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Robert Pinget is one of the current
French novels few indisputable glories. There could be no finer introduction
to the mind-boggling uncertainties of life in that blighted arcadia between
Fantoine and Agapa than The Libera Me Domine, the longer, wilder and
more endearing of these two Pinget novels (The Libera Me Domine and
Passacaglia) now supremely well translated by Barbara Wright. John
Sturrock The New York Times
It was in July, a bad month in our parts,
every sort of calamity happens to us in July, fires, car accidents,
hailstorms, drownings but we hadn’t had a murder since eighteen
seventy-three, it’s still there in the records and newspapers of the time,
a fellow called Serinet shot dead by his brother -in-law. We’d never seen
anything like it. The father was a baker, the mother too, they still are,
they’re still there, in the rue des Casse-Tonnelles, but the little boy
isn’t there any more, he’d have been fourteen, such a pretty little boy,
they still talk about him even though they’ve had three children since,
little Laure, little Frederic and little Alfred, all very sweet children.
It’s all very well to say they’ve had three children since, … the tragedy
they lived through you don’t forget just like that, these things mark you
for life…
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