John Barth's 'The Sot-Weed Factor' Finally Published in French Translation

Claro's French translation of John Barth's 1960 novel 'The Sot-Weed Factor' has been released by Le Serpent à Plumes. The novel, a cult classic in the US, is a sprawling parody of the picaresque genre and the bildungsroman. Set in the late 17th century, it follows the naive English virgin Ebenezer Cooke as he travels to the New World to oversee his father's tobacco plantation and write an epic poem glorifying Maryland. Instead, he discovers a continent plagued by syphilis, drugs, greed, and deceit, inverting the Jamesian trope of New World innocence versus Old World corruption. The novel features a dizzying merry-go-round of identities, with the hapless broker losing both his Latin and his virginity. Notably, Pocahontas is deflowered by a Magic Eggplant, debunking a great American myth. Barth argues that all history is fiction, and fiction must now recount the story of narratives, especially master narratives. Cooke's lost innocence mirrors that of the postmodern writer, condemned to create critical work from past forms. Brice Matthieussent's review in artpress highlights Barth's grand performance of burlesque numbers, striptease, tragicomic soliloquies, and unbridled bawdiness, suggesting that Thomas Pynchon likely reread this first masterpiece of American postmodernism while writing 'Mason & Dixon'.