Le coeur des ténèbres revisité?
Heart of Darkness Revisited?

"Halloo for a Hunter", by Jean-François Samlong

Author(s): Izabella Zatorska
Subject(s): Studies of Literature, French Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Jean-François Samlong; La Réunion; fabulous; Salazes; anthropology; François Mussard
Summary/Abstract: The story of a hunter who gets hunted by himself, told by Babel, a “beautiful devil”, to a sociologist-cum-psychotherapist; the tale is both a thriller set in the mountains and a kind of fairy-tale relating the hunt for the monsters and the familiar demons of La Réunion; it echoes the hunting of fugitive native slaves as practiced by François Mussard… By a kind of death-leap the narrator-author présumé gets the chance to reshape his identity in a metaphysical space open to reality, after having brutalised a group of friends out on a fanciful hiking trip. As with Joseph Conrad, the adventure into the recesses of the soul – represented here by the ascent of an imaginary pic de la Sorcière –produces some horrible surprises which are nevertheless liberating.

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