In All Likelihood
Publisher
:
Dilettante
Parution date
:
2010
EAN
:
9782842631871
Number of pages
:
154
Description
The short stories in In All Likelihood, Laurent Graff’s latest book, each involve a disappearance or an appearance . . . or something in between. His stories contain the absurd and the downright improbable and are full of allegory and symbolism.
A customer in a department store, in the opening story, is not really a shopper; he’s there to rate the level of customer service. His job completed, he proceeds to leave the store but finds that he’s trapped. In the next story, a stillborn fetus discusses his near-life experience, and in another, the world as we know it is flipped over and around by the absence of love and the notion that death suddenly no longer exists. Not only people and beliefs disappear: In one story, a woman’s last name, at first impossibly long, gradually erodes; in another, an archivist gradually loses everything he has called his own, even his hair. Then there is the man who eats himself to survive. And in the story “Mausoleum,” a string of disappearances drives a reporter to follow the trail of a man last seen on a highway. He discovers that people from around the world are suddenly abandoning their tasks . . . and bringing what they have in their hands to add to a growing pile of stuff, a monument, some say, of random objects.
Author
Laurent Graff : Laurent Graff is the author of several works of fiction, including Les Jours heureux (Happy Days, Carroll & Graf, 2004; Prix Millepages, 2002). Film rights to Happy Days have been optioned by Johnny Depp for Parliament Pictures/Warner Brothers.
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