D a l ke y a r c h i v e p r ess
Rapids
The Dance of a Sham
Translated by Peter O. Arnds
Translated by Marlon Jones
A sideways view of the “coming-of-age” experience, Rapids is the story of a young man who moves to a strange city and finds himself lost in its warren of streets and squares. He is looking for his own identity—personal, political, and sexual. A series of encounters culminates with his meeting Anja, a strong, older woman, stuck in a relationship with another man she cannot bring herself to leave. Anja becomes an anchor for the young man, yet their relationship must remain a secret— and when that secret finally comes to light, their troubles begin.
“Paul Emond’s characters tirelessly disgorge
Patrick Boltshauser
for sale throughout the world
Patrick Boltshauser
was born in 1971 in St. Gallen,
Switzerland, and grew up in Schaan, Liechtenstein. He attended the University of Bern and worked for several theater groups as an actor, director, and playwright. Several of his plays have been performed in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Poland. Rapids is his first novel.
Paul Emond
their stories, which they invent as they tell them, indulging in whimsies of sequence and fantasy that make Emond a successor to Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy.” —Le Soir
The narrator of this novel begins by introducing himself not as a speaker but a listener, spellbound by his friend Caracala’s yarns, which blend accounts of youthful mischief with casual references to Cervantes and Laurence Sterne. At first, the spotlight is entirely on Caracala, but the narrator soon begins to distrust his friend, concluding that he is no more than a sham, a performer. Yet the reader in turn comes to doubt the narrator’s own pretensions to honesty, until every source of information has become so unreliable as to make the very notion of a “true story” seem like blatant propaganda. Paul Emond
is a professor at the Institut des Arts de Dif-
fusion. An accomplished dramatist and fiction writer, he has written more than a dozen plays performed worldwide.
$15.50 / £10.50 paper 978-1-62897-018-0
$13.50 / £9.50 paper 978-1-62897-032-6
A p r i l 260 pages
J u n e 160 pages
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