La Foret Mont Blanc

Mont BlancFabio Viscogliosi revisits the event referred to but not named in Je suis pour tout ce qui aide à traverser la nuit, the death of his parents in the ' Mont Blanc Tunnel fire of 24th March 1999 ' which claimed 39 lives. At the heart of this book we have the accident, the enquiry, the investigating magistrate's conclusions, the press coverage, the trial and the way in which society as a whole appropriated the event, but - more than anything else - the intimate, day to day reality that the narrator has to confront: emptying his parents' house, clearing their abandoned garden, seeing lawyers, trying to open a recalcitrant trunk, and facing up to several signs and coincidences that throw into question the circumstances of his parents' death which will be a mystery forever. In this mercurial account full of tension and tenderness, Fabio Viscogliosi sounds out the variations in his own thoughts and his shifting moods during the ensuing years, but he also describes his return to the world and his urge to live. Why does he feel that he's now pursued by the Mont Blanc mountain, a character in its own right which he constructs as a literary metaphor? What does it mean to join the ranks of orphans and to share characteristics with David Copperfield? Why was he buying Kraftwerk's album, Autobahn, at exactly the time his parents died? And, above all, what does it mean that his mother and father died together, "as lovers", on the very border that links France and Italy, their country of origin? These are all questions with which the author travels, in the company of Borgès, Kerouac, Daumal and Fitzgerald but also Cary Grant, Annie Ernaux and Wim Wenders, whose presence and particular way of questioning the world create echoes of the powerful, devastating rite of passage that Fabio Viscogliosi reveals to us here. Fabio Viscogliosi was born in 1965 to Italian parents, and lives in Lyon. Also an illustrator and renowned musician, his first book, Je suis pour tout ce qui aide à traverser la nuit was published by Stock in the "La Forêt" series, in 2010. Ma vie de garçon, an illustrated book, has recently been republished by Attila.