Around the Webs

April 25th, 2014 § 0 comments § permalink

  • At The Pan Review, Mark Andresen devotes some well-chosen words to Jean Ferry’s collection The Conductor and Other Tales:

First there is the voice; lackadaisical, steeped in cynical wit. Then there is the experience. Unmistakeably, that of a man in middle-age[…]

The frontispiece image is a welcome photograph of the author, taken the year before his death in 1973. Sitting on a swing in his back garden, Ferry is bald, bespectacled and gnomishly pudgy, his fingers clasped together beneath his belly, like a Buddha with a philosophy doctorate. If any reader doubted satirical humour resided in the suicidal instinct, this intriguing reissue responds in the paradoxical positive.

I like very much Andresen’s take that Ferry’s “Failure of a Fine Career in Letters” reflects “Joyce while foretelling Calvino,” though his read on the story “The Society Tiger” is perhaps one of the oddest I’ve encountered:

‘The Society Tiger’ is a glimpse into the author’s compassion, (at animal maltreatment) which might otherwise have been assumed wanting elsewhere.

  • An interview I translated with Swiss comics creator Frederik Peeters is up at Comic Book Resources, in concert with the recent U.S. release of Book  I of his far-future SF series Aama.

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