A man wakes up in an unknown place — possibly in a hospital room, but that is not certain — and remembers nothing about himself at all. "Call me Ishmael," he suggests to the doctors, whom, in the absence of other versions, he names Yuri Zhivago and Madame Bovary. The man painfully recalls what happened to him (was it an accident? and, it seems, did he have a love? and should he really be called Ishmael?). He describes the circles around the riddle, getting closer and closer — like a moth drawn to the flame, doomed to perish in it. Meanwhile, just as cautiously and uncertainly, his innocent victim and unwitting Nemesis, the future storyteller of his story and simply a bewildered orphaned teenager, who once was the man himself, walks around him, narrowing the ring. Jaume Cabré (b. 1947) is the leading star of Catalan literature; his books have been translated into dozens of languages, their print runs exceeding a million copies. His new novel "And the Flame Consumes Us" (the first in ten years after the monumental, award-winning "I Confess") is a delicate parable, a song in praise of literature, and a tense noir: there will be sudden illuminations, unrelenting grief, true tenderness, murder, amnesia, chases, a mysterious fatal woman, as well as a family of wild boars, without which this story would not have happened at all. For the first time in Russian!
