Where Tigers Are at Home: A Novel

Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

mar, 2013 · Other Press, LLC

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Winner of the Prix Médicis, this multifaceted literary novel follows the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher across 17th century Europe and Eleazard von Wogau, a retired French correspondent, through modern Brazil.

When Eleazard begins editing a strange, unpublished biography of Kircher, the rest of his life seems to begin unraveling—his ex-wife goes on a dangerous geological expedition to Mato Grosso; his daughter abandons school to travel with her young professor and her lesbian lover to an indigenous beach town, where the trio use drugs and form interdependent sexual relationships; and Eleazard himself starts losing his sanity, escalated by loneliness, and his work on the biography. Patterns begin to emerge from these interwoven narratives, which develop toward a mesmerizing climax.

Shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize and the European Book Award, and already translated into 14 languages, Where Tigers Are At Home is large-scale epic, at once literary and entertaining, that belongs in the company of Umberto Eco and Haruki Murakami.

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Born in 1954, Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès was a lecturer in philosophy at universities in Brazil, China, and Italy and, finally, for the Alliance Française in Taiwan. His first literary publication was a volume of short stories in 1982, followed by two novels, after which he turned to writing full time. An avid traveller, Blas de Roblès also edits a series of books on archaeology, and is a member of the French Archaeological Mission. 

Mike Mitchell has translated over fifty titles including works by Goethe, Meyrink, Adolf Loos, and Oskar Kokoschka. Several of his translations have been shortlisted for awards, including three short listings for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.  Most recently Mitchell has been shortlisted for the Kurt Wolff Prize for his translation of Thomas Bernhard's Over All the Mountain Tops. In 1998, he was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for best German translation for Herbert Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China.