Book Review: "Voltaire's Calligrapher" by Pablo De Santis

Title: Voltaire's Calligrapher

Author: Pablo De Santis

Publisher: Harper Perennial

ISBN, PUB Date: 978-0-06-147988-5, October, 1, 2010

Reviewed By: Lee Libro for Author Exposure

Voltaire's Calligrapher is a story of both form and substance. Just as the calligrapher’s value lies in the utmost attention paid to the aesthetics of word formation, so does most of the value of Pablo De Santis’ story dwell in the style of the writing.

The substance, the actual story, is a puzzle by most standards, but perhaps that was the author's intention. The storyline takes the reader through a maze that doesn't follow any clear plot, but surprises the reader with scene after scene of often bizarre crafting, with few strong, yet enigmatic threads tying them together. Loosely based on the time frame following Voltaire's exile from Paris, the main character, a highly skilled calligrapher who was recently released from prison and in need of employment, is sent by his uncle to work for the playwright's home at Chateau Ferny. Soon after his arrival, Voltaire sends him on a mission to Paris to slyly attain appointment as court calligrapher and thereby spy on the trial of the Protestant Jean Calas, in hopes of battling the church and undermining the religious intolerance of the time. Along the way he befriends an executioner and becomes enamored with a brothel's whore who turns out to be an automaton, a life-sized doll fashioned after the very real Clarissa, with whom Dalessius later falls in love.

Far from being historically accurate, the world in which Dalessius thrives is extremely abstract. Much like a Magritte painting, there's an atmospheric quality with figurative elements, rather than a real sense of the age. Objectives are never fully clarified, but are expected to be somehow intuited by the reader. The calligrapher’s duties, from writing simple court papers to inscribing the backs of naked women to carrying hidden messages to aiding in Voltaire's fight against the church, seem detached from a central directive which the author never takes the time to write. At a mere 144 pages, Voltaire's Calligrapher would technically be classified as a novella; one may argue that a story about Voltaire's fight to progress the era of enlightenment would deserve greater length.

De Santis is also a comic-strip creator and it's this reviewer's opinion that he has infused some of that form into the story. Comics allow greater poetic license than do novels. In the case of historical material, unless the genre is clearly a satire or comedy, there's a fine line to be drawn between fact and fiction. Then too, because the book was originally written in the Argentine's native tongue, perhaps much is lost in translation to English as well.

What makes the reader want to turn the page is not so much the outcome of the events in the story, although De Santis' clever characters, Clarissa in particular, are enthralling. The glue of the story is found in frequent, philosophical mini-dissertations on the power and art of the written word, from the Egyptian hieroglyphs to the role of the modern-day, 18th century calligrapher. One sentence in particular, I suspect, could encapsulate the method of this novel and that is in a description of the act of writing calligraphy:

"He was concentrating on every stroke, writing slowly and forcefully, giving the words a definitive quality. This contrasted with the faint shadow of his hand on the paper and was itself another form of writing that seemed to say: for every word that remains, countless others disappear."

In writing Voltaire's Calligrapher, De Santis achieves the very same feat that does the calligrapher in the excerpt above. This is either genius literary execution or a fortunate mistake on the part of the author.

Either way, to truly enjoy Voltaire's Calligrapher one should withhold one's expectations of the classic fictional form. It would also be very helpful if one knew at least a little about the playwright's life and works as well as the struggles that took place between the Catholic Church and Protestantism at the time (1700's). Otherwise, De Santis' clever humor mixed with truly profound and exquisite words will be as hollow and lifeless as the automaton doll featured in the story. Read Voltaire's Calligrapher for what it is, that is, a short, elegantly written novella with messages embedded in dark humor, and you will appreciate this very new art form.