Praise
Giono calls on every sense as he asks us to imagine the most fabulous of encounters—a world where sea and sky, angels and monsters, the mundane and the miraculous are one . . . Fragments of a Paradise is surely one of the most strangely beautiful and original works of the post-war era.
— Susan Stewart
It’s amazing what Giono has done with Renaissance tales of voyages and monsters, turning them into a paean of the imagination, an invitation to a spiritual voyage. The giant squid! The island! The cook’s face! Bravo. Paul Eprile has done a masterpiece proud.
— Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story and The Humble Lover
The writing, even in the midst of carnage, is tenderly poetic, given a fine sheen of beauty by the translator Paul Eprile. This novel calls back not only to an ancient era when miracles were still routine but to classics of literary invention by, Jules Verne, Herman Melville and others. If we can’t sail into the unknown, we can at least turn to these works of evergreen imagination to help us.
— Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
In Paul Eprile’s vital and propulsive translation, Jean Giono’s Fragments of Paradise becomes a slimmed-down, mid-20th-century Moby Dick. In this existential sea journey, helmed by a captain fueled by curiosity rather than revenge, encounters with monsters lead to an intensification of reality rather than retreats into phantasmagoria. Along with the crew of L’Indien, we must ponder how best to be alive on a wild, watery planet.
— Catherine Bush
Out at sea near the beginning of this beautifully strange, beautifully translated novel, "when the sun went down, a broad expanse of sky lit up by increments, as if a wing of fire had slowly spread its feathers apart." The whole book is like that. Moment after moment, Giono does for our life on earth what the sunset does for the sky: makes it magical, radiant, spectacular.
— Damion Searls
Alluring . . . [Giono's characters'] journey soon becomes alternately hellish and idyllic, haunted and mesmerized in turn by mysterious islands, giant squids, massive rays, and potentially more mythic leviathans.
— Publishers Weekly
With tales of strange animals including a giant squid that has an ingenious way of capturing birds and the captain’s somewhat gloomy philosophy ('I maintain we are perishing of pettiness and deadly boredom.') . . . [Fragments of a Paradise] is a fascinating book.
Archipelago Books takes great care in translating and publishing outstanding non-English literature for American audiences. This 20th century French seafaring novel follows the crew of a ship as they encounter mythical beasts and explore the limits of human experience.
Fragments of a Paradise is stunning and carefully wrought, and the translation by Paul Eprile is superb. Giono was a longtime pacifist, a stance he took after serving in the First World War. Perhaps he meant Fragments of a Paradise to be his paean to peace, one in which the world survives even if the humans wreaking havoc on it do not.
Is this book in fragments or is the world in fragments? . . . Giono undermines the idea of the quest, it becomes all movement, no goal . . . Suspenseful, riveting, joyful, unbelievable, [Fragments of a Paradise] makes adventure of everything.
— The One Bright Book podcast
Perhaps the best novel by Jean Giono I’ve read to date, different in subject from his other works . . . Strongly attentive to the senses, tactile and aural—the wooden creaking of the ship, the flap of canvas sails giving voice to the wind, and human voices that carry miles from land to sea—sensations catalogued with intelligence . . . The stunning, rapturous beauty of this novel is conveyed in all its lambent grace and ambiguity by Paul Eprile.
— Tom Bowden, Book Beat blog
Fragments of a Paradise is a tale of longing and human powerlessness. The crew leave behind "civilized countries," experiencing the wonder, fear and disgust that untouched nature arouses throughout their voyage. It is a great treat that audiences can enjoy Giono's enchanting, haunting and chimeric narrative in English, eighty years after it was first written in French.
— Dylan Kaposi, Literary Review
