Fragments of a Paradise

Praise

“It’s amazing what Giono has done with Renaissance tales of voyages and monsters, turning them into a paean of the imagination, an invitation to a spiritual voyage. The giant squid! The island! The cook’s face! Bravo. Paul Eprile has done a masterpiece proud.”
—Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story and The Humble Lover

“Giono calls on every sense as he asks us to imagine the most fabulous of encounters—a world where sea and sky, angels and monsters, the mundane and the miraculous are one . . . Fragments of a Paradise is surely one of the most strangely beautiful and original works of the post-war era.”
—Susan Stewart

“Out at sea near the beginning of this beautifully strange, beautifully translated novel, ‘when the sun went down, a broad expanse of sky lit up by increments, as if a wing of fire had slowly spread its feathers apart.’ The whole book is like that. Moment after moment, Giono does for our life on earth what the sunset does for the sky: makes it magical, radiant, spectacular.”  — Damion Searls

“In Paul Eprile’s vital and propulsive translation, Jean Giono’s Fragments of a Paradise becomes a slimmed-down, mid-20th-century Moby Dick. In this existential sea journey, helmed by a captain fueled by curiosity rather than revenge, encounters with monsters lead to an intensification of reality rather than retreats into phantasmagoria. Along with the crew of L’Indien, we must ponder how best to be alive on a wild, watery planet.”
— Catherine Bush