Publisher
:
Gallimard
Parution date
:
1995
EAN
:
9782070742738
Description
In Furies, Luc Lang continues his exploration of the theme of the eternal return. Ferrières is the setting, where as it was the town left behind in Lang’s Voyage sur la ligne d'horizon. It’s fifteen years earlier, and Francis, the main character in the latter novel, is only a secondary character here. He is friends with a young ambulance driver (in the later Voyage…, Francis is a tractor driver) and their lives are an eerie echo.
As the novel opens, André Val is called to the scene of a gruesome automobile accident. The victim is none other than the husband of the love of his life since childhood, Laure. The accident is strangely clean: Pierre has not skidded off the highway, but run straight into the only tree anywhere for miles around that could possibly pose any danger to any motorist from Douai to Ferrières on the highway.
The victim was the uncle and guardian of Laure's young daughter Claire, who though he doesn't yet know it, is Francis's life's own impossible love. Here Andre embodies the small town's curiosity: why doesn't Laure come to Ferrières to her own house any more? Why is Claire always only in her uncle's company? One day André receives a letter from Laure whom everyone believed dead. She is living in London under a new identity. After swearing André to secrecy, she asks him to write and send pictures of Claire and the house across the street. This he does, and as he does it he becomes more and more deeply and personally involved in an investigation into not only the accident, and Laure's absence, but into a family wrought and strewn apart by vengeance.
Author
Luc Lang : Luc Lang is the prize-winning author of the novels Liverpool Marée Haute, Voyage sur la ligne d’horizon, Furies,(with Éditions Gallimard) and Mille six cents ventres (Fayard, 1998, in the original; English translation Strangeways with Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2000, Phoenix House 2002), Les Indiens (Stock, 2001), and of 11 septembre mon amour (Stock, 2003). He is a frequent guest at writers' conferences around the United States.
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