A Mage in Summer

Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid Genre. Translated by Anna Fitzgerald. In this, the most recent of Olivier Cadiot’s visionary works to be translated, an unnamed protagonist, a mage, reflects on his own past and on history and just about everything else in a meditation set in motion by a photograph by Nan Goldin. In a narrative that transcends chronology and genre, Cadiot writes at the limit of prose, using photographic images to punctuate the text and the fleeting imagery of poetry to move through history and mythology. Olivier Cadiot dances on a not-so-fine line between patter, satire, stream of consciousness, social commentary, poetry, prose, meditation, magic, performance, essay, comedy, melodrama, soliloquy, mania, dialectic, sublimity, tragedy. A MAGE IN SUMMER does delight in voices.–Charles Bernstein