SchrummSchrumm, or The Sunday Quicksands Excursion

In translation at last, a delightfully delirious novel in which absurdity gives way to nightmare

This novel by French writer Fernand Combet is at long last available in English. A unique work whose surrealism is one of horror rather than the marvelous, the book represents a dark prelude to the revolutionary spirit of May 1968 in France, a piercingly sinister flipside to the premise of one's desires being taken for reality. One morning, the Sunday Quicksands Excursion Company bus stops outside the professional excursionist SchrummSchrumm's building. His registration application having been accepted, SchrummSchrumm lets himself be stripped down, smeared with catechumenal balm for hallucination protection, manacled to armrests and blindfolded for the journey to the distant walled city of Misunderstanding. It is there that SchrummSchrumm will undergo a series of increasingly absurd ritualistic initiations under the supreme rule of Abocketaback as he prepares for the incessantly forestalled excursion to the Quicksands on the city's outskirts. Fernand Combet (1936-2003) wrote five books over 20 years. Though his first book was celebrated when released in 1966, Combet's lack of interest in a literary career, his thirst for travel and his pursuit of isolation led him to die largely forgotten.