Paul Harding's 'Les foudroyés': A Novel of Time, Memory, and Epilepsy

Paul Harding's novel 'Les foudroyés' (original English title 'Tinkers') centers on George Washington Crosby, a clockmaker dying over eight days. As he hallucinates his house collapsing, memories flood back chaotically, including his father Howard, an itinerant salesman with epilepsy who travels New England with a mule. Howard's seizures are vividly described, and his wife's care is both devoted and stern. The novel weaves in three textual counterpoints: a 1783 treatise 'Petit horloger raisonné' by Reverend Kenner Davenport, a copy of Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter' inscribed to a hermit named Gilbert, and poetic fragments around the word 'borealis'. Harding explained in a Paris bookstore that these fragments emerged from obsessive words after writing sessions. The book moves between mechanical precision and baroque invention, with nature descriptions that transcend typical nature writing. Published by Le Cherche midi in the 'Lot 49' collection, it was reviewed in artpress in 2011.