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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.

Island of the Dead

Jean Frémon

Translated from the French by Cole Swensen

Out of Print

The various characters who inhabit Paris's Jardin des Plantes share their researches and knowledge with one another, just as they share petty jealousies, admirations, and dislikes of each other. 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 experiences it. Or, do we experience it? Are we each lost in our own conception of things? With wit, humor and profound sense of intellectual curiosity, Frémon explores just these issues.

Jean Frémon is the author of numerous works, including Le jardin botanique (The Botanical Garden), La Vraie nature des ombres, Le Singe mendiant, L'Exhibition-nisme et sa pudeur, and, in English, Painting (1999).

Book Review(s)

LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW, August 1, 2004

by Susan Salter Reynolds

"Island of the Dead"

“Discoveries, like poems, are a moment of inattention, a stain on the tablecloth made by an overturned glass, the fortuitous passage from one form to another,” writes Jean Frémon in his novel Island of the Dead. Got a question? Need advice? Frémon has put the answer in here somewhere. Of course aphorisms do not a novel make, but literature is the best medium for showing how the mind works, how it hops and clings to fact and fantasy alike.

In Island of the Dead, we find ourselves in the mind of a painter who thinks aloud. When he addresses us, it is in the tone of an overbearing but generous uncle. “You’d prefer a novel, not a treatise,” he admits, but he doesn’t oblige. The story of his love affair with Gertrude, who left him for his enemy, Thomas, will have to supply the arc. Frémon introduces us to his characters: Karl, “passionate advocate of disinterestedness;” and Sam, head of the local zoo, who resembles Samuel Beckett (“Bitter condor,” “eagle with periwinkle eyes”); and Gertrude, who writes letters from Tunisia, but like any narcissist’s object of affection, she’s not quite whole. Our narrator spends a lot of time in a botanical garden painting caricatures. Caricatures are perfect for our painter. After all, he thinks, “without form, spirits wander,” and his drawings are all about form. His mind may wander, but it always comes back to “with whom I took tea.”

He’s trying hard to forget Gertrude and to shake free of his own mind. He cannot sleep, so he takes pills: “I broke with insomnia as with an old mistress.” He’s fond of naturalist ephemera; the central nervous systems of loons, for example, and “inertia of evolution” fascinate him. He has firm ideas about writing: “Sense grounded in the pit of the sentence; sense as the ballast of the sentence. Of course, a sentence that has no sense has no weight, but a sentence entirely taken up by its sense, such as a simple command, has no weight either. It’s the subtle sense, the volatile and ungraspable sense that gives a sentence its weight. The magic formula or incantation, praise, prayer, nursery rhyme.” Part Foucault, part I Ching, part narcissist marooned. It shows how shallow, how deep, how desperate, how alive the human mind can be.

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