The Reality Train, and The Deaths of the General

In Le Train de la réalité (The Reality Train) Roland C. Wagner maintains the socio-political   literary experiment of the novel Rêves de Gloire. Againhe gives the people who board "The History Train" the chance to speak and make history... or rather think they are making it. The narrative is more experimental, violent and provocative.

The uchronia that Rêves de Gloire created has as a starting point the assassination of General de Gaulle, only alluded to there as an epigraph in the first chapter.

In this case Roland C. Wagner has inverted the process: the death of the General becomes a mise-en-abyme through it being told by six different narrators with no connection between them: in short, who cares who killed the General!

These "deaths of the General" alternate with stories from the protagonists of Rêves de Gloire, a philosopher of the weak underclass, a Moscow spy masquerading as a bookseller in Marseille, a terrorist hippie, a man from Algiers speaking in pataouète, a nutter, a rocker...

"So, it happened like that, the death of the General. And it was me firing the machine gun.

A real coup.

Why did you do it?

Well I suppose we had nothing else to do."