Brothers
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
David Clerson's first novel won the Grand prix littéraire Archambault 2014. It is an original piece of fiction, steeped in myth and fable, a reflection of our own familiar surroundings in a distorting mirror. This world of "monstrous creatures, bigger than anything they could imagine, two-headed fish, turtles with shells as huge as islands, whales with mouths big enough to swallow up whole cities" is seen through the eyes of two brothers, the elder brother missing an arm, the younger fashioned by his mother from that arm.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clerson's debut novel, brought into strong yet delicate English by Grubisic, is an exhilarating collision of genres, including fairy tales, magic realism, and classical, biblical, and indigenous mythologies. Two brothers (who are never named) live with their mother in semi-isolation near a marsh, subsisting on what they catch, and sometimes visiting local villagers to trade objects that drift ashore. The mother tells them about their "dog of a father" and explains how the younger brother was created from one of the older brother's arms so that they could face the world together. When the brothers set off on a journey, it turns out to be not a typical quest but rather a journey of self-discovery, or perhaps a quest whose purpose and endpoint keep disappearing or being forgotten. The anchoring details are deliberately murky. Readers are left to wonder when and where the novel is set, whether the characters are even real, or whether the elder brother the character from whose perspective the story is told is simply dreaming them along with the fragmentary, surreal, often violent events. It won't be to everyone's taste, but this intelligent and urgently written tale is likely to earn a cult following.
