In Life
by Eugène Savitzkaya, translated from the French by Andrew Colpitts

ISBN:978-1-935835-23-3
Perfect Bound, $16.00
Publication Date: November 2018.
5 x 7 inches, 97 pages
FICTION
This book was translated and published with the generous support of the Belgian Ministry of Culture.

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Your life consists of passing time, and time passes around you. Walls chip, and you paint them. Weeds flourish, and you pull them. Throughout In Life Eugène Savitzkaya sifts lyrically through our daily comings and goings, through decay and renovation. Pruning trees, scaling fish, washing windows, ironing and eating are among the myriad tasks surveyed in this book. Even urinating and defecating have their just place in the melee of the day-to-day. In Life is a meditation on the quotidian, the circadian rhythms of life that sustain us and dissolve us. With piercing acuity Savitzkaya pays tribute to those actions that consume the lion's share of our waking hours.

On Savitzkaya

"Experiments with Weird: Eugène Savitzkaya," by Edward Gauvin, Weird Fiction Review, Dec 2013
"Savitzkaya is minimal without being skeletal; in fact, in few words he is almost lush, an impression derived from the swerve of his language, coloration through unlikely word choice. . . Above all he is authoritative. By refusing to say more, he makes us make do with what is said. Whatever is said simply is, though it can't be."

Eugène Savitzkaya -- Fraudeur

"Eugène Savitzkaya's Quest for 'Life'," by John Taylor, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, Aug 2010

Chaos, Creation and Self in the Novels of Eugène Savitzkaya, by Patrick Crowley, 1995

From In Life

There's a garden in the middle of a town. A house rises from the middle of that garden. There are smells and sounds: the house is inhabited. The house's inhabitants see to their work. Their tasks are numerous and varied. Clothes have to be repaired, as does the house itself, which like most houses threatens to fall into ruin. Meals have to be prepared and eaten. Sweeping and tidying have to be done. As soon as they're born, children grow up. When the trash is full, it's taken out. After night comes day. Night succeeds day. After autumn comes winter. Clothes wear out. Hair grays and the strands become so fine and soft again. Green vegetables cook in boiling water. Salt is at hand.