Synopsis
A tale of a writer, the glamorous, scandalous Paul Michel, enfant terrible of French letters, and of a student who sets out to find him. When he does find Michel, it is in a French asylum where he has languished for years. The student arranges for Michel to be freed, but with devastating results.
Biography
Patricia
Duncker was born in the West Indies. Hallucinating Foucault, her first
work of fiction, won Dillon's First Fiction Award 1996 and the McKitterick
Prize for the best first novel published in 1996. Her collection of stories,
Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees, was published in 1997. She teaches writing,
literature and feminist theory at the University of Wales and lives for
part of the year in France.
Contributors Testimonials
A love story, a cerebral thriller and a work of passion that had me hooked
from the opening page, Hallucinating Foucault shows how the impact of
reading on some people’s lives can be both terrifying and self-transforming.
In Duncker’s debut novel the lead character and celebrated French
novelist Paul Michel becomes insane when he learns of French philosopher
Michel Foucault’s death. The novel’s narrator is an English
student studying Michel’s work who sets out to rescue the writer,
so bringing the author’s words and the author’s world together
in a dangerous mixture of intimacy, madness and self-discovery.
Duncker has said that she wanted her novel to explain the love that exists
between readers and writers and Foucault himself is said to have written
his books like love letters to make young men fall for him. It’s
an interesting paradox that his emotional vulnerability was at the core
of his academic works that were so rigorous, powerful and influential.
I love the way that Duncker has captured all of this in a rollicking good
read.
Jane Czyzselska