Hoppla! 1 2 3

The tale is simple, if grim: a disenfranchised teenage boy from the housing projects on the outskirts of Paris rapes and murders the manager of the supermarket where his mother works. But Gerard Gavarry is a writer who knows how literary inventiveness can shed new light on a serious subject, and Hoppla! tells its story three times, in three separate sections, each in a different tone or mode and with different sets of images and vocabularies. The first relies on tropical images and the characters speak in a lexicon borrowed from the coconut industry--as if the Parisian suburbs had been transported to an exotic shore; the second is nautical in nature; the third invokes the mythology of the centaur, and ancient Greece butts up against modern-day France. Gavarry's bloody and poetic narrative takes dead aim at the social, political, and personal roots of violence, and argues for the transformative power of fiction.

Gerard Gavarry was born in Paris in 1946 and has also lived in New Caledonia, Niger, Guinea, Benin, and London. He studied literature at the Sorbonne and taught French literature first in Gabon and then in Paris. He is the author of eight books. Jane Kuntz has translated Everyday Life and The Power of Flies by Lydie Salvayre, Hotel Crystal by Olivier Rolin, Pigeon Post by Dumitru Tsepeneag, and Hoppla! 1 2 3 and Making a Novel by Gerard Gavarry, all of which are available from Dalkey Archive Press.