José Manuel Prieto began his June Lit&Lunch reading in San Francisco by commenting on the light—namely, how the light in San Francisco reminded him of the light in St. Petersburg. This fascination with light—and the illusions it casts—comes to play a remarkable role in his novel Rex, where a diamond’s brilliance reveals nothing of its authenticity. One of Rex’s main characters is a Russian scientist, living with his wife, their son, and their son’s tutor on the Costa Brava, where he has not only managed to manufacture artificial diamonds but also to pass them off as real to Russian Mafiosi. Having heard Prieto discuss Rex on a few occasions now, I’ve noticed how animatedly he speaks about the subject of diamond forgery, and considering that Prieto studied engineering in Novosibirsk, Russia, this doesn’t come entirely as a surprise.

As Prieto went on to explain, and Esther Allen to translate, at their reading with the Center, the history of manufacturing artificial diamonds goes back a couple hundred years. Although there had been many previous attempts throughout the world, the first diamond to be successfully manufactured was in the U.S. in 1953 by General Electric (to be used for industrial purposes like cutting hard materials). Chemists and scientists have always known that diamonds are made of carbon, but a French scientist put a fine point on this once by concentrating the sun’s rays on a diamond through a magnifying glass (like a child might do to set fire to ants)—and the diamond went up in flames.

It wasn’t until 1981, though, that Japanese scientists produced the first diamond of gem quality, one that replicated the immaculate sparkle and transparency of a real diamond. By the beginning of the 1990s, artificial diamonds that were absolutely indistinguishable from natural diamonds were being manufactured—and in none other than Novosibirsk, where Prieto had studied engineering. Even expert jewelers have been unable to distinguish between real diamonds and artificial diamonds, which, as Prieto has pointed out, is disturbing to a company like De Beers, which buys the entire annual production of diamonds in Russia.

Although Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is an evident motif in Rex, Prieto also makes a deliberate nod to Proust’s novella The Lemoine Affair, which just came out last year in English translation by Charlotte Mandell from Melville House. In The Lemoine Affair, a man approaches De Beers, claiming he knows how to manufacture artificial diamonds and threatens to flood the marketplace and destroy DeBeers’ monopoly. Proust’s own family owned shares in DeBeers and lost money in this famous swindle. As Prieto ironically pointed out, Proust was able to write his great novels in part because of the wealth afforded his family by diamonds.

Prieto, too, has cited inspiration from Jules Verne’s 1852 novel The Star of the South, about the discovery of diamonds in Kimberly, South Africa.

As Prieto advised the audience in San Francisco, if you’re in the market for a precious stone, don’t waste your money; buy the fake diamond.

Annie Janusch manages the Center’s TWO LINES World Writing in Translation series, the latest volume of which, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, features extracts from Rex.

In her translator’s introduction in Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, Esther Allen makes some interesting points about Jose Manuel Prieto’s novel Rex and its rather singular relationship with translation:

He began his literary career as a translator from Russian to Spanish, and in this particular novel, even more so than in his two earlier ones, he writes as a translator, to expose the way in which all meaning is temporary and provisional, dependent upon its immediate context, subject to infinite and unpredictable shifts. Language, and the literary texts that are made from it, is not a diamond, its super-hard molecules permanently ordered in a fixed pattern, its great value impervious to the ups and downs of the marketplace; it is, rather, a “luminous uproar,” inevitably illusory and impermanent, dissolving into an ungraspably fine floating powder when any determined will is brought to bear on it.

The English translation of Rex makes that point in a way its author, who finished writing the novel in 2006, could hardly have dreamed of. Though the book was written to describe “the strategies used to overcome the terrible experience of totalitarianism,” as Prieto says in the Author’s Note, the reader who comes to the English translation in 2009 won’t be able to help reading this book, with its depiction of an obscene and ostentatious wealth founded on fakery, supposedly valuable objects that turn out to be of no value whatsoever, as being about a collapse much closer to home than that of the Soviet Union.

Though Rex is undoubtedly enriched by the added dimension that the current global economic crisis has bestowed upon it, its translation into other languages, other contexts, is only a first step on the way to what the text finally demands—translation into other mediums altogether. As I translated Rex, I kept visualizing it all on a stage . . .

Allen’s full translator’s introduction is available in the Center’s forthcoming anthology, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, along with an excerpt from Rex, available this November.

For more on the intersection between translation and Rex, listen the Center’s audio of Esther Allen in conversation with Jose Manuel Prieto. That conversation was part of the 2008-09 season of Lit&Lunch. For the 2009-10 season, we’ve already booked Natasha Wimmer and Breon Mitchell, whose re-translation of The Tin Drum will be published this fall.