A Certain Louis Wolfson

Un certain Louis Wolfson

 

Description

In 1970, the literary world was stunned by Le Schizo et les langues, a revolutionary book written by Louis Wolfson—an American schizophrenic who wrote in French because he couldn’t bear to hear or read his mother tongue. Championed by luminaries like Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault, Wolfson fascinated the intellectual elite before disappearing into obscurity. Decades later, a young writer mourning his brother’s terminal illness becomes obsessed with tracking down this vanished literary genius, discovering that Wolfson’s life was even more extraordinary than his work—including a lottery win of two million dollars, communication attempts with extraterrestrials, and a mysterious disappearance in Puerto Rico.

While watching his brother succumb to cancer, narrator Étienne finds himself drawn to an obscure book with a peculiar title: Ma mère, musicienne, est morte de maladie maligne à minuit, mardi à mercredi, au milieu du mois de mai mille977 au mouroir Memorial à Manhattan (My mother, musician, died of malignant disease at midnight, from Tuesday to Wednesday, in the middle of the month of May 1977 at Manhattan’s Memorial hospice). The book’s author is Louis Wolfson, an American schizophrenic who gained brief notoriety in the 1970s for his first work, Le Schizo et les langues, published by Gallimard with a preface by Gilles Deleuze. The book detailed Wolfson’s unique method for escaping his native English (which caused him physical pain) by instantly transforming English words into phonetically similar foreign words.

As Étienne grapples with grief, his casual interest evolves into an obsession. Who was this strange writer who enthralled the likes of Deleuze, Foucault, Sartre, and Paul Auster? What became of him after his brief literary fame? And is he still alive? Through correspondence with Paul Auster, conversations with filmmaker Duccio Fabbri (who tracked Wolfson to Puerto Rico), and various literary archives, Étienne pieces together Wolfson’s remarkable journey: from psychiatric hospitals in New York to homelessness in Montreal, to winning $2 million in a Puerto Rico lottery in 2003, to losing most of it in the 2008 financial crisis. In Puerto Rico, Wolfson developed an obsession with the Arecibo radio telescope and extraterrestrial communication, hoping aliens might destroy Earth and end all human suffering. Gradually, Étienne confronts the ethical questions of his quest. Is he simply fetishizing mental illness? What is the proper distance between biographer and subject? And why do we turn to literature in times of grief?

Culminating in the revelation that Wolfson has recently disappeared from his Puerto Rico apartment—possibly dead, possibly having fled to Russia—A Certain Louis Wolfson is part literary detective story, part memoir of mourning, and a poignant meditation on what we seek when we read.

 

English samples available.

Contact: Kamelya Kudo, kamelya.kudo@placedesediteurs.com.