MORNING LIST
A man who follows in the footsteps of his double along the Mekong River; an unpublished reading by La Fontaine; a love story in Kabylia during the war; the tragic fate of a young woman in 1920s Germany; a teenager who disappears during a scorching summer in the Italian mountains… This week, worlds and eras mix and collide. Sparks guaranteed.
SCIENCE-FICTION. “The Dogged Book of My Life” by Lucius Shepard
Going up, to appreciate the classification of his works, the course of the Amazon river, the novelist Thomas Cradle, hero of the Dog-eared book of my life of Lucius Shepard, suddenly comes up against an aberrant obstacle: The tea forest, novel signed with a perfect double and complete double, released, moreover, by its own publisher.
Cradle’s Tale 2 – A Descent of the Mekong “By second-hand fishing boat” by four dating backpackers – and especially the unhealthy dizziness that diffuses the heady crawling of his sentences appear to Thomas Cradle as the monstrous double of his own universe. The psychic shock and the playful excitement brought about by this discovery lead him to buckle his bag, haunted by the desire to embody the text.
So begins for him a neopicaresque drift over which Shepard, as a great wizard of the imagination, creates a heady cocktail of postcolonial delights, interweaving morbid evocation of a Cambodia undermined by trafficking and tourism, improbable river hike, orgiastic sessions and amazing rituals.
At the end of the story, the stakes are still not made: what did Thomas Cradle really live or dream of? What about this ultimate forest where the entire Cradle lineage seems to gather in a frightening mass grave? The dog-eared Book of my life opens a new, fascinating path in this immense dreamlike and political narrative labyrinth that is the work of Lucius Shepard, one of the most fascinating there is. Francois Angelier
TEST. “La Fontaine”, by Michel Serres
For a long time, Michel Serres (1930-2019) dreamed of writing about La Fontaine (1621-1695) a sum that would not only concentrate the admiration he had always devoted to Fables, but what he owed them as philosophical as well as literary objects, purveyors of new light, according to him, on the origins of human thought, before language and at its source, in a networked reality where humanity and the animal kingdom weave a world always present in ours, in “Palimpsest”. This project never saw the light of day.
You have 65.02% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
–
