Coda A Novel (french Voices) [Paperback]

It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt. With this sentence Ren? Belletto begins a novel that compresses every genre he has worked inthriller, science fiction, experimental literature, horrorinto one breathless narrative in which what is at stake is nothing less than our own immortality.

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Playing with the expectations of the reader, Belletto constructs a logical puzzle that defies logic, much like the almost-perpetual motion machine invented by the narrator of this novel and his father. What sets the story in (perpetual) motion is a package of frozen seafood. This lowly mechanism triggers a series of picaresque and otherworldly events, from the storytellers meeting with Fate disguised as a beautiful woman, to the kidnapping of his daughter, to his amorous reunion with the younger half-sister of a high school friend, to the elimination of death from the world. Its a funny business, but Bellettos playful and falsely transparent language opens the book to such serious matters as explorations of death, immortality, love, and the innocence of children.