Carole Allamand

La plume de l’ours

« La soirée était douce pour une fin de novembre et de longs nuages roses s'effrangeaient au-dessus de Brooklyn. »

The Camille Duval case has kept the literary world busy for some fifty years now. No-one has been able to explain why this highly successful Swiss writer emigrated to the USA after the mysterious death of his wife and the unusual move by the Catholic Church in 1948 to censor one of his novels and put it on the Index of banned books. And how was it that, after a twelve years’ silence, he was suddenly once again the man of the moment? How did he manage so radically to renew his style? How did he become the literary genius, which changed the novel for all time?
Camille Duval (1901 – 1974) is one of literature’s special cases; Carole Courvoisier is a young Swiss literary expert, who wants to find the reason for this. So she sets out on the trail of the mysterious writer. But she has no idea that she’s embarking on the craziest quest ever undertaken in the history of literature.
So the heroine of this biographical crime novel finds herself in a ‘road movie’ that takes her across an unfamiliar and untamed America, in the company of Jasper Felder, a veteran of the Iraq War. Their journey goes from Manhattan to Alaska – where an encounter with a grizzly bear finally brings the longed-for truth to light.
The Grizzly Bear’s Pen is a light-hearted tale about a thrilling subject – a tale that runs from the depths of the Hudson River via the remains of the Twin Towers to the world of the Mormon University. And this humorous and satirical novel reveals at the end that research into bears and books will reveal they have a thing or two in common.
(Martin Zingg, translated by Max Easterman, Rosie Goldsmith)

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, www.12swissbooks.ch

Translation of title: The Grizzly Bear’s Pen

Éditions Stock, Paris 2013

ISBN: 978-2-234-07333-3