Anna M. – Au Coeur Des Pluies

Wistbook 009 / Edition series. 100 / Format. 3″cd and novella… A murder mystery by one of today’s finest crime writers, “Jigokuhen” takes place in a declining coastal city whose once thriving harbours and shipyards now house a shadowy criminal underworld. Drawn into this world when the son of the city’s mayor is killed, a jaded middle-aged detective finds himself distracted by a beautiful unemployed dockworker who spends each day walking aimlessly along the shore, and whose mysterious past may just hold the key to solving the crime. Throughout the novella, these two characters act as allegories of the dingy concrete metropolis and the wild untamed sea that borders it, City and Nature constantly approaching and withdrawing. The plot reaches a climax with a shootout in a warehouse, but the action plays second fiddle to the relationship between the detective and the dockworker, which remains ambivalent and by the end of the novel remains unresolved. Quiet, yet intensely evocative, “Jigokuhen” is a literary tour de force.

Wistbook 008 / Edition series. 100 / Format. 3″cd and novella… This botano-philosophical treatise is a classic of Renaissance scientific literature. Delicate, minutely detailed sketches of flora and fauna litter the pages, attesting in their exquisiteness to the wonder and beauty of a world viewed under the microscope for the first time. Accompanying the drawings are Alberic’s handwritten notes on taxonomies and classifications, designations of anatomical parts, therapeutic and practical uses, and allegorical meanings. A sober yet reverential tone is retained throughout, and the book ends with a sublime canticle praising the Divine Creator “who deigned in His Infinite Wisdom to bestow such Marvealous Complexity on even the Smallest of parts”. To read this book is to feel the lost intellectual and religious fervour of a prior age.