Dying /
Belletto, René.
Hertich, Alexander.
Champaign, Ill. ; London : Dalkey Archive Press,
2010.
Take several genre novels telling similar stories of love and death--a spy novel, a romance, an adventure tale--mix them together so that items and images from each start popping up in the others, add playful asides--such as a several-page historical digression on the etymology of the word "prison"--and a collagist's sensibility, and you might end up with the untethered celebration of writing that is novelist Rene Belletto's Dying. Built upon two obliquely converse stories--one of a man who finds himself paying ransom for a woman he's never met, the other of a man who fakes his own death to escape a woman whose devotion has begun to terrify him--Belletto's weird, funny, surprising, and wonderful novel cuts strange and circuitous byways through the landscapes of contemporary literature.
"Rene Belletto is an Infinitely Intriguing Writer, In Large Part Because he Never Fails to Astonish."--Warren Motte, World Literature Today --Book Jacket.
Originally published in French as Mourir, 2002.
Take several genre novels telling similar stories of love and death--a spy novel, a romance, an adventure tale--mix them together so that items and images from each start popping up in the others, add playful asides--such as a several-page historical digression on the etymology of the word "prison"--and a collagist's sensibility, and you might end up with the untethered celebration of writing that is novelist Rene Belletto's Dying. Built upon two obliquely converse stories--one of a man who finds himself paying ransom for a woman he's never met, the other of a man who fakes his own death to escape a woman whose devotion has begun to terrify him--Belletto's weird, funny, surprising, and wonderful novel cuts strange and circuitous byways through the landscapes of contemporary literature.
"Rene Belletto is an Infinitely Intriguing Writer, In Large Part Because he Never Fails to Astonish."--Warren Motte, World Literature Today --Book Jacket.