The first writer

It is always greedily that one opens a book by Patrick Rambaud. This author-Frégoli, reborn always different. Sometimes as the novelist of the rise and fall of Napoleon, the great Balzac style dreaming of writing The Battle of Essling, all that precedes and all that follows. It can also take the habit of Saint-Simon (Duke) -mâtiné Duck enchaîné- to be scrupulous and compelling chronicler of the reign of Nicolas I. Slipping in fantasies and slippers Marcel Ayme, it can also bring a strange encounter with itself in the village idiot ....

This writer can do it all here!

The Master, his latest novel, brings the reader back 25 centuries to accompany Chuang Chou throughout his life in ancient China, fierce and restless.

Endowed with natural wisdom, the hero of the novel frequently entertained with equal happiness tyrants and peasants, giving everything its value, far from vain ambitions. He prefers simplicity with grandeur, frugality to intemperance (except the wine), contemplation to the agitation.

Picaresque, playful, probably joker (arise in a library, p. 68, the memories of Bill Gates ...), oddly disorienting, but often rustic, narrative advocates against the current wisdom frenzies of his time-which often looks to ours. But Chuang Chou really existed between 300 and 400 years before Christ. He is a master of Taoism. This is the first writer.

From the pen of Rambaud is a bit -in addition truculent- Monsieur Teste in the Middle Kingdom which speaks to us with cunning man who describes (back cover) as a "precarious writer," much in the style his hero.

The latest novel by Patrick Rambaud will also leave some readers baffled, fill it with delight and other wisdom. But as an informed reader is forearmed ...