“There was a story, probably apocryphal, that James T. Kirk had once said that captaining the Enterprise was like making love in a fish bowl. You couldn’t make a move without someone voicing an opinion about your technique.” ~ David Gerrold, Star Trek: The Next Generation – Encounter At Farpoint So, let’s talk about technique. This week we present, side by […]
By night, David Sarella is a burglar at the bottom of the sea. He’s a lucid dreamer whose dreams are always threatening to slip from his control. Each time, he dreams a new cityscape that only his concentration maintains in a bubble of breathable air. When his nerves or belief waver, the sky starts to cave in from water […]
Discussions of Noël Devaulx often turn around a handful of the best-known, or at least most approachable, stories. And the man has written so many: the count was 105 before his last four collections. I have spoken of Devaulx’s economy; here, for instance, is the opening line of his story “The Lady of Murcia”: We had rented […]
The ogre’s wife is a secret vegetarian, a purger of eaten meats. A girl when the ogre abducts her, she believes him first an angel (in a snowstorm), then a devil (on a beach), mistaking his swiftness in seven-league boots for flight. The child’s perceptions are convincingly presented, and transparently horrifying; for adult readers, the crime is all the more chilling […]
“Noël Devaulx is the secret master of the 20th century French fantastic,” I wrote in 2009. And by that I meant in letters, in essays, in interviews, in conversation, he was the name on everyone’s lips, everyone I was reading and researching. Scratch a French fantasist, find a reference to the former Breton engineer, René Forgeot, whose pseudonym had been […]
“We must refuse madness,” writes Marguerite Cassan at the end of “On the Line,” one of nine stories in Develop in Darkness (À développer dans l’obscurité, Laffont, 1967), and this tension between refusal and embrace, suspicion and abandon, fuels much of the book’s conflict, dividing those whom darkness touches from those who tell their tales. Little […]
Though Jean Ferry (1906 – 1974) primarily made his living as a screenwriter, he was involved in many notable movements of 20th century French literature. He was a satrap of the College of ‘Pataphysics, an Oulipo guest of honor, and the greatest specialist of his day in the works of Proust’s eccentric neighbor and cult figure, Raymond Roussel. As […]
To mark the second issue of Unstuck, due out this week, I’m devoting the next two weeks to Marcel Béalu, author of “The Water Spider.” But don’t buy Unstuck for my translation: buy it for more than 500 pages of elephant men and minotaurs, magic charms and lost islands, talking dogs and miniature husbands, orphans […]
“And you, sprawled upon your cushions, watching and listening to me tell my tale, you who believe me but a fleeting reflection of reverie in the torpor that follows a fine meal, are you sure it is any different for you, that each and every one of your […]
Editor’s Note: The following is a continuation of last week’s column, which can be read here. VI. The Last Days of an Immortal begins with a death, and a statement of epistemological uncertainty that resonates throughout the entire book. The setting is like any number of perfect futures we’ve seen before, where the human form, in close-fitting and […]