Description

Book Synopsis

A truly mind-bending novel from an author prized for his experimental fusions of nouveau roman techniques and Oulipian constraints

An editor at a Parisian publishing house receives a manuscript by someone calling himself Desiderioa manuscript that bears an eerie resemblance to his own life and to a book he was planning to write on a Renaissance painter of the same name. He decides to use his vacation time to visit the place from which it was sentthe quaint, historical seaside town of V.and believes he has identified the author: one Jean Morelle, himself a tourist, who disappeared the very day the manuscript was mailed. The narrator decides to play amateur detective and track down Morelle, unaware that as he becomes more deeply enmeshed in the mystery, the streets of V. will bend around him like a Möbius strip to form a loop that seems to offer no escape.
A portrait of obsession, Vacated Landscape is both ingeniously fractal and exuberantly byzantine. It is the first novel of Jean Lahougue's to be translated into English.
Jean Lahougue (born 1945) is a French novelist. A lifelong Agatha Christie fan, he won (and refused) the Prix Médicis in 1980 for Comptine des Height, a puzzle-novel patterned on Ten Little Indians.

Vacated Landscape

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    A Paperback by Jean Lahougue

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      Book details

      Publisher Wakefield Press
      Published 11/21/2024
      ISBN-13 9781939663979
      978-1939663979
      ISBN-10 1939663970
      Also in:
      Contemporary Fiction

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      A truly mind-bending novel from an author prized for his experimental fusions of nouveau roman techniques and Oulipian constraints

      An editor at a Parisian publishing house receives a manuscript by someone calling himself Desiderioa manuscript that bears an eerie resemblance to his own life and to a book he was planning to write on a Renaissance painter of the same name. He decides to use his vacation time to visit the place from which it was sentthe quaint, historical seaside town of V.and believes he has identified the author: one Jean Morelle, himself a tourist, who disappeared the very day the manuscript was mailed. The narrator decides to play amateur detective and track down Morelle, unaware that as he becomes more deeply enmeshed in the mystery, the streets of V. will bend around him like a Möbius strip to form a loop that seems to offer no escape.
      A portrait of obsession, Vacated Landscape is both ingeniously fractal and exuberantly byzantine. It is the first novel of Jean Lahougue's to be translated into English.
      Jean Lahougue (born 1945) is a French novelist. A lifelong Agatha Christie fan, he won (and refused) the Prix Médicis in 1980 for Comptine des Height, a puzzle-novel patterned on Ten Little Indians.

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