The great laughter of men sitting on the edge of the world

first novel الرواية encyclopedias for me, is the story of Paulette Blanchard, a 17-year-old girl in love with freedom who adopts the unexpected form of an encyclopedia of eight alphabets to tell her life within an upper-middle-class family, an environment to which she escapes, who became one of the first Europeans to enter Japan at the end of the 19th century. It then follows the story of Juna, a young artist who finds herself in 2011 in Tokyo at the end of the Fukushima tsunami apocalypse, as she wanders in search of the beloved woman who also escaped.

Interview: Philip Weiss, sitting at the edge of the world

This woman, physicist and climatologist Chantal Blanchard is at the heart of the third volume, which is undoubtedly the most innovative in the work, and at the same time a philosophical and scientific novel, a surreal collage and an adventure novel. Fleeing from Juna, from Japan to Siberia, Chantal questions the world, while searching for the daily alphabet for her grandmother, Paulette Blanchard, whose body has just been found frozen in the Mer de Glace at the foot of Mont Blanc.

In the last two parts of this fascinating collection, we’ll discover the recordings of a young Japanese boy who survived the Fukushima tsunami who talks into a dictaphone to ward off his fear, and a manga whose heroine resists abolition of reality and his body in a virtual Tokyo.

Modernity, apocalypse, environment, human revolution, passion and crazy love, Philip Weiss is constantly creating new forms in this fascinating novel, with humor pervasive throughout.

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Philip Weiss was born in 1982 in Vienna. He studied German, civilization and philosophy. He is the author of plays that have won him many privileges. The great laughter of men sitting on the edge of the world It is his first novel.

File – Novels of the 2021 literary season: Browse the good papers