Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Four nightmarish novellas . . . The writing is sinuous and propulsive; disturbing images are rendered with icy, swift precision." The New Yorker
These stories lead the reader on a race through the abyss . . .” Paul La Farge, author of Luminous Airplanes
"Here genitalia prove as amorphous as the desires they incite, and slaughter leaves only casual impressions upon its casualties. . . . As much as we loathe these atrocity exhibits, we turn every knob. Littell has organized the mechanisms, but our desire is what fuels the machine." BOMB
The stories evoke the fin-de-siècle sensibility of Baudelaire or Schnitzler.”
Publishers Weekly
A living, breathing, sublime collection of novellas that ignite the readers imagination and entices their most base of desires to grab control.” Typographical Era
"The four novellas that comprise this collection deal with a wealth of themes, but the ultimate one is of unachieved desire and the isolating mania it spawns. . . . Surrealistic doesnt fully capture the formal breed of this collection." HTMLGIANT
"Littells stories are structurally elegant . . . The Fata Morgana Books is a frequently thought-provoking [read]." Foreword Reviews
"A gorgeous tour through a world of human excess and futility . . . exhilarating." Numéro Cinq
Synopsis
The Prix Goncourtwinning author of the scandalous The Kindly Ones returns with four new novellas that offer startlingly fresh depictions of age-old obsessions: sex and love, desiring and gazing, and the memories that take a lifetime to process. In The Fata Morgana Books, Littell crafts unique narrative voices by letting sensual feelings take the fore, whether the slippery promise of silk underwear, the dizzy intensity of abstract art, the languid torpor of a French beach, the shock of a bulls goring horn, or the warmth of a fondled breast. The connections between events are left obscure, yet these novellas are as striking as a gust of frigid air, presenting a skewed reality in which the reader is drawn forward to figure out who, or what, is telling the story, and why. Narrated by what may be hermaphrodites or ghosts, wanders or wonders, Littells masterful, effortless sentences carry these stories that illuminate the shadowy depths of solitude, reflection, longing, and lust.
"In Quarters" is a Proustian ghost story, or maybe a memory, or a dream. Narrated by a man who may or may not exist, it follows him through a sprawling mansion where he cares for a sick child, though he has forgotten whether or not the boy is his, while stealing food from other's plates and having sex with a beautiful young woman. When he travels to a provincial city, the young woman reappearsor does she? Repeated brushes with shadowy men with umbrellas offer a hint of menace that forms the backbone of this strange tale.
"Story About Nothing" follows a man who cannot remember his birthday "or even the sign under which I was born" as he experiences transgenderism, a pornographic tape given to him by a mysterious stranger, and a Hemingway-esque series of bullfights under the hot Spanish sun. As Littell takes his narrator through a series of affairs, each more ephemeral then the last, it becomes clear that this is a story about the transience of sex, the way that desire evaporates in satiation and then reappears when two strangers share a long look over a strong drink. Anchored by striking imagesa lime sorbet, children diving off of high rocksLittell's tale becomes a trip through desire that is not soon forgotten.
Commanding in spite of their vagueness, beguilingly easy to read but full of depth and mystery, these novellas explore the in-between spaces: between thoughts, between bodies, between hungers and their satisfactions, between eyes and the things they look at.
About the Author
Jonathan Littell received the Prix Goncourt for his 2006 novel
The Kindly Ones, called by
Time magazine unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer.” A former worker for Action Against Hunger in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, the Congo, and Afghanistan, he is the author of more than ten works in French. He lives in Paris.
Charlotte Mandell is the translator of numerous award-winning works of innovative French literature, among them The Kindly Ones, Zone by Mathias Enard, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by Pierre Bayard, and works by Proust, Blanchot, and Jacques Rancière. She lives in New York City.