Liliane Giraudon's 'Sker' Explodes Conventional Prose

Liliane Giraudon's 'Sker' is a poetic work that disrupts conventional literary forms. The book functions as a 'borderless' journal, decentering narrative and self. It spans geographically disparate locations including Cuba, Tibet, Mexico, Haiti, and Norway. The text interweaves mythological figures and references artists and writers such as Edvard Munch, Georges Bataille, José Lezama Lima, Marcel Proust, Georg Büchner, Heinrich von Kleist, Antonin Artaud, Asger Jorn, and Marcel Duchamp. It also includes a homeless woman called 'the Marquise', a dead poet, and a blinded bullfighter. The narrator's self is doubled and multiplied. The work contrasts 'tragedy' and 'farce' as dual states of the world. Giraudon's writing is described as dry, precise, visually acute, and attentive to concrete details like the movement of grass or the color of sky and earth. Jacques Henric praises the book for its poetic force, free from metaphorical excess.