Aseroe

“A singular novel.” —Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t and Essays One

Aseroe, the mushroom, as object of fascination. First observed in Tasmania and South Africa, it appeared suddenly in France around 1920. It is characterized by its stench and, at maturity, its grotesque beauty.

Aseroe, the word, as incantation. Can a word create a world? It does, here. Francois Dominique is a conjurer, who through verbal sorcery unleashes the full force of language, while evoking the essential rupture between the word and the object. An impossible endeavor, perhaps, but one at the very heart of literature.

The narrator of Aseroe wanders medieval streets and dense forests, portrait galleries, and rare bookshops. As he explores the frontiers of language, the boundaries of science, art, and alchemy melt away, and the mundane is overtaken by the bizarre. Inhabited by creatures born in darkness, both terrible and alluring, Aseroe is ultimately a meditation on memory and forgetting, creation, and oblivion.