take first class seats with the complicity of incompetent conductors, while modest geniuses are left on the platform.”

This quote describes the opinions of Victor Miesel, but because Victor’s career has many parallels with Le Tellier’s, it is easy to trace Victor’s opinions back to the author (whether true or one of Le Tellier’s tricks). Victor laments the fact that his literary fiction gets no recognition while popular fiction (and American genre fiction especially, since Victor makes a living translating it) finds easy success. That he uses the metaphor of a train in a novel about air travel emphasizes that Victor’s position is old-fashioned.

“I would have liked the two of us to walk the longest possible path, together, and even the longest of possible paths.”

André writes a convoluted email to Lucie after reading Victor Miesel’s The Anomaly, as if his thinking is infected by Victor March’s existential musings. The somewhat nonsensical distinction between “the longest possible path” and “the longest of possible paths” implies that a defined set of possible paths already exists, suggesting that André (and by extension Victor March) are thinking probabilistically.