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Description

An illustrated artist’s memoir of the motivations, feelings, ideas, figures (including Samuel Beckett and Walter Benjamin), travels, and love affairs that have influenced his life.

The writer and artist Frédéric Pajak was ten when he began to dream of“a book mixing words and pictures: snippets of adventure, randommemories, maxims, ghosts, forgotten heroes, trees, the raging sea,” butit was not until he was in his forties that this dream took form as Uncertain Manifesto.The utterly original book that he produced is a memoir born of readingand a meditation on the lives and ideas, the motivations, feelings, andfates of some of Pajak’s heroes: Samuel Beckett and the artist Bram vanVelde, and, especially, Walter Benjamin, whose travels to Moscow,Naples, and Ibiza, whose experiences with hashish, whose falteringmarriage and love affairs and critique of modern experience Pajakre-creates and reflects on in word and image. Pajak’s moody black-andwhite drawings accompany the text throughout, though their bearing on itis often indirect and all the more absorbing for that. Between word andimage, the reader is drawn into a mysterious space that is all Pajak’sas he seeks to evoke vanished histories and to resist a modern worldmore and more given over to a present without a past.

With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia