Le crocodile blanc et autres hasards

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Presentation

A carpenter who makes coffins knows who is going to be next deceased but doesn’t see his own death catch up to him; a young Nigerien woman resorts to a love potion to “seduce” her master; an Argentinian musician gets lost in the Parisian metro tunnels and discovers cataboms… From the mangrove of the Niger delta to the Parisian metro corridors, from a literary salon rue Monsieur-le-Prince to an amphitheatre of the Jussieu faculty, Uli Wittmann’s short stories make us travel into widely varied worlds and landscapes. These stories all have in common a pinch of madness, which makes them branch silently to fantasy tale, under the auspices of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Maupassant.

Praised by JMG Le Clézio, who offers a preface in the form of a letter to the author, these short stories draw a singular territory where we sometimes switch without knowing it, and without wanting to, on the other side of the mirror, where rationality is erased in favour of magical practices, witchcraft, premonitory dreams or ancestral beliefs.

Born in Germany, Uli Wittmann studied ethnology and has a Ph. D. on the English-speaking African novel. He spent two years in Nigeria. Living in Paris since 1971, he now devotes himself to literary translation. He is notably the German translator of Maryse Condé, Philippe Djian, Noëlle Châtelet, J.M.G. Le Clézio and Michel Houellebecq.