It's difficult to predict the reception Where Tigers Are at Home will receive in the United States. The winner of France's Prix Medicis in 2008, this big, sprawling novel (in a translation by Mike Mitchell) comes to us from Algerian-born writer, philosopher and world traveler Jean-Marie Blas de Robles, author of more than a dozen works of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. This book — the first of his to appear in the U.S. in English — stands as a challenge to readers who want their fiction to offer a quick pay-off. The novel is probably scholarly enough to satisfy those who enjoy reading Umberto Eco, and erotic enough for those who take pleasure in the sexual gambits in the fiction of Milan Kundera. And among its other narrative delights is an adventure plot straight out of Michael Crichton. But before all the alluring stuff begins, the book opens very, very slowly as we meet Eleazard von Wogan, a retired French journalist living in Brazil and working on a translation of a 17th century Latin biography of a Jesuit scholar named Athanasius Kircher, written by a trusted acolyte.
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