About the Author

Olivier Targowla is the author of six works of fiction, all published by Editions Maurice Nadeau. Narcisse on a Tightrope is his first novel. Paul Curtis Daw practiced law before becoming a translator. In 2015, the University of Virginia Press published his translation of Evelyne Trouillot's novel Memory at Bay. His translations of stories and other texts from France, Haiti, Belgium, Quebec, Reunion, and Swiss Romandy (forthcoming) appear in Words Without Borders, Subtropics, Asymptote Blog, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, carte blanche, and K1N, among other publications, and in several annual editions of Best European Fiction (Dalkey Archive Press. He serves as an officer and director of the American Literary Translators Association. Warren Motte is College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado and a Chevalier in the Order of Academic Palms. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. His recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), and Mirror Gazing (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014).

Reviews

One can imagine that if Garp had described his world without Irving's assistance, he would have done it with the same cautious curiosity and the same discreet elegance. An absolute must-read.
--- L'Evenement du jeudi

. . . [T]his is what gives the book all its charm---to denounce stupidity and brutality, Olivier Targowla deploys a delicate irony and confers life and speech on this tightrope-walking character. A bit of the marionette, a bit of the imp, who could plausibly have sprung from a story by Robert Walser or from Ivan Goncharov's novel, Oblomov.
--- Art Press . . . [T]his fluid little narrative instills in the reader a sense of strangeness that gives it its value.
--- Le Monde Strange tale of rehabilitation, a tightrope-walking exercise, a pleasing yet painful return to life.
--- Liberation Olivier Targowla had to keep his balance perfectly. His first novel is better than promising, it is deeply mischievous and nonetheless serious, well-constructed, well-written . . . Targowla has successfully brought off a bittersweet fable. He has created a character with a real existence, a slightly loopy fellow who in the end is not nearly as ill as a good many outwardly healthy people.
--- Dernieres nouvelles d'Alsace