Narcisse on a Tightrope

By: Olivier Targowla, Paul Curtis Daw (Translator), Warren Motte (Introduction by)

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Paperback | 1 June 2021

At a Glance

Paperback
120 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.5 x 13.9 x 0.89

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For seventeen years, Narcisse Dieze, chronic sufferer of a mysterious condition called "cerebral rheumatism"; has lived in the protective confines of a psychiatric hospital. There he has been attended by a contingent of nurses, for whom he has obligingly fathered somewhere between thirty-five and one hundred seventy-one children. (No one knows the exact number.) But the doctors abruptly decide that he is cured and prod him to reenter the outside world. Narcisse is floored, yet he gradually summons the will to try. What follows is an account of this naive and timid patient's adventures in the realm of the so-called sane. An endearing misfit in the tradition of Walter Mitty and Forrest Gump, Narcisse is destined to totter precariously on the highwire of his existence. Will we see him fall?
A quirky fable that pokes holes in the accepted mental health verities and pleads for a touch of madness. With an introduction by Warren Motte.

Industry Reviews

One can imagine that if Garp had described his world without Irving's assistance, he would have done it with the same cautious curiosity and the same discreet elegance. An absolute must-read.
--- L'Evenement du jeudi

. . . [T]his is what gives the book all its charm---to denounce stupidity and brutality, Olivier Targowla deploys a delicate irony and confers life and speech on this tightrope-walking character. A bit of the marionette, a bit of the imp, who could plausibly have sprung from a story by Robert Walser or from Ivan Goncharov's novel, Oblomov.
--- Art Press

. . . [T]his fluid little narrative instills in the reader a sense of strangeness that gives it its value.
--- Le Monde

Strange tale of rehabilitation, a tightrope-walking exercise, a pleasing yet painful return to life.
--- Liberation

Olivier Targowla had to keep his balance perfectly. His first novel is better than promising, it is deeply mischievous and nonetheless serious, well-constructed, well-written . . . Targowla has successfully brought off a bittersweet fable. He has created a character with a real existence, a slightly loopy fellow who in the end is not nearly as ill as a good many outwardly healthy people.
--- Dernieres nouvelles d'Alsace

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