Too Many Popes

Alexandre Amprimoz inhabits a hallucinatory world of perverse peoples, monstrous suffering children whose only friends are insects, village idiots and frog-stranglers, cuckolds and fascists and transvestites — all of whom are born raconteurs — unable to stop telling their surreal stories of lives that bound between and are bound to the Italian hills, the white sun of Algeria, the swamps of La Rochelle. These are stories of an extraordinary visionary kind.

Alexandre Amprimoz is a distinctive voice, a unique voice, a teller of short tales unlike any other in his country. Wild flights of surrealistic vision are rooted in a sometimes grim reality, a sometimes whimsical abandon. The wry, amazed eye of a pilgrim boy grown to manhood holds these tales together, a boy who was born old and a mas who became young.