GREEN INTEGER

750 S. Spaulding Ave., Suite 112
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Complete Catalog

* SALES *

Pallaksch, Pallaksch

Liliane Giraudon

Out of Stock

Liliane Giraudon
Pallaksch, Pallaksch
Series No.: SMC 061
ISBN: 978-1557131911, Pages:
French Literature, Fiction

A Sun & Moon title.

* * *

The words "Pallaksch, Pallaksch" are reportedly those spoken by the mad Hölderlin to mean both yes and no. No one could interpret those words precisely; one could not know whether he meant yes I'd like soup or no, I wouldn't until he took the soup or threw it in one's face. The very indeterminacy of this phrase is appropriate to these haunting tales about the lives of the poor and the oppressed. In "The Artist" a man describes his life in a cannery as accountant and his private, artistic life of embalming the workers in the factory. In "The Border" a man escapes to the country, delaying his return to his lover and city, until he gradually retreats, hermit-like, so far into nature that he literally becomes part of it. Giraudon's dark world is that of the outcast, of abused children, and hapless lovers. But her stories are not those of pity but of magic and dark mysteriousness, revealing her fascination with the fabric of each individual's life.

Also by Liliane Giraudon:

Fur [Sun & Moon], Digital Only

Book Review(s)

THE COLLIDESCOPE, September 16, 2022

by George Salis
From “An Incessant Mending / Un incessant raccommodage: A Bilingual Interview with Liliane Giraudon”

George Salis: Your fiction borders on the surreal. Do you have an affinity for surrealism or do you not think in terms of this cultural movement?

Liliane Giraudon: I don’t know if what I write borders on the surreal. For me, it’s about the way one looks at things. From afar. From a vantage point and, above all, of working through the language. How language adjusts to reality. An angle of attack. The initiating and then the functioning of the textual machinery. As a teenager, the great surrealist texts deeply affected me, it was like opening a window and airing out the premises, but I was already reading Kafka and Dostoyevsky so I very quickly turned away and went to look elsewhere… In the greatest disorder and without too much method. But I think it was above all the Dadaist movement that impressed me the most, their radical activism… And then there was Proust and Saint Simon and Dickinson, Stein and above all the shock felt on reading Testimony and then Holocauste by Reznikoff… It was a terrible shock. I stopped publishing poetry to produce only short prose (unlocatable short stories)…for years. It was after breast cancer that I returned (in 2009) to poetry books with La poétesse [The Poetess] still with P.O.L… But they’re “impure” books with mixtures of prose, mini-plays or even photos as in L’amour est plus froid que le lac [Love is Colder Than the Lake] (currently being translated by Sarah Riggs and Lindsay Turner) where stills from a Fassbinder film are embedded… READ MORE

Green Integer | 750 S. Spaulding, Suite 112 | Los Angeles, CA 90036
Contact Us