Solo Viola: A Post-Exotic Novel
A harrowing early novel by one of France's most unusual contemporary writers
At once humorous and horrifying, Solo Viola is one of Antoine Volodine's first forays into post-exoticism. He takes the reader into a fictional world where a variety of characters collide: three prisoners just released from jail, a band of circus performers, a string quartet, a writer, and a bird. All are trying to survive in an absurd and hostile environment of authoritarian spectacle, at the mercy of a tyrannical buffoon, and seeking the strange counterbalance of hope in a viola player, whose stunning music just might save them all, if only for a moment.Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
Antoine Volodine has written more than forty novels, using various heteronyms in his ongoing post-exoticism project. Other works in translation include Radiant Terminus, We Monks and Soldiers by Lutz Bassman, and In the Time of the Blue Ball by Manuela Drager.
Lia Swope Mitchell holds a PhD in French from the University of Minnesota. Her translations include Survival of the Fireflies by Georges Didi-Huberman (Minnesota, 2018).
Lionel Ruffel teaches comparative literature and création littéraire at Université Paris 8 (Vincennes-Saint-Denis). His most recent works include Brouhaha: Worlds of the Contemporary (Univocal/Minnesota, 2017).
"Antoine Volodine's Solo Viola is a deft evisceration of fascism, seen through another lens and dislocated to a fantastical world. Volodine, here and elsewhere in his hugely important work, shows how the political and the fantastical can be intertwined in a way that allows a powerful reevaluation to occur--a reevaluation that feels all too starkly relevant to twenty-first-century America."--Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World
"Haunting and elegiac, Solo Viola has its share of whimsy, but it's all in service of an earnest meditation on the dangers of fascism that lingers long after the story is concluded."--Foreword, starred review
