Talking is the best medicine is a sentence drawn from Primo Levi’s story “The Molecule’s Defiance.”
Hasn’t the hour of fables come? is a question asked in André Dhôtel’s La chronique fabuleuse.
I’ve learned that the dead never abandon the living is a slightly altered version of a line I found in Fady Stephan’s lovely book Le berceau du monde.
I write in my brain is, if I remember correctly, a remark made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Marie-Charlotte d’Espouy, Laurence Tardieu, and Yves Léon, who through their joint efforts managed to save Brodeck from the irretrievable digital depths of my computer.
I would also like to mention, in connection with this book, several persons who have been important to me at different moments in my life and who, having passed away during the two years I worked on my novel, accompanied my thoughts as it unfolded: Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, Laurent Bonelli, Marc Vilrouge, René Laubiès, Jean-Christophe Lafaille, Patrick Berhault, Jacques Villeret.
And finally, my thanks go to the entire team at Éditions Stock, my French publisher, who, under the leadership of Jean-Marc Roberts, have honored me with their trust and their friendship, and also to Michaela Heinz, faithful reader and dispenser of precious advice from the other side of the Rhine.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Philippe Claudel is the author of many novels, among them By a Slow River, which has been translated into thirty languages and was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 2003 and the Elle Readers’ Literary Prize in 2004. His novel La Petite Fille de Monsieur Linh was published in 2005, and Brodeck won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens in 2007. Claudel also wrote and directed the film I’ve Loved You So Long, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein, which opened in movie theaters in the United States in the fall of 2008 and in thirty other countries around the world.