Where Tigers Feel at Home
Publisher
:
Zulma
Parution date
:
2008
EAN
:
9782843044571
Number of pages
:
774
Description
• Winner of the 2008 Prix Médicis, Prix du Roman FNAC, and Prix du Jury Jean Giono
• Shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, Wepler and Découverte Le Figaro Magazine—Fouquet’s.
• Rights sold to Germany (Ammann Verlag), South Korea (Open Books), Greece (Polis), Italy (Frassinelli), the Netherlands (Ailantus), Czech Republic (Host Nakladatelstvi), Poland (Sonia Draga), Croatia (Novela Media) and Romania (Trei)
• 80,000 copies sold
• Translated sample available
With one foot in Borges and the other in Conrad, we are strolling, rummaging, smiling. It’s Montaigne in an Indiana Jones movie.
—Telerama
This is erudition at the service of a universal adventure-series. Umberto Eco revisited by Indiana Jones in Malcolm Lowry, with a zest of African Queen and Lévi-Strauss in Nambikwara. No, the tropics are not sad!
—Le Figaro Litteraire
Là où les tigres sont chez eux is a deeply researched adventure epic that takes the reader from seventeenth-century Europe to today’s Brazilian favelas.
Eléazard von Wogau lives in Alcântara, a ghost city in the wild north of modern Brazil. He is a foreign correspondent . . . and an expert on the Baroque-age German scholar Athanasius Kircher. Kircher was the founder of Egyptology, a renowned geometer, astronomer, and the inventor of the first megaphone—perhaps the last of the Renaissance men. One day, a fascinating biography of Kircher, seemingly written in the seventeenth century by a Jesuit priest, falls into Eléazard’s hands. Eléazard’s journey into that biography intertwines with the intriguing destinies of the book’s other characters. There is Eléazard’s ex-wife, on a jungle expedition in a search of precious fossils; Moéma, his cocaine-addicted daughter who is studying the origins of primitive tribes; a diabolical local governor; a seductive Italian journalist; and Nelson, a child from the favelas out to avenge his father’s death. The story de Roblès tells—and yes, it is a page-turner—is intellectually and geographically far-reaching, suspenseful, and wickedly humorous.
Author
Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès : Globetrotter and polyglot Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès is a specialist in submarine archaeology. After studying philosophy and history, he wrote La mémoire de riz et autres contes (Seuil, 1982), which received the Académie française award for short stories.
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