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Chafouine
Alain Galan

The Stump – that’s what he called her – appeared to him in the declining afternoon light. She stood, unmoving, on the foredeck of the old boat. It made for a strange tableau. The vast emptiness of the pond. A hidden landscape the water had revealed when it withdrew. The flat-bottomed boat, caught in the mud at low tide, tugged listlessly at its chain. The Stump was planted there, as still as a carved figurehead. From her slightly raised position, she had noticed him – as he strolled past the poplars – first. She tensed. On the alert. That brief, imperceptible twitch had been enough to betray her presence to the man. For in that furtive movement, he recognized her. She had a way of hunching over that was unforgettable, she blended into the wood of the boat the same way that, the other morning, stump among the stumps, she had blended into the drowned tree stumps jutting out of the mud.

In the village of La Tremblaie, everyone – Delhot, Mélie, the mail carrier and others – swear they’ve caught a glimpse of a cat with the head of an owl. Is it the fruit of an unnatural coupling, a rare survivor of an ancient species of fauna, or one of those as-yet-undiscovered creatures the cryptozoologists study?

Throughout the narrative journal he devotes to the affair, is the tireless hiker André Delhot really trying to get to the bottom of it? Or is he in fact trying to cover the tracks? And if its the latter, to what purpose?

An owl-headed cat is intriguing the inhabitants of the village of La Tremblaie. Investigation, literary homage, ode to nature, wild animals and the woods - Chafouine is a poetical novel that’s filled with humor.

Chafouine -
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  • Buchet/Chastel
  • Littérature française
  • Novel
  • Publication date : 11/01/2018
  • Size : 11,5 x 19,0 cm, 192 p., 14,00 EUR €
  • ISBN 978-2-283-03105-6
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