CosmoZ
Publisher
:
Actes Sud
Parution date
:
EAN
:
9782742793198
Number of pages
:
484
Description
***Translation sample available***
***Rights sold in Italy (Barbes Edizioni)***
A masterpiece.
—Le Soir
An aerial extension of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
—Le Monde
The characters of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz return to experience the first fifty years of the twentieth century as reinvented in CosmoZ. When the characters of the original Oz were born in 1900, in a writer’s imagination, they lived in a novel entirely devoted to fantasy. Claro releases them in the war-torn Europe of World War I into a reality that is populated by genuine torturers and fake healers. As their new world flirts with apocalypse, they become undesirable orphans searching for a lost paradise.
Dorothy is now a naïve young nurse; Nick Chopper—the tin man—is an amputee from the war; and Oscar Crow has no memory. Elfeba—Glinda—is a female aviator who dreams of writing luminous words across the sky; and the dwarves, Avram and Eizik, are being pursued by the FBI. Separately and then together, they roam Europe and the United States. They are seen as freaks, as “different,” and cruel new policies are put in place to deny them access to the human race.
One by one, Dorothy and her companions are claimed by war, circuses, asylums, and camps. They are manipulated by every kind of charlatan and must desperately search for signs of the mythical Oz in the ludicrous irrational hope of finally becoming what they truly are. In this anti-fairy-tale about metamorphosis on the boundaries between imagination and reality, Claro takes the reader on a fearsome journey to the very limits of wonder.
Author
Claro :
Christophe Claro : Born in Paris in 1962, Christopher Claro has written fifteen novels, among them Bunker Anatomy and Electric Flesh, which were published in English by Marick Press and Soft Skull Press. He is also a translator (with over 100 translations of works by William T. Vollmann, William Gass, Salman Rushdie, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon).
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