When to Go into the Water
Lawrence Sutin, . . Sarabande, $15.95 (152pp) ISBN 978-1-932511-72-7
In discrete, delightfully composed vignettes, Sutin, a biographer of Aleister Crowley and Philip K. Dick, tells the rags-to-riches story of a French peasant farmer. Born in 1900 on a farm in eastern France, Hector de Saint-Aureole, the humble protagonist of this clever pseudobiography, gravitates first to Paris, where he works as a renderer in an abattoir, then to London, where he becomes a barman in Bloomsbury. Luck strikes the young man in the form of a friendship with a Scotsman who dies and leaves Hector his considerable estate: “a fortune to assure a lifetime of ease and choice.†Hector sets out to explore the world, determined to leave a record of his passage, which takes the shape of his life's opus,
Reviewed on: 03/30/2009
Genre: Fiction