General Soledad

Under option in Catalonia, China, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Korea, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Spain and Taiwan.

Somewhere in the depths of what we assume is central American tropical rainforest, a thousand men are preparing to head out and join the rest of their unit in Iquita.
But that evening, during General Soledad’s birthday celebrations under canvas, a lookout guard informs the aide-de-camp that there are fires burning on the horizon.
Is it the work of insurgents? Indians? The general is fascinated. As dawn approaches, he reaches a key decision: Iquita and the campaign against Bolivar can wait, they must cross the jungle and find a way to those hypnotic flames. General San Martinez, who commands the section of the Spanish army already in Iquita, grows concerned. Enemy attack? Desertion? As San Martinez waits, immobilised in his garrison, he thinks about the man who was once his faithful friend, in the days before the appearance of one Maria-Elena, a bewitching figure who created a cruel dissension between the two men. But the reader is to know nothing of that story.
Soledad’s feverish pursuit means his troop is doomed. The fires on the horizon merely recede as the troop draws closer. The general chooses a plot of land on a plateau to build a city free from women, and founded on forgetting the past. Some men die there, others lose their minds. The single flowering of a plant, the ominous puya Raimondi, marks the disappearance of this world founded by one man’s folly. And all that is ever retrieved from this journey to hell and back is a log that Soledad kept every single day, until his dying breath. A log that San Martinez reads breathlessly, wracked alternately with rage and fear, but never finding any answers.
General Solitude was first a short story, written in the 1990s, then, by expanding on hitherto unexplored territory, it took the form of a novel, a venomous novel. Éric Faye’s first.

In 2012 éditions Stock’s “la Bleue” collection will be publishing Éric Faye’s first three novels : Le Général Solitude (1995), Parij (1997) and Le mystère des Trois Frontières (1998). Le Général Solitude now has a previously unpublished preface by the author.

Éric Faye has had a number of novels and travelogues published Stock, including Mes trains de nuit (2005), L’homme sans empreintes (2008), Nagasaki (2010), Grand prix for a novel from the Académie française); and a collection of factual accounts published José Corti, Je suis le gardien du phare, which won the 1998 Prix des Deux-Magots.