Synopses & Reviews
In awarding him the Nobel Prize in 2008, the Swedish Academy hailed J. M. G. Le Clézio as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation.” The outlying humanity that Le Clézio explores in this collection of stories finds its expression in the understanding of children. The world of
Mondo and Other Stories is that of a natural world pushed to the margins by complacent, indifferent modernity.
Haunting and beautiful, these stories speak to a universal longing for a life beyond the confines and trappings of modern existence. In each tale it is a child who can see and appreciate these places filled with wonder and knowledge. Mondo is a little boy whose connection to the beauty in everything unites a seaside town. Little Cross perturbs the order of things with her question: “What is blue?” Daniel flees his stifling school and absent parents for the sea. All these children, like the wise billy goat in the collections final story, understand “so many things, not the things you find in books that men like to talk about but silent, strong things, things full of beauty and mystery.” And in the end, so do we.
Review
“A cold-eyed rebuke to those who complain of the lack of inventiveness of French writers.”—Jean-Maurice de Montrémy
Review
"Vividly imagined, thought provoking and spare, this is an unusual collection . . . worth searching out."—Sandy Amazeen, Monsters and Critics
Review
“A continually changing, continually new poetic force.”—Christophe Kantcheff,
PolitisReview
“Between a fragile lyricism and an almost silent poetic expression of an absolute, inevitable devastation.”—Hugo Pradelle, La Quinzaine Littéraire
Synopsis
From one of the most original French writers of our day comes a mysterious, prismatic, and at times profoundly sad reflection on humanity in its darker moments—one of which may very well be our own. In a collection of fictions that blur distinctions between dreaming and waking reality, Lutz Bassmann sets off a series of echoes—the “entrevoutes” that conduct us from one world to another in a journey as viscerally powerful as it is intellectually heady. While humanity seems to be fading around them, the members of a shadowy organization are doing their inadequate best to assist those experiencing their last moments. From a soldier-monk exorcising what seem to be spirits (but are they?) from an abandoned house, to a spy executing a mission whose meaning eludes him, to characters exploring cells, wandering through ruins, confronting political dissent and persecution, encountering—perhaps—the spirits once exorcised, these stories conduct us through a world at once ambiguous and sharply observed. This remarkable work, in Jordan Stumps superb translation, offers readers a thrilling entry into Bassmanns numinous world.
About the Author
Lutz Bassmann belongs to a community of imaginary authors invented, championed, and literarily realized by Antoine Volodine, a French writer of Slavic origins born in 1950. Volodines many celebrated, category-defying works include the award-winning Minor Angels (Nebraska, 2004), which blends science fiction, Tibetan myth, a ludic approach to writing, and a profound humanistic idealism. Jordan Stump is a professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of The Other Book (Nebraska, 2011), has translated numerous texts, including Minor Angels, and was awarded the French-American Foundations translation prize and the Prix Médicis in 2014.