Bernard du Bucheron's The Voyage of the Short Serpent is reviewed in Sunday's New York Times Book Review: "Tackling the gruesome and the grotesque with gleeful abandon, The Voyage of the Short Serpent is an eccentric, slightly maddened and often brutally funny tale of a colony of Roman Catholics marooned in medieval Greenland by the encroachment of a new ice age. Much has been made in France of the fact that its author, Bernard du Boucheron, was 76 years old when “Voyage,” his first novel, was published, and there’s something oddly triumphal about the way the narrative takes direct aim at death — which, despite its omnipresence (the bodies pile up rapidly) is never entirely conceded to."
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Blog: The Winged Elephant (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Blog: The Winged Elephant (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Bernard du Bucheron's The Voyage of the Short Serpent is reviewed in the Houston Chronicle book section. Critic Robert Zaretsky says "the novel reads as if Cormac McCarthy had channeled Jack London, or better yet, Dostoyevsky . . . a compelling and well-crafted tale."
Blog: The Winged Elephant (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Bernard du Bucheron's award-winning novel, The Voyage of the Short Serpent, gets a rave review in Booklist: "A medieval bishop travels to the most desolate, forgotten regions of Iceland to investigate reports of paganism among the wretched settlers, whose major choice in life is to die of starvation, freezing, or, once the bishop arrives, torture (for the salvation of their souls, naturally). The story comprises mostly a report from the bishop, whose matter-of-fact tone is so ridiculously incongruous to the atrocities that he encounters (“the crew had partaken of human flesh, even on fish days”) and that he perpetrates (burning a fallen priest at the stake slowly in seal-oil, wood being too scarce for the task) that it is laugh-out-loud funny and revolting at once. With touches of Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies, du Boucheron’s stark tale raises questions of how far we have really traveled from such barbarism, or how quick the fall back might be. Despite all the awful and gruesome happenings, though, the writing is splendid, and this is a strangely pleasurable and completely riveting read, if you’ve got the stomach for it. Fans of post-apocalyptic waste-land tales might be surprised to find them in the past as well." The Voyage of the Short Serpent will be available in bookstores next month!
Blog: The Winged Elephant (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Coming to bookstores in January 2008, The Voyage of the Short Serpent is an extraordinary work that Robert Littell has called "a novel of staggering originality." Written by Bernard du Boucheron, and translated from the French by Hester Velmans, The Voyage of the Short Serpent was an international bestseller and winner of the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Academie Francaise when published in France a few years ago. Finally available to American readers, The Voyage of the Short Serpent is a modern masterpiece about human morality in inhuman conditions, a parable of truth, obsession and the myth of utopia.