Sebastien Brebel - Böcker

The narrator of "Villa Bunker" receives letters, dozens of them, written by his mother in an isolated seaside villa, which tell of his parents' troubles in this uninhabitable house, soon to become a kind of labyrinth roamed by memories and long-buried emotions. At first the narrator's parents fret most about the villa's physical deterioration, but soon their own psychological deterioration becomes the inescapable focus of their stories. Is their joint madness due to the villa's aberrant architecture? Or is its isolation to blame? Or were they mad all along? The narrator is left to decipher the clues, himself in turn becoming prey to his own house, which, like memory and time, seems in a state of permanent metamorphosis.

The unnamed narrator of Francis Bacon’s Armchair has just been released from an extended stay at a psychiatric hospital and now has only one objective: to shut himself away in his apartment and contemplate the best way to restart his life. But his obsession with Cathie, a young woman he met during his convalescence, drives him out of his bedroom one night in search of a telephone—which leads him two floors below into the apartment of his morbidly obese neighbor, Sauvage. Sauvage is a translator overwhelmed by his current project, The Dictionary of Rare and Incurable Diseases, and by the inherent difficulties of his profession. The narrator begins paying regular visits to his mysterious neighbor, and the two isolated men develop a bizarre relationship dominated by fear, jealousy, and mutual fascination. A hypnotic and philosophically dense novel, Francis Bacon’s Armchair deftly weaves between explorations of loneliness, language, and obsession.