A small group of survivors presses on relentlessly across desolate moorlands. Among them, a former nun whose prayers seem to attract disaster, and a bard who, when night falls, sings of the end of all things. The march stretches on, punctuated by unsettling encounters, wolf attacks, and tragic incidents that gradually dismantle the fragile cohort. On their trail follows a strange bonze-woman, tasked with steering these survivors onto a less gruelling path. But for those who remain, the wandering continues, taking on at times the quality of a slow, unhinged western.
Retour au goudron is a monumental work, comprising 343 bardic notebooks with recurring sections, containing numerous previously unpublished texts. These texts are published as an eleven-volume edition released simultaneously by different publishers. La Grande Misère is one component of this ultimate literary performance. And so, under the signature of the collective Infernus Iohannes, the edifice of post-exoticism closes — a movement of which Antoine Volodine was long the standard-bearer.
