BETWEEN FICTION AND REALITY: LE LIVRE DE LA FAIM ET DE LA SOIF BY CAMILLE DE TOLEDO

In his last novel, Le livre de la faim et de la soif, Camille de Toledo uses a less common narrative strategy: he delegates his powers as a novelist to a dactylographer; in this way he joins the tradition going back to some medieval and renaissance works. Furthermore, the book itself becomes one of its own narrators. This book transforms itself from a simple object to a "Don Quixote in paper". According to the statements of his author, the book would like to enter life and to continue its own adventure while telling a labyrinthine fiction. The author wonders if the adventure will be the bearer of triumph or of the disappearance of the book. This question, as well as the different narrative strategies deployed by the narrator and his dactylographer-secretary, and the dialogue established between different characters of the story and the literary and artistic tradition, between reality and fiction, are the subject of our analysis.