Les Editions Phebus will publish a French translation of The Balloonist in early fall of 2024.
Gustave Crispin, the Swede, is the leader of the expedition and the narrator of MacDonald Harris's witty, richly sensual and ingenious novel. As the balloon drifts northward, his thoughts drift south to his exasperating romance with the striking Luisa, a Parisienne of exotic background and a decidedly venturesome spirit, with whom he fell madly in love in the only way nineteenth-century amateur scientists seem to have done: madly and to his great annoyance. While he works painstakingly on the inventions that will make his polar adventure possible, he and Luisa embark on a storm, tender, and hilarious affair, involving, among other incidents, a delightfully comic balloon trip across the Gulf of Bothnia; a series of maddening seances in the home of Luisa's eccentric family; a brief, wonderfully erotic idyll in the Italian Lakes, and a shocking foray into the decadent counterculture of turn-of-the-Century Paris.
With great elegance, Harris plaits together the strands of his story--the hazardous exploration of the Arctic and the equally hazardous journey through the warmer regions of the heart--to create a novel that is both a captivating, unsentimental love story and an exciting adventure in the tradition of Jules Verne.
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