Memories crystallize into stories, fiction pointing back to an initial trigger: a lived moment, more often an intensely felt impression. The significance of any outside "action" lies in its imprint on the mind. If some of the pieces united in this book can be considered "action-packed," it is not in the sense of the reader's compulsion to learn what "happens" on the next page. It is not about the "smoking gun," only about the smoke and the vibrations it causes in the mind. It is impossible to pigeonhole vibrations, which is why these prose pieces can only be divided into non-categories, tangents to short stories, capriccios, and a personal essay, as they emerge from pen strokes like the brush strokes of impressionists which, together, form a vision-
Perchance a Life.
Perchance a Life, with the Shakespearean sounding "perchance" (..."to dream", like Hamlet) is a work of fiction (short stories) with the exception of the two last chapters which are slightly tinted by biographical circumstances: The first story depicts a sports and sex crazed American student, bored during his visit to his multi- divorced mother in her ramshackle French chateau. A generational and cultural clash. Another story is that of a young Cuban girl, room made in a de-luxe Miami hotel, afraid of men because of constant harassment. For once she falls in love with a very seducing, seemingly distinguished man who respects her, only to discover that he is an entrepreneur selling animals to be sacrificed in gruesome santeria or voodoo ceremonies. Her own, beloved dog will be one of those. In the breast cancer recovery room of a New York hospital, the trio of a Jewish, a Black, and an "Aryan" women enjoy their exchange on contemporary hypes, ending in roaring laughter. In a "capriccio" the ghost of Karl Max witnesses the 2016 American presidential election. The hilarious goings-on in a small-town bomb shelter in Nazi Germany show petty-bourgeois behavior, illustrating "the banality of evil". Christine de Lailhacar successfully brings to us her immense range of experience and imagination playing itself around the globe, through hundreds of years of literature, revolutions, and the foibles and anxieties of humans - and their charm.
-Jeanne Perrin, cultural critic, mediator revue Passages, Paris... The book is very good, especially revealing is the last chapter on a childhood under the Nazi flag.
-Cecilia Vicuna, international poet and installation artist Perchance a Life is an exquisite jewel of a book and a rare glimpse into an almost vanished world of a deep, refined, multinational culture that sustained generations of Europeans through war, terrors and cataclysms. There is so much in that short book that bears deep reading, but the memoir of the father, a gifted anti-Nazi photographer trying to survive the nightmare of National Socialism is a startling keyhole not only into Germany in the 1930s and 1940, but also into the world today, again so obviously teetering on the edge of political insanity.
-Perry Brass, author of King of Angels, The Manly Art of Seduction and other books This is not only great entertainment. It is true art.
-Marie-Helene Kourimsky, head of Association pour le Patrimoine Culturel Francais