Demolishing Nisard

by Éric Chevillard, Jordan Stump (Translator)

Overview

New work from the acclaimed author of "The Crab Nebula" and "Palafox."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564786333
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	08/18/2011
Series:	French Literature Series
Pages:	135
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Eric Chevillard was born in 1964 in La Roche-sur-Yon in the west of France. He published his first novel, "Mourir m enrhume" ("Dying Gives Me a Cold"), at the age of twenty-three, and has since gone on to publish more than twenty works of fiction, including "The Crab Nebula, On the Ceiling, Palafox", and "Demolishing Nisard".

Jordan Stump is the noted translator of several modern French novelists, including novel prize winner Claude Simon, for whom his translation of Le Jardin des Plantes won the French American Foundation s Translation Prize.

Editorial Reviews

This whimsical broadside by Chevillard (The Crab Nebula) directed against the 19th-century traditionalist litérateur Désiré Nisard is the equivalent of a Gallic smack down: a fun, highly staged, fantastical vaudeville act, complete with the requisite salvos directed at Nisard's ancestry, birth, sexual proclivities, and of course his entire unfortunate literary legacy. But this manifesto is also an earnest endeavor, as the erstwhile critic's "disseminated ideas mingle with the air around us just as the atoms of his decomposed corpse mingled with the earth," simultaneously a cathartic rant and a tongue-in-cheek quest, as our all-consumed narrator sets out single-mindedly to unearth an elusive copy of Nisard's "lascivious tale" A Milkmaid Succumbs. "Nisard's ribaldry bespeaks clearly enough the poverty of his imagination: his very libido inspires in him only the most pitifully banal sort of fantasy." Aided by Jordan Stump's vivacious translation, which captures equally both the verve and the tomfoolery of the original, this tragicomic manifesto reads like a good farce peppered with some heartfelt cultural criticism and a copious serving of existential angst. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Chevillard is not only an extremely funny and witty writer, he also happens to be one of the most fascinating stylists at work in French today. To read him is to expose oneself to serpentine phrases and paragraphs, to crawl on the page, to take the long ride and then the short ride, to enjoy one-sentence haikus, to discover an art of the counterpoint that always catches the reader off guard.

Quarterly Conversation

What could be more serious and important for an artist than the need to destroy his critics? . . . Chevillard has chosen as target for his ire the destructive Jean Napoléon Désiré Nisard (1806–1888) . . . [and] subverts this obsession into brilliant comedy. Nisard is everywhere . . . We may choose between taking Nisard’s side or enlisting to destroy Nisard ourselves.

Le Monde