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Next month Dalkey Archive will be publishing Demolishing Nisard by Eric Chevillard, one of the more interesting French writers to have come up on my radar lately.
We covered this one at The Quarterly Conversation a while back, long before the book was slated for U.S. publication, in François Monti’s piece on “France’s Foremost Absurdist.”
Since Mourir m’enrhume (Dying Gives Me a Cold) in 1987, Chevillard has published eighteen books, only two of which—Palafox and The Crab Nebula—have been translated into English. One doesn’t need more than a sentence to sum up the argument of a novel by Eric Chevillard: inventing a simple idea and then exhausting it over the course of 150 to 250 pages. His latest novel, Sans l’Orang-Outan (Without the Orangutan) was an affair as straightforward as its title implies: imagine a world where the last orangutan died and figure out the impact. Almost each paragraph develops a new idea, a new possible outcome or consequence in an extremely wide spectrum of situations. This is neither an ecological fable nor a scientifically oriented fiction: Chevillard is France’s foremost absurdist, a modern day surrealist who revels in using popular catchphrases or clichés—here the “butterfly effect” that some suppose will follow the disappearance of a species—and subverts them by means of his imagination and sense of humor.
I also wrote about his strange novel Palafox back in November.
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- Demolishing Nisard Coming in 2011 Very pleased to see that Dalkey will be publishing Demolishing Nisard by the acclaimed French author Eric Chevillard next year. (And this is a great...
- On Palafox by Eric Chevillard I've been intrigued by the contemporary French writer Eric Chevillard ever since Francois Monti called him "France's foremost absurdist" in The Quarterly Conversation. And then,...
- The Quarterly Conversation: Issue 11 Over and Under Our opionated contributers pick 11 overrated books and 11 underrated books. [more] Where the Readers AreEssay bySam J. Miller Stephen King may...
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- Mimesis Amardeep Singh at The Valve: I tried to deflect the conversation onto Nabokov’s real point here, which begins with the principle that art requires a...
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After reading your take on Palafox, he almost seems like he has similarities to Aira with the short, fantastic books that could turn in any directions but his sentences remind me of Marias. Especially the one that starts with, “One morning at dawn, he made his cry heard, which is to say, a sort of chirping, or more of a meowing, or more of a barking, or more of a lowing…” I intend to check that one out or perhaps wait until Dalkey releases his new one.