Synopses & Reviews
Setting out to tell the story of a mysterious cowboy--a stranger in town with a terrible secret--Christine Montalbetti is continually sidetracked by the details that occur to her along the way, her CinemaScope camera focusing not on the gunslinger's grim and determined eyes, but on the insects crawling in the dust by his boots. A collection of the moments usually discarded in order to tell even the simplest and most familiar story, Western presents us with the world behind the clichés, where the much-anticipated violence of the plot is continually, maddeningly delayed, and no moment is too insignificant not to be valued. Montalbetti's daring theft of movie technique and subversion of a genre where women are usually relegated to secondary roles--victims, prostitutes, widows, schoolmarms--makes Western a remarkable wake for the most basic of American mythologies.
Review
"This novel is a true western adventure--including a duel under the sun--written a la Perec or Claude Simon." Baptiste Liger
Review
"Montalbetti's books are innovative, compelling, and slyly enticing constructions which provide some of the finest readerly experiences that French fiction currently has to offer." Technikart
Review
"Montalbetti... rescues her work from the potential pitfalls of formalism, crafting a novel that's clever and pleasurable, if exhausting in its exhaustiveness." Warren Motte, author of < em=""> Fables of the Novel < m="">
Synopsis
A pioneering French woman turns her eye toward the most classically male American genre.
About the Author
A novelist, playwright, literary critic, and theorist, Christine Montalbetti is also a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII. She has written five novels.Betsy Wing is a writer and translator whose fiction collection Look Out for Hydrophobia appeared in 1991. She is the translator of Western and The Origin of Man by Christine Montalbetti, as well as works by Assia Djebar, Paule Constant, and Édouard Glissant.