- 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.