La pourtraiture de la dicte cisterne tant doloureuse

Si prist l'ame a regarder entour d'elle s'en aucune maniere elle pourroit veoir comment elle estoit la venue et en regardant ça et la, elle percheu une grant fosse toute quarree, tout ainsi come une cisterne. De celle fosse sailloit ung tourbillon de flambe grant, artant et puant a merveilles, et luy sembloit bonnement que la fumiere contremontoit jusques au chiel. En celle vapeur et tourbillon avoit si tres grant nombre de dyables et ainsi de ames ensemble quy aloient avec l'ayr tout en le flambe et en la fumiere, que c'estoit une tres horrible chose a regarder. Et quant icelles ames estoient montees en l'ayr moult hault, si recheoient tout a coup ou partont de la fournaise. Et quant 'ame du chevallier ot veu ce  tant douloureux tourment, elle s'en vouloit traire arriere, mais elle ne pouoit lever ses piés de la terre pour le grant paour qu'ell avoit. Et quant elle vey que sa voulenté ne pouoit accomplir, si se courrouça moult forment et dist: «Hellas! chaitisve, pourquoy ne vouloies tu croire les Escriptures?»

Les Visions du Chevalier Tondal de David Aubert 

(Los Angeles, Getty Museum, ms. 30, fo. 29ra)

Then his soul began to look around in an attempt to understand how it had come there and in so doing it saw a great pit, all square, just like a cistern. From this pit gushed an eddy of huge flame, blazing and stinking, and it was as if the smoke rose to the very sky. In that steam and eddy there was a very great number of devils and souls together that were lifted into the air within the flame and smoke, this being a most horrific thing to behold. And when these souls had been lifted very high in the air, they would all of a sudden tumble back down into the furnace. When the knight's soul saw this so pitiful torment, it would have turned away, but it could not raise its feet from the ground so great was the fear it felt. And seeing that it could not achieve its will, it was greatly angered and said, "Alas! wretched soul, wherefore wilt thou not believe in the Scriptures?"

Alistair Ian Blyth - Card Catalogue

 

Alistair Ian Blyth, Card Catalogue, Dalkey Archive Press, 2020 

ISBN-13: 978-1628972696

 

In the crepuscular Bucharest of the decade after the Revolution, the neurasthenic, amnesic narrator of Card Catalogue meets Obmanschi, a former political prisoner and unpublished writer of the pre-war avant-garde. Over many years, Obmanschi has compiled a minutely detailed card catalogue of the realia to be found in the classic Russian novel, whose categories include not only everyday material items, but also books as tangible objects and even the cockroaches whose rustling presence can be heard in Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. Meanwhile, the narrator compiles his own catalogue of oneiric books and their insubstantial authors, one of whom, bewilderingly, may be Obmanschi himself. Obmanschi already leads a second, shade-like existence, having been reduced to an independent, fictional character in the informer’s reports submitted to the secret police over the decades by the superintendent of his building. In a series of dreamlike narratives linked by the subject of libraries—book hoarding, book hunting, dreams of infinite other books, past and future—Card Catalogue hints that fiction is ultimately an oneiric world unto itself, in which the characters lead their own tenuous, separate existence, like the shades in Hades.