Let's Take That from the Beginning Again

• Published in: SubStance 2003, Vol.32 (2), p.12-43
• Main Authors: Volodine, Antoine, Wagneur, Jean-Didier, Lapidus, Roxanne
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Blanchot, Maurice (1907-2003); Camps; French literature; Literary criticism; Literary influences; Literature; Memory; Narrators; Novels; Poetry; Police; Prisons; Questioning; Science fiction; Writers; Writing
• ISSN: 0049-2426; 1527-2095; 1527-2095
• DOI: 10.1353/sub.2003.0048

Since I published my first novels in a science fiction collection, I was in contact with the world of science fiction authors of the 1980s. In the fantastic and political universe of Lisbonne, dernière marge, Ingrid Vogel recreates worlds—the "society of the Renaissance"—where the poetic word is capable of threatening the impostures and lies upon which a totalitarian society is constructed. Since Ingrid Vogel is in reality a militant in clandestine and urban guerilla operations, she projects into her imaginary book elements that structure her own vision of the world: combat, violence, weapons, faction struggles, fear, the police, madness. When Fabien Golpiez recounts fragments of his individual and collective experience, when he chooses to recount them in a dream-like manner, in a disorder that prevents the hostile listener from fully and easily reconstituting the story, he abandons himself to the exercise upon which nearly all post-exotic fiction rests. [...]in his world of fictional references, one encounters a lot of elements that refer the reader to precise historical or political information, but which do not directly belong to the fiction. [...]it is very personal—there is an element of author-character attachment.