FOMITE

In the Place Where We Thought We Stood tells the contemporary tale of a French American translator traveling by train from Paris to Barcelona, then on to Madrid where he is bound to comfort his mother-in-law, who recently suffered a stroke. Haunted by his wife's suicide, and by his failure to complete his translation of the anguished, post-war correspondence of the writer Ingeborg Bachmann and her lover Paul Celan, he struggles numbly to make sense of the moment, the day.Set entirely in the course of this journey, the novel—at heart a reckoning with things past—explores the fleeting little triumphs of love.

Praise

“Peter Nash takes us on a classic European train journey, from Gare de Lyon to Barcelona, imbued with the vivid smells and sounds which transport us through the history of art, wars, and philosophical observations. In places, I felt haunted by the ghosts of Thomas Bernhard, Albert Camus, and Joseph Roth in this stream of consciousness and narrative exploration of a man in search of his lost past. A wonderful ride!”

~Josip Novakovich,  author of April Fool’s Day and Man Booker International Prize Finalist

About the Author

Peter Nash is the author of the novels, Parsimony, The Perfection of Things, and The Least of It. He has also written a biography called The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor, Arcadian Knight and has co-authored a collection of essays called Trotsky’s Sink: Ninety-Eight Short Essays About Literature. He lives in New Mexico with his wife and two sons.