TRAITOR COMET

A guilty man finds himself at the center of Paris’ artistic community in Personne’s debut literary novel, the first in a planned series.

In 1926, Geoffrey Weidmann, a veteran of the Great War, flees his farm in Austria after waking up next to the body of a dead man. Rather than risk standing trial for murder, Geoff goes with his father to Paris, where his estranged brother, Franz, has already settled. Geoff is a mess, mentally and emotionally, haunted by his experiences in the war as well as by the body he left buried (in a very shallow grave) back in Spital. He soon acquires some drinking buddies who introduce him to the city’s artistic avant-garde, including two poets at the center of the burgeoning Surrealist movement: the visionary Antonin Artaud and the buoyant Robert Desnos. Their poetry describes existence in ways Geoff has never encountered before. Under their influence, Geoff begins to find the words to articulate the previously unspeakable tumult he experiences inside his head. “The dead part of oneself. Artaud’s words were still banging around inside of me the same way the West Indies music reverberated from down the street.” Geoff hopes he may finally banish the ghosts of his past…until he gets word that his old farm will soon be sold and the body he buried on it potentially discovered. Personne’s baroque prose captures the lyricism of the period, as here, when Geoff sees Artaud for the first time: “He had that chiseled, angular face…and a taut body like a flame. He resembled a desert-wandering fanatic, or a medieval angel trapped in stone in a cathedral.” The book is in a decidedly modernist tradition, with its nearly 400 pages dedicated primarily to drinks and aesthetic discussions of bohemians and writers. Fans of the Parisian scene in this era will marvel over the detail—Personne strives to depict the lives of Artaud and Desnos as accurately as possible—but those without a reference point may become lost and sometimes bored in these pages.

A deftly rendered meditation on trauma, madness, and art.