With the break-up of Yugoslavia, hundreds of thousands of young people were scattered all over the world. Three of these exiles are back in their town. Along with a young couple who did not leave their country, they form a group of friends. These five highly imaginative characters are respectively: advertising and film designer; musician; software developer; filmmaker; and owner of a café called Pharmacie. Over the course of a scorching summer their friendly exchanges move towards a strange outcome, a kind of collective project… Their town has been bombed. It has lost its bridges and is in the process of rebuilding them. Huge steam hammers operate day and night. Their insistent rhythm dominates the town. Using their various experiences and some brilliantly improvised techniques, the five friends pick up and transform that rhythm – which suggests that of the heart – then send it back onto the city, plunging it into a kind of ecstasy. This is the most obvious framework of a far more complex story recounted by a narrator inclined to restless roaming, the sites of her restless roaming being those of her various forms of knowledge, stories, and myths. In other words, the art of digression, already consummate in the author’s previous novel, Cadeau d’adieu(Farewell Gift) continues to unfold here in an amazing way. Pluie et papier is a complex and demanding novel that will reward the reader with its inventiveness and uncommon originality.
TITLE : Rain and Paper
AUTHOR : Vladimir Tasic
COUNTRY : Canada
AUTHOR : Vladimir Tasic
COUNTRY : Canada
NUMBER OF PAGES : 296
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EXCERPT
The simplicity of Termen’s notion was brilliant. Anyone who has tried to improve radio reception by moving the antenna knows that if a human body is nearby, it creates interference: you think you’ve found the best possible position for the antenna but if you move away, if you sit in your chair, you realize that the reception is worse than before. Through a simple change of viewpoint, Termen told himself that the interference should be seen not necessarily as a problem but rather as a possibility for controlling the sound, which is the very essence of any musical instrument. In 1920, he built a prototype – a wooden box with two antennae, a circular one on the side, a linear one on the top. The pitch of the sound was controlled by the movements of hands close to the antennae; the instrument reacted to their position, accompanying them with a melancholy monophony of which it was later said that it could only have appeared at that time, in that particular place.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Writer, essayist, and professor of mathematics at the University of New Brunswick, Vladimir Tasic was born in Yugoslavia in 1969. In 2004, he won two of the Serbia’s most prestigious literary prizes with Rain and Paper, the Vital Prize and above all, the Nin Prize for the best novel of the year. This literary award is the most famous in Serbia : it has existed over 50 years and the previous winners were Kis, Crnjanski, Ivó Andric, Pekic, Pavic, Arsenijevic, David Albahari, Goran Petrovic. Farewell Gift, has been applaused by critics and booksellers, at the time of his parution in France (2004).
The simplicity of Termen’s notion was brilliant. Anyone who has tried to improve radio reception by moving the antenna knows that if a human body is nearby, it creates interference: you think you’ve found the best possible position for the antenna but if you move away, if you sit in your chair, you realize that the reception is worse than before. Through a simple change of viewpoint, Termen told himself that the interference should be seen not necessarily as a problem but rather as a possibility for controlling the sound, which is the very essence of any musical instrument. In 1920, he built a prototype – a wooden box with two antennae, a circular one on the side, a linear one on the top. The pitch of the sound was controlled by the movements of hands close to the antennae; the instrument reacted to their position, accompanying them with a melancholy monophony of which it was later said that it could only have appeared at that time, in that particular place.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Writer, essayist, and professor of mathematics at the University of New Brunswick, Vladimir Tasic was born in Yugoslavia in 1969. In 2004, he won two of the Serbia’s most prestigious literary prizes with Rain and Paper, the Vital Prize and above all, the Nin Prize for the best novel of the year. This literary award is the most famous in Serbia : it has existed over 50 years and the previous winners were Kis, Crnjanski, Ivó Andric, Pekic, Pavic, Arsenijevic, David Albahari, Goran Petrovic. Farewell Gift, has been applaused by critics and booksellers, at the time of his parution in France (2004).