The Real Life of Shadows

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Translated from the French by Cole Swensen. Jean Frémon writes about painters he loves, contemporary and otherwise, about writers, whose books are sometimes named, and who at other times stay unnamed. He visits each one at a crucial moment of his life, creating thus an essential and spiritual biography of each. The particular elegance of his writing and the form he uses make us privileged witnesses of his investigations."Jean Frémon's REAL LIFE OF SHADOWS delivers its dazzling récits with delicately calibrated irony. Frémon writes in "the words of others" tales of stunning quiet mystery. His painterly journey, ably translated by Cole Swensen, portrays a parallel present of chance and circumstance, where fragmented narrative, or narrative fragments, fall into the gaps as well as the text, intervals fulfilling inscription."—Norma Cole