The Mystery of Henri Pick
Page 20
“Okay, we’ll see. Anyway, I’m going to look around. I’ll probably borrow a book.”
“Wonderful,” said Magali, smiling as if he’d just paid her a compliment.
Frédéric headed over to the bookshelves, thinking over the offer she’d just made. When his first manuscript had been accepted for publication, he’d imagined himself surrounded by young female fans, receiving literary prizes, perhaps even the Goncourt or the Renaudot. He’d also thought that his books would be translated all over the world, and that he’d travel through Asia and America. Readers would eagerly await his next novel, and he’d be friends with other great writers. He’d thought all of this, but he hadn’t imagined that he would end up helping elderly people to write, in a small town in the wilds of Brittany. Surprisingly, this idea made him smile. He couldn’t wait to tell Delphine about it; he loved being close to her. And he was going to be a father. He realized, even more forcefully now, that the prospect filled him with joy.
5
A few minutes later, he took the manuscript of The Man Who Told the Truth from his bag and left it in the library of rejected books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Novelist, screenwriter and director David Foenkinos was born in 1974. He is the author of fourteen novels that have been translated into forty languages. Several of his works have been adapted for film, including Delicacy (2011).
Sam Taylor is a literary translator and novelist. He has written four novels, which have been translated into 10 languages, and translated more than 50 books from French including Laurent Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language and Hubert Mingarelli’s Four Soldiers, both longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and Leila Slimani’s bestselling Lullaby.
PUSHKIN PRESS
Pushkin Press was founded in 1997, and publishes novels, essays, memoirs, children’s books—everything from timeless classics to the urgent and contemporary.
Our books represent exciting, high-quality writing from around the world: we publish some of the twentieth century’s most widely acclaimed, brilliant authors such as Stefan Zweig, Marcel Aymé, Teffi, Antal Szerb, Gaito Gazdanov and Yasushi Inoue, as well as compelling and award-winning contemporary writers, including Andrés Neuman, Edith Pearlman, Eka Kurniawan, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and Chigozie Obioma.
Pushkin Press publishes the world’s best stories, to be read and read again. To discover more, visit www.pushkinpress.com.
THE SPECTRE OF ALEXANDER WOLF
GAITO GAZDANOV
‘A mesmerising work of literature’ Antony Beevor
SUMMER BEFORE THE DARK
VOLKER WEIDERMANN
‘For such a slim book to convey with such poignancy the extinction of a generation of “Great Europeans” is a triumph’ Sunday Telegraph
MESSAGES FROM A LOST WORLD
STEFAN ZWEIG
‘At a time of monetary crisis and political disorder… Zweig’s celebration of the brotherhood of peoples reminds us that there is another way’ The Nation
THE EVENINGS
GERARD REVE
‘Not only a masterpiece but a cornerstone manqué of modern European literature’ Tim Parks, Guardian
BINOCULAR VISION
EDITH PEARLMAN
‘A genius of the short story’ Mark Lawson, Guardian
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SEA
TOMÁS GONZÁLEZ
‘Smoothly intriguing narrative, with its touches of sinister, Patricia Highsmith-like menace’ Irish Times
BEWARE OF PITY
STEFAN ZWEIG
‘Zweig’s fictional masterpiece’ Guardian
THE ENCOUNTER
PETRU POPESCU
‘A book that suggests new ways of looking at the world and our place within it’ Sunday Telegraph
WAKE UP, SIR!
JONATHAN AMES
‘The novel is extremely funny but it is also sad and poignant, and almost incredibly clever’ Guardian
THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY
STEFAN ZWEIG
‘The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed’ David Hare
WAKING LIONS
AYELET GUNDAR-GOSHEN
‘A literary thriller that is used as a vehicle to explore big moral issues. I loved everything about it’ Daily Mail
FOR A LITTLE WHILE
RICK BASS
‘Bass is, hands down, a master of the short form, creating in a few pages a natural world of mythic proportions’ New York Times Book Review
COPYRIGHT
Pushkin Press
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London WC2H 9JQ
Original text © 2016 David Foenkinos
English translation © 2020 Sam Taylor
Copyright © Editions Gallimard, 2016
The Mystery of Henri Pick was first published as Le Mystère Henri Pick by Editions Gallimard in Paris, 2016
First published by Pushkin Press in 2020
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ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–583–1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
Epigraph: Ernst Cassirer qtd in Fritz Saxl, “Ernst Cassirer”, in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (Tudor, 1958), p. 47
Quotation on p. 11 from Richard Brautigan, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (Vintage, 2002), p. 13 and p. 38
Quotations on p. 119 and p. 241 from Alexander Pushkin, Yevgeny Onegin, translated by Anthony Briggs (Pushkin Press, 2016) p. 73
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