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For seventeen years, Narcisse Dièze, chronic sufferer of a mysterious condition called
"cerebral rheumatism"; has lived in the protective confines of a psychiatric hospital. There
he has been attended by a contingent of nurses, for whom he has obligingly fathered somewhere
between thirty-five and one hundred seventy-one children. (No one knows the exact number.)
But the doctors abruptly decide that he is cured and prod him to reenter the outside world.
Narcisse is floored, yet he gradually summons the will to try. What follows is an account of this
naïve and timid patient¿s adventures in the realm of the so-called sane. An endearing misfit in the
tradition of Walter Mitty and Forrest Gump, Narcisse is destined to totter precariously on the
highwire of his existence. Will we see him fall?
A quirky fable that pokes holes in the accepted mental health verities and pleads for a touch of
madness. With an introduction by Warren Motte.
About the author
Olivier Targowla is the author of six works of fiction, all published by Éditions Maurice Nadeau. Narcisse on a Tightrope is his first novel.Paul Curtis Daw practiced law before becoming a translator. In 2015, the University of Virginia Press published his translation of Evelyne Trouillot’s novel Memory at Bay. His translations of stories and other texts from France, Haiti, Belgium, Quebec, Reunion, and Swiss Romandy (forthcoming) appear in Words Without Borders, Subtropics, Asymptote Blog, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, carte blanche, and K1N, among other publications, and in several annual editions of Best European Fiction (Dalkey Archive Press. He serves as an officer and director of the American Literary Translators Association.Warren Motte is College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado and a Chevalier in the Order of Academic Palms. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. His recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), and Mirror Gazing (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014).
Summary
For seventeen years, Narcisse Dièze, chronic sufferer of a mysterious condition called
"cerebral rheumatism"; has lived in the protective confines of a psychiatric hospital. There
he has been attended by a contingent of nurses, for whom he has obligingly fathered somewhere
between thirty-five and one hundred seventy-one children. (No one knows the exact number.)
But the doctors abruptly decide that he is cured and prod him to reenter the outside world.
Narcisse is floored, yet he gradually summons the will to try. What follows is an account of this
naïve and timid patient’s adventures in the realm of the so-called sane. An endearing misfit in the
tradition of Walter Mitty and Forrest Gump, Narcisse is destined to totter precariously on the
highwire of his existence. Will we see him fall?
A quirky fable that pokes holes in the accepted mental health verities and pleads for a touch of
madness. With an introduction by Warren Motte.
