The Mystery of the Three Frontiers

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

In an imaginary landscape dominated by a vast forest, The Mystery of the Three Frontiers follows the trajectory of its ethnologist narrator. His partner Andonia’s sudden unexplained disappearance has left him in a state of depression which he tries to alleviate by absconding himself. His choice of hideaway is the Zum Wanderer guesthouse, a haven of peace surrounded by the Three-Frontiers Forest.
Almost before he has settled in, he has an extremely enigmatic conversation with a walker also staying in the local guesthouse, a man who looks like a soothsayer and turns out to be certifiably mad. On the strength of this, our narrator embarks on long walks on the fringes of the great forest which appears to be the venue for strange demonstrations. We gradually leave the edge to move into the dark depths. “Depressives adapt better to alcoves than full light”. While his dampened spirits rediscover a degree of calm from these exhausting walks, the fascinated ethnologist delays the date of his return home. There are too many phenomena, disturbances and questions surrounding the extensive forest; he so wants to understand its strange qualities that it drives him almost to a state of coma or collapse, which each reader will imagine in his or her own way.
When we leave the forest and its legendary ghosts, it is to witness the depression of a Zeus devastated to have been abandoned by men who have also rejected Poseidon and Dionysus in favour of a single god and his ministers (Un dîner chez les Zeus), or the absurd events of the last day of the world (Le jour de la fin du monde): The Mystery of the Three Frontiers, the novel that opens and lends its name to this collection which also comprises eight short stories, demonstrates a liking for rereading of ancient myths, those “black boxes of humankind” that Éric Faye submits to analysis while still leaving room for the individual reader’s interpretation.

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 Le mystère des Trois Frontières now has a previously unpublished preface by the author.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.