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Set in the post-apocalyptic future, this novel of fragments represents contemporary prose at its most daring and experimental.
A propos de l'auteur
Serge LamotheNovelist, dramatist and poet Serge Lamothe has published four novels:
La Longue Portée (1998),
La Tierce Personne (2000),
L'Ange au berceau (2002) and
Les Baldwin (2004). His poems and short stories have also been published in various literary journals. His adaptation for the stage of Kafka's novel
Le Procès direction of filmmaker François Girard (
The Red Violin).
Fred A. ReedInternational journalist and award-winning literary translator Fred A. Reed is also a respected specialist on politics and religion in the Middle East. After several years as a librarian and trade-union activist at the
Montreal Gazette, Reed began reporting from Islamic Iran in 1984, visiting the Islamic Republic 30 times since then. He has also reported extensively on Middle Eastern affairs for
La Presse, CBC Radio-Canada and
Le Devoir. Reed is a three-time winner of the Governor General's Award for translation.
David HomelAward-winning author and literary translator David Homel also works as a journalist, editor and screenwriter. He was born in Chicago in 1952 but left at the end of the tumultuous 1960s and continued his education in Europe and Toronto before settling in Montreal in around 1980. He worked at a variety of industrial jobs before beginning to write fiction in the mid-1980s. His six novels to date have been translated into several languages and published around the world.
Résumé
In the post-apocalyptic future, 50 years after the last government of turbo-liberals and its president-for-life have been elected, a group of researchers convenes a Congress to address the curious cultural phenomenon of the Baldwins, whose stories have been gathered and archived by the chroniclers since the end of history. “Who are the Baldwins?” the Congress asks. “Do they actually exist, and if so, what is their history and their fate?” Only one thing seems certain to these Baldwinologists: “The Baldwins resemble us: they knew nothing of their origins, nor of their destination.”
Set in the landscape of one vast disposal site containing all the refuse of history, and using the rhetorical conventions of precise, objective, depersonalized scholarly research, the world Serge Lamothe brilliantly creates with this novel of fragments is one of a mysterious ambiguity, haunted by Kafka, Orwell, Gibson and Fukuyama.
This is contemporary prose at its most daring and experimental, creating a post-historical world so devoid of difference that the only imaginable use of language is for the mass production of consent—a world in which a nine-year-old’s suicide bombing may well, in fact, constitute the only meaningful act left to The Baldwins: a joyful embrace of the ultimate existential gesture, in which all difference is obliterated, consummated in a martyrdom of innocence on the consensual altar of the morally and politically correct.
