Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Trafika Europe 11

them the narrator tries to solve the mystery behind the flood of tears with which his strikingly beautiful, intelligent, inscrutable, and impossible mother greeted his birth. Interspersed with these chapters are fragments from the narrator’s conversation with his present lover, a woman who “demands words” from him in a verbal exorcism of his past. A supremely varied stylist in French, Noëlle Revaz created an almost inarticulate peasant voice that was nonetheless capable of expressing both the deep abysses and tentative hopes in brutalized human souls in her novel With the Animals . In her latest novel, The Infinite Book , she employs graceful, even slick prose to fashion a surreal satire of the literary industry and consumerism. In the not too distant future—or is it the present?— books have become merely decorative objects to be hawked on endless talk shows. Some don’t even have pages. Authors are commodities, too, or would be if they weren’t still governed by their vanities, longings, and insecurities. Mundane objects like a single lost shoe, discarded how-to books, a classified ad, an anonymous

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