This dazzling book is itself such a mountain, overflowing with visions that dramatically enlarge the reader's imaginative horizons. At the narrative confluence of these surging visions, de Robles places the complex psyche of Eleazard von Wogau, a French journalist living in Brazil, spending his retirement editing the manuscript of a biography of a seventeenth-century Jesuit, a polymath whose life trajectory exposes theological passions, alchemical secrets, and sensual appetites. Unsettled by the serpentine turns in the life of this dead cleric, Eleazard struggles to cope with the more immediate influence of an ex-wife venturing into a perilous rain forest to do archaeological research and a mercurial daughter hitting the beach with a lesbian lover and a freethinking professor. Thanks to a gifted translator, Englishspeaking readers can now understand why European critics have been raving over this astonishing novel, winner of the Prix Medici. AUTHOR: Born in 1954, Jean-Marie Blas de Robles was a lecturer in philosophy at universities in Brazil, China and Italy and, finally, for the Alliance Francaise in Taiwan. His first literary publication was a volume of short stories in 1982, followed by two novels in 1989, after which he turned to writing full time, while travelling widely. His magnum opus: Where Tigers are at Home took ten years to write and almost as long to find a publisher who would publish it without insisting he should shorten it by 400 pages.
