ABSTRACT
Emmanuel Hocquard (b. 1940) is an enigmatic and prolific French poet and prose writer whose work defies a single definition. When he seems at his most abstruse, he suddenly moves us with a scene from everyday life. He admittedly rambles, yet oblique transitions allow him to pass quickly from idea to image and he actually remains quite concise. Associated with the avant-garde, he nonetheless engages deeply with the classics. His introspections are tantalizingly tentative, as if he constantly doubted the validity of most personal experience. Similarly, his most compelling book, Aerea dans les forêts de Manhattan (1985), translated by Lydia Davis as Aerea in the Forests of Manhattan in 1992, follows a contemporary Ulysses through shifting settings both real and imaginary, and includes dreams, speculations, literary allusions, bizarre facts, and memories.
