This extravagant novel marks the English-language debut of one of France’s most exciting and controversial writers. At the center is a mysterious excavation site in southwest France, where the skull of a 500,000-year-old man has been discovered. Simon, a journalist assigned to do a story on the cave, is a voluptuary keenly responsive to his surroundings, finding an erotic patina over everything he sees, hears, touches, imagines. As he and a young archeologist from Cameroon find themselves drawn into a whirlwind of sexual hunger, the surrounding countryside fills with strange and exotic visitors: an escaped Basque terrorist, a roving lynx, a redheaded biker queen and her latest conquest (a village waitress), tourists from Northern Europe, a hermit, a gold prospector, a madwoman. . . . All these characters and narrative strands come together at the conclusion as the countryside goes up in flames. In The Cave of Heaven Grainville explores the mystery of origins, the convergence of the prehistoric past on the technologic present, and the primitive impulses that still reside in the modern heart and mind. The journalist Simon encompasses in his visionary imagination both epochs, the savage and the civilized, united by his Rimbaudesque sensitivity to extremes (of language as well as behavior). “Nature out here is subject to unpredictable excesses,” he notes, which Grainville matches with the unpredictable excesses of his highly imagistic prose, superbly rendered here in Dominic Di Bernardi’s translation.

Cave of Heaven

Literature & Fiction

Grainville, Patrick

Contemporary

Dalkey Archive Press

This extravagant novel marks the English-language debut of one of France's most exciting and controversial writers. At the center is a mysterious excavation site in southwest France, where the skull of a 500,000-year-old man has been discovered. Simon, a journalist assigned to do a story on the cave, is a voluptuary keenly responsive to his surroundings, finding an erotic patina over everything he sees, hears, touches, imagines."

Le Dernier Viking (French Edition)

SEUIL

La Caverne céleste

Genre Fiction

Literary

POINTS

Paradis des orages (le)

A Marine, fulgurante et perdue. A Sylvie des favelas. A Napoleon Hugo, le chauffeur de taxi. A toutes les Carmelina du Brésil. A Gilberto Gil pour la musique surnaturelle de Mãe Menininha. A la générosité rouge d'une vraie terre, à sa chair. A Rio dévoilée toujours à l'aurore. A sa Zone Nord immense comme la peur de la mort, à sa colère. A la cité unique. Aux Deux Frères, Dois Irmãos.

Colère

Dernier Viking(le) (English and French Edition)

Contemporary French Fiction

La plus célèbre estampe érotique japonaise d’Hokusaï, Le Rêve de la femme du pêcheur, revisitée par Patrick Grainville.Le récit se déroule sur une île imaginaire d’Extrême-Orient ; un soir, le volcan de l’île se réveille ; la terre tremble ; les toits des maisons du village s’effondrent. Un jeune homme, Haruo, porte secours à une jeune veuve, Tô. Il la découvre nue ; la vision de cette nudité provoque chez lui un désir fou, une passion violente pour cette femme. Il cherche à la revoir et surprend, une nuit, une pieuvre se glissant dans sa chambre et s’enlaçant à elle. Cette vision monstrueuse, cette étreinte impossible avec l’animal va le renvoyer à une terrible angoisse du corps et du sexe féminin. S’ensuit une quête initiatique au cœur du paysage asiatique qui amènera progressivement le jeune homme à démêler la beauté du monde et à se libérer ainsi de ses peurs. Le Baiser de la pieuvre raconte cet enchantement aussi ambigu que salvateur.

Le Baiser de la pieuvre

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