Island of the Dead

by Jean Frémon, Cole Swensen (Translation)

The various characters that inhabit Paris’s Jardin des Plantes share their researches and knowledge with one another, just as they share petty jealousies, admirations, and dislikes of one another. Through the eye of the unnamed narrator, Frémon creates a world of what often seems like random bits of knowledge but is, in fact, an interconnecting skein of ideas—philosophical, scientific, religious, and literary—that questions and searches out the meaning of everyday life and, just as importantly, how each of us experience it. Or, do we experience it? Are we each lost in our own conception of things? With wit, humor and a profound sense of intellectual curiosity, Frémon explores just these issues.

Director of the famed art gallery, Galerie DeLong in Paris, Jean Frémon is the author of numerous works, including Le jardin botanique (The Botanical Garden), L’Exhibitionnisme et sa pudeur, and, in English, Painting and Proustiennes.

250 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2002

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cover yourself in spines, spikes, quills, exhale an intolerable odor, inject poison with a quill or stinger. When things get rough, flee, hide, freeze, take on the colors of the surrounding leaves, put on a thick, scaly shell, pull in your head, puff out your cheeks, bristle your hair, turn red, look mean. Confuse your enemies with spots, stun them through hypnotism, trick them with another species' song. Anything's fair if it aids survival. Beyond my little morning excretions, I throw out a few words, a few spots, a few tunes; I build a rampart enclosing my territory, a wall, my little wall of China.

Van Gulik tells us that the ancient Chinese built little walls in front of their houses to trip up the ghosts that wander at night and attack the living. He claims that such ghosts only know how to walk in a straight line. It's their weak point and gives them away every time.