The inside of the Paris salon, a fantasia of the arts/music and underground culture scene of the early 1970's with newly arisen British bands mounting the diaspora. A fantastical write originally published in French with a beautifully written Translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Rose Poussiere/Dusty Pink by Jean-Jacques Schuhl resonates as a poetic imagining. Jean-Jacques Schuhl (Poet, Writer) born in Marseille, France is the author of Ingrid Caven that won him the Prix Goncourt (2000). He has also written Telex no. 1, Entrée des fantomes, and Obsessions.

Written entirely in poetic prose, the novella dreams in night moves in half begun half-ended thoughts expertly painted. As if everything and everyone is incredibly asleep, a haze of sweet smoke, the great unnamed malaise, the missing lover, an unnamed war in dance. A grand silence filled with memories, images, a montage in colours, an escape of music, fine silks and satins, feathers. As if experiencing the inside of the mirror, a series of images juxtaposed, presents a world of great light and darkness in which everyone has already died. Spinning, spinning out of the box, brilliant impressions of the machine, a dance that begins and loses a step, a movement out of time, becomes a casual grace not a misgiving. The Zen of silence out of time.

Inside the dressing rooms of Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, the visiting Marlene Dietrich, the death of Brian Jones, the oeuvre of becoming, the oeuvre of loss, the magic of a place out of time.

" : brown, black, dusty pink, gray, dark turquoise, bilberry, rust, yellow, cream, honey, bottle green buried in the rubble where the detritus is strewn across coats and jewelry, like Berenice Maranhao, that young seventeen-year-old Brazilian woman from a photo published in France-Soir: dead in an earthquake, only two thirds of her face visible, but beautiful all the same, joists and debris forming her hat; the music still enveloping them all, connecting them to things that aren't there (the butcher shop facing the store), connecting them to each other - a weak link - all now dead, the turntable still turning and turning without anybody to listen - all these eyes wide open, calm, and dazed - like those of mannequins (nobody was ever able to perform that beautiful and furtive and simple act of using their thumbs and forefingers to shut their eyes)

       Then blue turns to gray
       blue turns to gray
       And try as you may

or indeed"

A brilliant Avant Garde write, that stops time, captures a moment in poetry and then let's it go. This Writer suspects reads as well or better in French, Rose Poussiere/Dusty Pink by Jean-Jacques Schul. Unforgettable.

Available from Amazon Canada. Available @ Amazon.ca.

Available from Amazon United States. Available @ Amazon.com.

Available from Amazon United Kingdom. Available @ Amazon.co.uk.

Genre: Poetry, New Age, Surrealism