Jean-Christophe Valtat
(Press release) |
Tuesday, September 28 | 6.30 pm | Lecture | AF de Miami
Rencontre/Lecture with Jean-Christophe Valtat, writer
Free entrance / Lecture in French & English
Refreshments will be served after the conference
Born in 1968, Jean-Christophe Valtat is a French writer and teacher.
Educated in the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he is currently Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature in the Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand. His field of research includes romantic, modern and contemporary literature and the relationships between Literature, science, technology and the media.
He is the author of a book of short stories, Album (Léo Scheer, 2003) and two novels for Gallimard: Exes (1997) and 03, (2005), which was published in the USA by Farrar Strauss & Giroux, in June 2010.
His first novel written directly in English, Aurorarama, was published by Melville Publishing House in August 2010.
He also won the Fondation Beaumarchais-France Culture-Villa Médicis prize for the radio play La vie inimitable (2000) and co-directed the movie Augustine (2003).
More : "Take a girl like you" by James Wood - The New Yorker September 6, 2010
Aurorarama
1908. New Venice—”the pearl of the Arctic”—a place of ice palaces and pneumatic tubes, of beautifully ornate carriage-sleds and elegant Victorian garb, of long nights and vistas of ice. But as the city prepares for spring, it feels more like qaartsiluni—“the time when something is about to explode in the dark.”
Local “poletics” are wracked by tensions with the Eskimos circling the city, with suffragette riots led by an underground music star, with drug round- ups by the secret police force known as the Gentlemen of the Night.
An ominous black airship hovers over the city, and the Gentlemen are hunting for the author of a radical pamphlet calling for revolt. Their lead suspect is Brentford Orsini, one of the city’s most prominent figures. But as the Gentlemen of the Night tighten the net around him, Orsini receives a mysterious message from a long-lost love that compels him to act.
03
A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams—full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon, sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up—reveal an entire adolescence. This fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person.
Excerpt:
“From the bus stop across the street, it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that picked her up every morning, that she was slightly retarded. Once you knew, it was easy to make sense of her thin adolescent frame, her black hair spiking up on her little head as though she were enduring some slow, endless horror, her eyes, like those of a heroine in a Japanese cartoon forced open onto the real world, eyes so round and so opaque that if they'd focused on me, I might almost have picked them up like two black marbles rolling in the gutter at my feet.” |
