The new novels of the legendary French writer Antoine Volodine—“Writers” and “A View of the Ossuary.”
Bogdan Tarasyev or Nikita Kurilin, Maria Trava thirteen or Linda Wu—piercing life stories or scenes from life—and not only those—presented in Antoine Volodine’s novel, the latest so far, differ from its author basically only in that they are purely fictional figures, because for their author only the name is fictional. All of them—outcasts and loners, victims and martyrs, possessed and invincible—are facets of his unique authorial personality and of the universal archetype of the writer, as he imagines it.