The Explosion of the Radiator Hose

A Novel

By: Jean Rolin, Louise Rogers Lalaurie (Translator)

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Paperback | 19 January 2011

At a Glance

Paperback
168 Pages

Age
22+

Dimensions(cm)
20.2 x 14.0 x 1.2

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$34.75

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In this nominally true story of an epic, transcontinental road trip, Jean Rolin travels to Africa from darkest France, accompanying a battered Audi to its new life as a taxi to be operated by the family of a Congolese security guard. The ghost of Joseph Conrad haunts Rolin's journey, as do memories of his expatriate youth in Kinshasa in the early 1960s--but no less present are W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust, who are the guiding lights for Rolin's sensual and digressive attack upon history: his own as well as the world's. By turns comic, lyrical, gruesome, and humane, "The Explosion of the Radiator Hose" is a one-of-a-kind travelogue, and no less an exploration of what it means to be human in a life of perpetual exile and migration.

Industry Reviews

Jean Rolin is a companion with whom one can walk as one hears his clear and dispassionate voice, his wry humor . . . One day I ll have to tell this story, the story of my heroic death and the ensuing revolution, he announces on the final page. I look forward to this. --Christian Authier
Like Sebald, Rolin is a master of sentence structure, honing his syntax with considerable elegance, allowing his sentences to reach beyond normative bounds in an effort to bring forth meaning more fully. He is not afraid to loiter here and there, taking his time to develop ideas he finds upon his way, as it were. Though the radiator hose explodes, there is no explosion of truth. Instead, through a deftly ironical and dispassionate gaze, Jean Rolin focuses most closely upon small things, the very ones which in the aggregate compose the fabric of existence in the first world, in the third world, or indeed in a fictional world.

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