Paul Willems

First published in French in 1983, The Cathedral of Mistis a collection of stories from the last of the great Francophone Belgian fantasists: distilled tales of distant journeys, buried memories and impossible architecture. Described here are the emotionally disturbed architectural plan for a palace of emptiness; the experience of snowfall in a bed in the middle of a Finnish forest; the memory chambers that fuel the marvelous futility of the endeavor to write; the beautiful woodland church, built of warm air currents and fog, scattering in storms and taking renewed shape at dusk, that gives this book its title. The Cathedral of Mistoffers the sort of ethereal narratives that might have come from the pen of a sorrowful, distinctly Belgian Italo Calvino. It is accompanied by two meditative essays on reading and writing that fall in the tradition of Marcel Proust and Julien Gracq. Paul Willems(1912–97) published his first novel, Everything Here Is Real, in 1941. Three more novels and, toward the end of his life, two collections of short stories bracketed his career as a playwright.

The Cathedral of Mist

This volume combines Paul Willems' 1990 novella, "The Drowned Land," a haunting and magic transformation of the Atlantis legend, and his most recent play, "La Vita Breve," which launches the reader upon a voyage into the dark night of the soul. Both novella and play explore the frontiers of dream and reality, investigating the relationship of guilt and innocence, memory and desire.

Paul Willems

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