Press Review - Anastasia Lester Literary Agency - Free

The Fortress
Novel, 256 pages - 2002
Short-listed for the Femina Etranger
Maxim Livius is a young reserve officer whose military
service is ending. His country is disintegrating, and
there are unmistakable signs of decay in the army as
well. Shortly before his discharge, he is sent to a fortress
in the mountains.
Cut off from the outside world, nothing appears as it
should be : the food is excellent, commands are largely
ignored, the soldiers mustn’t carry weapons… and no
one can understand the reason why. The language can
be compared to Kafka, Borges, and Eco, and the story to
Buzatti’s The Tartares Steppe.
« A masterpiece » (Le Monde)
Foreign rights :
;
G e r m a n y ( K l e t t - C o t t a) - I t a l y
(Nottetempo)
The Garden
Of Diogenes
Novel, 192 pages - 2001
The narrator of this novel (clearly autobiographical)
Suspense
abandons his country ripped apart by civil war and
goes to the neighboring country. However, the uprooted
feeling creates a heavy atmosphere around him. He lives
from hand to mouth and takes refuge in the wait and
inactivity.
He is torn between two worlds : the real one, incarnated
by two strange individuals, Zénon and Simon, who try
to pry him away from his lethargy ; and a spiritual one
into which a bum named Diogenes pushes him to enter.
The narrator hesitates, but when he realizes that he is
no longer able to integrate into society, that his marriage
is a failure, he joins Diogenes, with his car cemetery and
his strange stories.
« What interests me, he says, is man himself and his role
in History ; in other words: man, slave to the materialist
world, in antiquity as in the present, and his connection
with the transcendental world. »
Robert Hász
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amy
É D I T I O N S
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