A book is easier to understand when you know where it comes from and what surrounds it. For this author, the work divides into three families, and La Saison du souffle occupies a precise place between two of them.
The personal narratives
La Saison du souffle and Je respire encore form a set: two first-person texts where the body, illness and breath are central. They can be read in any order, but they answer each other. This is the most intimate part of the work.
The crime series
Oscar’s Notebook is of another kind: investigations, a city, recurring characters. Readers arriving through it will not find the same register, but they will find a setting — Liège, its streets, its stairways — that circulates from one book to another.
The guides
The Thailand guides are practical books, but they share with the narratives the same attention to places: a market, a street, a quality of light. You look for addresses there; you also find a way of looking.
What this changes for the reading
Placing the book avoids two misunderstandings. The first would be to look for an investigation: it is not a crime novel. The second would be to read it as mere testimony: it is a constructed text, with a form and a progression.
Practical information
If you are discovering the author, start with La Saison du souffle or with one of the Oscar novels depending on what you want — intimacy or plot. Both paths meet, but not in the same place.
FAQ
Must the books be read in a set order?
No. The narratives are independent, the crime series reads in publication order, the guides in any order.
Is the novel autobiographical?
It is a first-person narrative, but that is no reason to read it as a document.
Which book to start with?
La Saison du souffle for the writing; an Oscar novel for the story.
Also read
The book
Mr Schaka lives with pulmonary fibrosis and has been travelling in Thailand for years. In The Season of Breath he tells the story of that journey, one step at a time, with humour and no self-pity.
