Dec/Jan Issue of Bookforum
The Dec 08/Jan 09 issue of is now available both in print and online. As always, there’s a lot of great stuff, including a review of Saramago’s and Olivier Pauvert’s which sounds pretty cool:
The dystopian thriller is narrated by an unnamed white man, who discovers the mutilated body of a young woman hanging from a tree. He is arrested for the crime and thrown into the back of a police van, but en route to a location out of town, the van crashes and the narrator finds himself the sole survivor. Panic-stricken, he wanders the streets of Paris trying to piece together what happened, soon realizing, with a 鈥減iercing sense of d茅j脿 vu,鈥 that he has been transported twelve years into the future. The novel then follows a trajectory of malevolent discovery: The narrator has no reflection, his body has morphed into that of another person, and he can kill others with his maniacal stare. He is neither dead nor alive, a 鈥淏astard With No Name, neither chosen nor condemned, an In-Between, a remanence,鈥 hiding from a government that has devised a method of collective mind control. Only the Noir, a disparate group of nonwhites who fight 鈥渘ot to change anything but just to avoid disappearing altogether,鈥 can help him.

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