I’m on an ancient Egypt kick, and when I plucked The Third Translation by Matt Bondurant from the Aunt’s ever crowded shelves it seemed like the perfect read for the mystery part of my day. It’s a highly praised literary thriller that promised a Kem Nunn like mixture of esoteric knowledge, messed up protagonists and a final annihilating mystery, and, for a while, kept that promise. The writing is beautiful and Bondurant displays an impressive knowledge of things Egyptian as he tells the tale of Walter Rothschild a brilliant if socially inept scholar obsessed with deciphering the mysterious Stela of Paser, whose carvings are purported to be able to read in a unheard of third way, that understanding opening the door into the absolute. Naturally a bunch of others are interested in obtaining the secret as well, and things get more dangerous the closer Rothschild gets to final comprehension. Unfortunately, in the end the usual MFA flaws drag the book down, preventing it from being the really transcendent novel it could have been. It’s considered unseemly by the highbrows to come to any real climax or conclusion, and while I agree that the usual Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft over determination of the numinous. along with the attendant rubber snakes and special effects, is bogus, the reader and protagonist have to get closer than a long cab ride to the ultimate apocalyptic solution, which merely fizzles out in this book. Another problem with the academic approach is that certain passages resemble writing exercises more than dramatic moments, but the literary types just can’t resist shoving them into the stew. It’s great, essential even, to know the minutia of the characters’ biographies, but long bits about Rothschild’s father and ex-wife destroy the flow of the book, pacing being another essential quality that the lowliest pulp writer understands better than the most exalted MFA. And I won’t even mention the lengthy author’s note that explains way too much. Matt is two clever by half and determined to demonstrate it, in the epigraphs, acknowledgments, author bio, end papers and every other place he can think of to let his light shine, brevity having evidently parted from wit in his ivory environs long ago. Sigh. I guess I’m so hard on The Third Translation because it could have been so much better, as you can see from the great passages I quote below. As Antelme and Rossini point out in their book Sacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt, Egyptian spirituality was very concerned with the corporeal, seeing in the female body the indispensable element "that puts into motion the intrinsic forces of all manifestations of the divine," a concept that Bondurant translates to modern reality beautifully.
All those things seemed individual segments in a chain of reverberative events, a spiraling helix into space, something like the glyph of Anubis in the afterlife; the icon of otherworldly justice, recognizable for its distinct shape and placement, yet its meaning never clear. It was the touch of Erin’s quivering fingers, the press of her warm lips, the want in her shoulders and arms that made that spinning helix move, bending to touch me here and now, marking me for future judgement.
Penelope was wearing a loose cotton blouse with small pointed collars. Her shirt gapped at the front and I found myself drawn to examining the pale triangle of flesh exposed there. It was the pallor of a born Englishwoman, devoid of any hint of cleavage, and it drew me like a moth.
At night the dark alcoves of the streets of London were always crammed, nook and cranny, with groping couples, each trying hard to solve some inscrutable mystery that lay in the face of their partner, on their tongues, their lips, their neck, feeling with their hands for th next possible secret, working with exhausted limbs, feverish, shuffling feet.
Her narrow shoulders almost poked out of her sweater, loose around the neck, exposing her thin neck and that captivating slot or niche at the base of the throat, where the bones meet and the neck begins, the place that moved as if of its own accord whenever she spoke or moved her head, deepening or spreading, the texture and shading adjusting in constant motion, rippling like a sail in the wind. You know the place.
To be near her at that moment, to have her talk to me was like wandering out onto the plain of the future from some dismal cave of obscurity, to discover aesthetic beauty in the midst of the cold logic of mathematics. It was a feeling I have always sought.
As she walked across the stage I watched her body form and re-form under the thin cotton, momentary glimpses of her shape and then something amorphous and strange.
The transcendent is the only true link to other worlds, including the world of the past.
This is eternity. This room. Every room, every confined space, is eternity.
