Le Talisman

A farandole as grotesque as it is disturbing takes a prisoner to the King: like a resigned and desperate Scheherazade, the prisoner avoids death by telling a story… That of a soldier in a nameless war. A modern war, out of any precise context, but cold and chilling. Not a war of fighting and explosions, but an empty, white war, where the enemy is already a prisoner, to be watched and tortured. Once the soldier returns home, the slide towards madness becomes more tangible, and from silent ellipses to dull imbalances, the story forms a strange and suffocating loop, with the appearance of a grimacing cartoon. In these pages, Simon Liberman deploys his scratchy, expressive line, his heavy masses, his deformed and grotesque characters to unfold a rough universe of great maturity. The Talisman is a brutal first book, made of enigmatic impressions and striking images, whose bitter taste remains in the mouth for a long time.