Meroe: Roman

by Olivier Rolin

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 2020312719
• ISBN13: 9782020312714
• Release Date: August 1998
• Publisher: Seuil
• Length: 237 Pages

Customer Reviews

Rolin's Africa, continued

In this novel we find the protagonist of Port Soudan (the novel) back in his no-man's land, this place of absurd violence and utter dereliction, Port-Soudan.The book is mostly poetic descriptions of this place tattered by endless wars and an extreme climate and of the hapless souls who end up there like Harald, the diceased friend of the narrator whom, we are not too sure, was a man and could now be a bird.There's a bit of a plot as well that comes in the end like a postponed explanation for part of the emotional upheaval at the begining of the book. But, as a warning, we are told that, like the Nile, whose sources are innumerable and lost in the mist of East Africa's high ranges, a story has no real begining. So maybe Meroe really starts with the death in Soudan of General Gordon, the Victorian hero, evoked here through quotes of Lytton Stratchey's Eminent Victorians; or maybe even with the shape of Gordon's London dry gin bottles, which are flat on one side and rounded on the other...As far as I'm concerned, this book could be about the growth of green peas in Northern Luxembourg, and I could still enjoy it; its style is so rich and dazzling it stands on its own, precious, bombastic, roc-solid, like some ruin in the Soudanese desert.