Praise for Jean Echenoz and Ravel :
Rarely has the difficult craft of storytelling been as well mastered.
Every word is perfectly placed; the writing is fluid, never forced, and there isn’t a trace of an awkward phrase, like a garment that fits beautifully even inside-out.
The most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel.
Ravel
A Novel
Translated by Linda Coverdale
With a foreword by Adam Gopnik
hardcover
$19.95
—LE MONDE
A bestseller in France, Ravel is a beguiling and original evocation of the last ten years in the life of a musical genius, written by the acclaimed novelist Jean Echenoz, winner of the Prix Goncourt. The book opens in 1927 as Maurice Ravel—dandy, eccentric, and curmudgeon—voyages across the Atlantic aboard the luxurious ocean liner the France to begin his triumphant grand tour across the United States, where he will travel aboard such fabled trains as the Zephyr, the Hiawatha, and the Sunset Limited, smoking his precious stash of Gauloises along the way.
Illuminated by flashes of Echenoz’s characteristically sly humor, Ravel is not just a delightfully quirky portrait of a famous musician coping with the ups and downs of his professional and personal life but a truly touching farewell to a dignified and lonely old man going reluctantly into the night.
Jean Echenoz is the winner of France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt for I’m Gone (The New Press). He is the author of four previous novels in English translation and is the winner of numerous literary prizes, among them the Prix Medicis and the European Literature Jeopardy Prize. He lives in Paris. Linda Coverdale’s most recent translation for The New Press was Tahar ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light, winner of the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She won the French-American Foundation’s Translation Prize in 1997 and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
hardcover
5 1/4 x 7 1/2, 128 pages
978-1-59558-115-0
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