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Trio

Preface by John Updike
Translated by Barbara Wright

Paperback
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Trio marks the first time these three shorter Pinget works are collected in a single volume. From the sublime surrealism of Between Fantoine and Agapa, through the Faulknerian take on rural life in That Voice, to the musical rhythm and flow of Passacaglia, this collection charts the varied career of one of the French New Novel's true luminaries.

The space between the fictional towns of Fantoine and Agapa is akin to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: an area where provincialism is neither romanticized nor parodied; where intrigue—often violent intrigue—confronts the bucolic ideal held both by insiders and outsiders; and where reality is shaped not by events, but by talk and gossip, by insinuation and conjecture.

Written over the course of his career, these three novels are by turns hilarious and dark, surreal and painstakingly accurate; together they demonstrate the consistent quality of Pinget's versatility.

Details

ISBN-10 1-56478-408-8
ISBN-13 9781564784087
Publication Date Nov 2005
Nb of pages 206
Dimensions 5 x 8 in.

Excerpt



VISHNU TAKES HIS REVENGE


The curé of Fantoine is an amateur. He hasn’t much of a gift for God. He’s bored. He subscribes to theater magazines. He dips into the fashionable authors. He gleans in learned vineyards. He passes for a scholar, but he’s a rotter.

The Fantoine belfry dates from the ninth century. It is extremely stylish. It’s a pity that it goes for walks at night. It can’t read. It visits the church, the village, the environs. You get used to its moods.
...more



Reviews

Press Reviews

New Yorker
"If we can imagine a Faulkner who began with the combative intellectual playfulness of Queneau or Jarry, or a Sound and the Fury that ends with everyone dissolved in Benjy's idiocy, we start to taste Pinget."

London Review of Books
"It can and should be claimed for Pinget that he has produced a sequence of some twenty books over the past three decades, all of which observe the kind of stringent laws of discourse and development that we associate with the Beckett oeuvre. . . . But the comparison with Beckett should not be allowed to mask the fact that this is a wholly original and distinctive achievement."

Los Angeles Times
"The style seems like a combination of Joyce's stream of consciousness with Burrough's cut-and-paste technique."

New York Times
"Robert Pinget deserves more readers."

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