THE DIARY OF A TREE
What if the day you die you start a double life? One that goes backwards, into your memories and back to your origins and the other forwards, following the emotions and inspiration that you continue to feel.
That is what happens to the narrator of this tale, a four hundred year old pear-tree who has been uprooted in a storm. Henceforth his conscience is shared between his new way of seeing the world – as logs, as the work of art that was carved into his trunk – and the human destiny to which he found himself linked during his active life: lovers with names carved into his bark, someone who hanged themselves from one of his branches, a young girl accused of being a witch burned with his wood, the rebel adventurer whose ashes were scattered on his roots, the illegitimate royal upon whose birth he was planted…
How does a tree “work”? What makes up its conscience and what is the secret of itsinteraction with the environment? The tree’s posthumous ‘diary’ makes us see the world, nature and man in a whole new light, through a vegetal way of thinking that develops as it tells a tale full of suspence: will the emotions and memories disappear once the sap is dry? The pear-tree itself, with its own survival instinct, does not know if it should replant its roots in the past or point them towards the future, whether to explore ancient history or leap into the unknown…
Captivating, funny and stirring, The Diary of a Tree answers the universal question, what is the best way for a tree, as for a man, to avoid death?
The new novel by Didier Van Cauwelaert, winner of the Prix Goncourt, and author of Unknown, a blockbuster thriller film starring Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones.
Winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1994 for Un Aller Simple, Didier Van Cauwelaert is a French writer of novelsand plays. Inspired by the themes of family and socialachievement, Didier is also interested in the paranormal and mad science. In film, following Un Aller Simple and L’Éducation d’une fée, his books Hors de moi andL’Évangile de Jimmy are being adapted in the USA.The novels of Didier van Cauwelaert have beentranslated into more than 20 languages.
Publication date: october 2011
Pages: 300
Rights sold: Korea
