A Swiss novelist turns insomnia into an asteroid obsession
In «L'Echelle de Turin», Marc van Dongen follows a sleepless narrator whose nights are haunted by Bénou, a fictional asteroid whose orbit crosses Earth's.
Marc van Dongen's new novel, published by Editions de l'Aire, is built from short chapters that unspool like a string of white nights, according to Le Temps. At its centre is an insomniac narrator whose sleepless hours summon up a "mental album" of childhood memories, travels and embarrassing moments, alongside existential dread.
Looming over all of it is Bénou, an asteroid 500 metres in diameter whose orbit intersects the Earth's, rated zero on the Torino scale that measures the collision risk of celestial objects — the scale that gives the book its title. Between the sleepless narrator and his "star" an improbable dialogue takes shape, Le Temps reports.
The novel extends a preoccupation from van Dongen's previous book, Le Périmètre intérieur, published in 2018 by Editions d'autre part and centred on Geneva. That earlier work traced what Le Temps described as a "cartography of private space" through urban tableaux in which the public city and the narrator's inner world echoed each other. L'Echelle de Turin keeps that reflection on the ties between a person and their surroundings, but shifts its scale from the city to the cosmos.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.