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Opening Emmanuel Hocquard’s “narration”
A Day in
the Strait we find ourselves on stage. The book’s first part is entitled “A
Shadow Theater” and would seem to be an investigation of how memory theatricalized the world. Hocquard uses a day’s uneventful outing as a means
for considering how to perceive, how to describe, how to remember….Hocquard’s
Moroccan childhood may account for the Mediterranean light that bathes his
writing…He seems haunted by bright shards of a lost coherence….The point
that Hocquard reaches at the end of his journey has always been there on the
horizon of language, always just beyond touching or possessing: “While the
landscape faded as night approached, this fabric in the air no longer hinted
at anything but its transparency.” Geoffrey O’Brien Village Voice
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