The Book of Shadows

In the vacuum of the very beginning everything was possible. Including the birth of a universe where a cognisant being would one day create a perfect world, the energy necessary springing up from the differential between absence and presence, between the blank page and the written word. An initial universe was born. According to physicists, it only lasted a few moments. Three seconds, or perhaps four. Then it shrank and collapsed. But in the meantime something had appeared that refused to die.

The being that we will call the Avatar.

Le Livre des ombres (The book of shadows) is a project that Serge Lehman has imagined throughout his years as a writer but that only his maturity has permitted him to finish. Its twenty-seven narratives (for the most part short stories published in the 90's) place the universe of his novelistic work - Faust, Aucune étoile aussi lointaine (No star as far), Wonderland - in a lyrical and nostalgic tale of the future.

Orson, a man in a far, far distant future, where myths and gods are life itself, has been enlisted by his peers to collect and transcribe stories that will allow them, through collective memory which is factual, legendary and mythological, to find out what happened in "the world before the world". They ask him to become a scribe, again. Le livre des ombres is the fruit of this quest. It makes a chronology of a cosmogony, a canyon of words where one can accomplish a personal pilgrimage.

Serge Lehman gives us a narrative to read where the novel form combines the wonder and intoxicating vertigo specific to science fiction: when the fragments of a world give us the means to imagine that world.