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Intrepid Visions
When nine edgy, wildly inventive short stories board the choo-choo train. Allegorical fantasy and black humor at their stunning best!
207 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
2 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Carrié
6 books1 followerA postmodern social satirist, black humorist, and candid absurdist, Jacques Carrié keeps his readers forever mystified. No one, some people have said, writes like he does—alternating from very serious and complex to very funny and simple, from linear to non-linear, and bending, mixing, and twerking all genres into one…with a high degree of artistic flair and freedom.
His debut novel The Bridge of Movie Producer Louis King (1981) rose many eyebrows in literary circles, so did his debut collection of short stories Intrepid Visions (1985). Twenty-seven years later (a strange gap for a highly-acclaimed novelist) the trend continued with his second, even bolder and bigger, novel Octiblast (2012), Book 1 of The Octidamned Trilogy. Following this massive 800-page release came Papelitos (2014), another out-of-the-box novel. Then Hard Contacts, a wildly inventive collection of short stories, from the dark side of the soul, released on May 13, 2018. Currently Carrié is fully engaged with The French Volunteer--another massive novel focusing on the battlefield conflicts and near-impossible romance between Lieutenant Dassin and top surgery nurse Encanto during the ravaging Spanish Civil War (1936-39), resulting in millions of slaughtered innocent civilians and total destruction of Democratic Spain by rebel General Francisco Franco, his barbaric Moroccan Army of Africa, and their Axis Powers Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the latter two equally cruel against the Allies Forces in the theater of WWII, which finally annihilated their existence. All these books deal with the human condition in the weirdest of circumstances…whether in the past, present, or future (or combinations thereof).
Jacques Carrié was born in Alès (Languedoc-Roussillon region of France) between the end of the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of World War II, getting his early education together with his brother in neighboring Toulouse. His Parisian father, Marc, a magazine entertainment columnist, then recovering from wounds from the recent war, had been a rising figure in the legendary International Brigades and the Administrator of the also famous Benicassim Medical Center, in Castellón de la Plana, Spain, where he and Pepita, his operating room best nurse (whom he eventually married) once jointly took care of an ailing newspaper correspondent and illustrious novelist named Ernest Hemingway, who needed rest for three weeks in one of the Hospital’s guest beach villas before returning to the front to cover the rest of the war. Lieutenant Carrié and Hemingway had then become buddies and great chatters of topics they shared in common, including their battlefield ambulance driving and medical unit romantic experiences.
At home and at school little Jacques and his brother continued being mystified by the confusion and misery surrounding them. Their innocent fresh start into this unwelcoming, absurd world, violently occupied by invading foreign military troops and weapons of mass destruction, made them feel unwanted, crushed, and full of rancor. It gave Jacques, at least, dozens of reasons to become a serious short story writer and novelist, unafraid to speak his mind and reveal the truth, and, like Picasso, Borges, and Buñuel before him, mold ideas, feelings, visions, and personal experiences into explosive artistic creations, if not fabulations. (The French Volunteer, a gigantic novel due out in 2020, based on his parents’ 3-year involvement in the Spanish Civil War, is both a tribute and condemnation of everything that war does to human beings.)
Such challenge commenced, however, not in Europe, but in the cragged hilltop slums of Caracas, Venezuela, and nearby piranha infested rivers of the rain forests, where he landed one day--both hardly penetrable hideouts, but necessary for protection against machete swinging death squads working for El Dictador. (All this and more soon to appear in fictional manner in Octispin, Book 2 of The Octidamned Trilogy.)
His debut novel The Bridge of Movie Producer Louis King (1981) rose many eyebrows in literary circles, so did his debut collection of short stories Intrepid Visions (1985). Twenty-seven years later (a strange gap for a highly-acclaimed novelist) the trend continued with his second, even bolder and bigger, novel Octiblast (2012), Book 1 of The Octidamned Trilogy. Following this massive 800-page release came Papelitos (2014), another out-of-the-box novel. Then Hard Contacts, a wildly inventive collection of short stories, from the dark side of the soul, released on May 13, 2018. Currently Carrié is fully engaged with The French Volunteer--another massive novel focusing on the battlefield conflicts and near-impossible romance between Lieutenant Dassin and top surgery nurse Encanto during the ravaging Spanish Civil War (1936-39), resulting in millions of slaughtered innocent civilians and total destruction of Democratic Spain by rebel General Francisco Franco, his barbaric Moroccan Army of Africa, and their Axis Powers Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the latter two equally cruel against the Allies Forces in the theater of WWII, which finally annihilated their existence. All these books deal with the human condition in the weirdest of circumstances…whether in the past, present, or future (or combinations thereof).
Jacques Carrié was born in Alès (Languedoc-Roussillon region of France) between the end of the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of World War II, getting his early education together with his brother in neighboring Toulouse. His Parisian father, Marc, a magazine entertainment columnist, then recovering from wounds from the recent war, had been a rising figure in the legendary International Brigades and the Administrator of the also famous Benicassim Medical Center, in Castellón de la Plana, Spain, where he and Pepita, his operating room best nurse (whom he eventually married) once jointly took care of an ailing newspaper correspondent and illustrious novelist named Ernest Hemingway, who needed rest for three weeks in one of the Hospital’s guest beach villas before returning to the front to cover the rest of the war. Lieutenant Carrié and Hemingway had then become buddies and great chatters of topics they shared in common, including their battlefield ambulance driving and medical unit romantic experiences.
At home and at school little Jacques and his brother continued being mystified by the confusion and misery surrounding them. Their innocent fresh start into this unwelcoming, absurd world, violently occupied by invading foreign military troops and weapons of mass destruction, made them feel unwanted, crushed, and full of rancor. It gave Jacques, at least, dozens of reasons to become a serious short story writer and novelist, unafraid to speak his mind and reveal the truth, and, like Picasso, Borges, and Buñuel before him, mold ideas, feelings, visions, and personal experiences into explosive artistic creations, if not fabulations. (The French Volunteer, a gigantic novel due out in 2020, based on his parents’ 3-year involvement in the Spanish Civil War, is both a tribute and condemnation of everything that war does to human beings.)
Such challenge commenced, however, not in Europe, but in the cragged hilltop slums of Caracas, Venezuela, and nearby piranha infested rivers of the rain forests, where he landed one day--both hardly penetrable hideouts, but necessary for protection against machete swinging death squads working for El Dictador. (All this and more soon to appear in fictional manner in Octispin, Book 2 of The Octidamned Trilogy.)
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