#post-exoticism

Antoine Volodine’s novel Radiant Terminus is a 500-page post-apocalyptic, post-modernist, post-exotic epic that destabilizes notions of life and death itself. Radiant Terminus is somehow simultaneously fat and bare, vibrant and etiolated, cunning and naive. The prose, in Jeffrey Zuckerman’s English translation, shifts from lucid, plain syntax to poetical flights of invention. Volodine’s novel is…

There is an old saying, some may say a cliche, but nevertheless it rings as wisdom in my waxy ears: The best time to read a Volodine was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. Maybe start with Volodine’s 2021 novel The Monroe Girls, forthcoming in translation by Alyson Waters from Archipelago. Their jacket copy: Breton has seen brighter days. Now his body sags as he pulls a pair of…

Antoine Volodine’s 2007 novel Mevlido’s Dreams is a bleak, dystopian noir novel set several centuries in the future in the ruined city-state of Oulang-Oulane. Here, weary revolutionary Mevlido lives in a decaying ghetto called Henhouse Four, an eerie quarter inhabited by indigents, junkies, and other remnants of failed uprisings who must contend with the giant mutated birds who terrorize the…

Antoine Volodine interviewed at the Evergreen Review

Antoine Volodine is interviewed by Andrew Wilson at The Evergreen Review. The interview focuses on Volodine’s 1990 novel Lisbon, Last Frontier. (Wilson’s translation of the first chapter of Lisbon, Last Frontier was recently published in The Evergreen Review). The interview touches on a number of subjects, including Volodine’s invented genre, post-exoticism. From the interview:

AW: Is…