The Ring Road
Publisher
:
Éditions Actes Sud
Parution date
:
2008
EAN
:
9782742771691
Description
In this profoundly moving story about love, grief, and friendship, the critically acclaimed author of Oedipus on the Road explores the unpredictable power of memory.
On his daily trip to the hospital to be at his stepdaughter’s bedside, the narrator of Le boulevard périphérique is confronted with the haunting presence of death. Paule, who’s suffering from cancer, is fighting with all the might of a mother who yearns to live for her family. The visits to Paule somehow bring to mind the narrator’s old friend Stéphane, a resistant who died during the war, killed by Shadow, a Nazi officer he was in charge of eliminating.
Stéphane died for having been free—free of the usual fears and the dread of dying. He was the narrator’s friend, but also a master and a model to follow when facing the difficulties of life. When he was teaching the narrator the techniques of free climbing, he could tell him where to go, the way to pass the most difficult walls, and it always worked. Now that Paule’s condition leaves less and less hope to hold on to, the narrator tries to find some guidance in Stephane’s memory and recollects his final days, as confided to him by Shadow himself.
Author
Henry Bauchau : Writer, poet, and psychoanalyst Henry Bauchau was born in 1913 in Belgium. He has spent much of his life in Paris, where he was a friend of Camus and Gide, and later of Lacan and Derrida. Bauchau's novels and poetry have won several major French and Belgian literary prizes, and he was elected to the Belgian Royal Academy in 1990. Oedipus on the Road was published to rave reviews in the United States by Arcade Publishing in 1997.
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