Death Sentences

Résumé : When a book opens with an elite police squad hunting down an illicit substance known as “stuff,” your mind probably goes to drugs, or maybe weaponry. But in Death Sentences, “the stuff” is a surrealist poem that kills its readers. It had already claimed Arshile Gorky and Antonin Artaud before causing a rash of suicides in 1980s Japan. Why does it bring death to its readers? Who wrote it? And can it be stopped? This dizzying mash-up of horror, sci-fi and Parisian surrealism, Kawamata Chiaki’s first novel to be published in English, hops from the Left Bank to Japan to Mars, and turns historical figures including André Breton and Marcel Duchamp into characters in a live-action, and all-too-literal, Exquisite Corpse exercise.