The Facts of Winter is a series of dreams, all dreamed by people in and around Paris during the winter of 1881. It is historical fiction once removed: an account of events that were imaginary even from the point of view of an invented past — although Poissel claimed (in a letter to his friend Bartholomeo Facil, August, 1905) that “the characters in this book are all true — all persons who really lived and slept that winter.”
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"... awispy reverie ... performs sly thievery, nicking childlike flights of fancy lost to the magical realm between memory and imagination." -- The Village Voice, July 5, 2005
About the Author
La Farge is a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s and is the author of Haussmann, or the Distinction, a New York Times Notable Book, and The Artist of the Missing, winner of the California Book Award. He is also a leading scholar on the work of Paul Poissel, one of the least known of the little-known French "tiny metaphysician" writers of the late 19th century. "La Farge is a master storyteller with cleverness and inventiveness to spare." —Philadelphia Inquirer "La Farge conjures sinuous, melancholic otherworlds that feel wholly tangible." —Village Voice
"La Farge designs worlds—splendid, elegant edifices built on the rubble of our dreams and history." —Colson Whitehead
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Like Describing a Dream to a Friend,
By
This review is from: The Facts of Winter (Hardcover)
Paul La Farge's book THE FACTS OF WINTER is a haunting, funny, intriguing, little book. There are echoes of the unreliable editor of Nabokov's Pale Fire or the authorial self-awareness of Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler and the strings of strange little stories like Calvino's Invisible Cities. Yet, it is a lovely work in it's own right and is in no way derivative of these earlier works.
The book features a series of short dreams (1-3 pages) of Parisians in 1881. On facing pages, the reader is treated to French and English versions of the dream narratives followed by an academic-styled afterward examining the life of the ersatz author Paul Poissel. The writing is lyrical and the reader has a haunting feeling of the interconnectedness of certain images and ideas among the dreams that in a way that is highly pleasing but difficult to explain. If one reads even a little French there are certain sly winks in the French. As discussed in the afterward, the title itself is a pun in French: Les faits d'hiver or L'effet divers. The illustrations are an added bonus and suit the work perfectly. They remind me of Lorca's doodles. Much like trying to describe a dream to a friend it is difficult to describe the way the book connects and intertwines as you read it which is perhaps why they other reviews are so brief and why I've resorted to so many comparisons. It is not a book for those who demand straightforward narrative, but for those who enjoy good, poetic writing and are willing to let the work wash over them it is a lovely read. It is the best thing I've read in months.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Moment of waking, almost.,
By
This review is from: The Facts of Winter (Hardcover)
A strange, haunted little book, like the lack of sound in a snow-covered landscape. A twisted meditation on history, memory, translation-how things hover below the surface of the real, waiting for language to thaw them and cast them out where we can see them just before they sink out of time or melt away. Sorry to be cryptic, but that's exactly what this book is. Really, it's about dreams-or, more precisely, about the state of uncertainty one feels when coming out of a dream, when the dream is still real, or before you realize that it's not.
5.0 out of 5 stars
gorgeous, inventive, delicious,
By reader1 (Kingston, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Facts of Winter (Hardcover)
Lafarge's sense of character and place are tuned to a sweet little instrument with plenty to say.
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