It was the morning of the seventh, and there was still a lot of money in my account. That seemed strange. My mortgage is paid on the fifth. The salary deposited at the very end of the month goes out just as it came in, to pay off the mortgage. I went online to check my account, but the lines had disappeared, the credit lines and the credit history. And given that banks are never late about such things, and given that they don’t make mistakes, at least not in our favor, and given that I’m not naïve, I realized that a Russian hacker or perhaps an Anonymous hacker had gotten into the bank’s system and erased from the bank’s memory all traces of the intimate, or at least privileged, relationship that I’d developed with that bank. I knew neither his name nor his face. And he’d probably not done...
And Suddenly I Owed Nothing/Je ne devais plus rien
vincent message is an associate professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the University of Paris 8 Saint-Denis. His book Romanciers pluralistes (Seuil, 2013) is devoted to twentieth-century novels that stage value conflicts and aims to provide a basis for the notion of pluralism in literary theory. He has published three novels: Les Veilleurs (Seuil, 2009) was a finalist for the Goncourt for a Debut Novel; Défaite des maîtres et possesseurs (Points, 2016) was awarded the Orange Literature Prize; Cora dans la spirale (Seuil, 2019) was short listed for the Renaudot and Médicis prizes. His research deals with the social and environmental effects of capitalism and with the ways in which ecology makes it possible to renew the critique of capitalism.
cole swensen is a poet, translator, editor, and critical writer. She has won the pen USA Award in Literary Translation and a number of awards for her own poetry, including the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award.
Vincent Message, Cole Swensen; And Suddenly I Owed Nothing/Je ne devais plus rien. differences 1 December 2020; 31 (3): 48–58. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-8744483
Download citation file:
Advertisement
