Nur
Arnaud Rykner
Translated by Sue Boswell
In a town in the East which enchants him and drags him well beyond the disreputable exoticism which he had feared, a man meets a woman, and the love which then takes them by surprise threatens to carry everything away. Secretly he calls her Nur, which means “only” in German and is pronounced like the word for “light” in Arabic. Only her, only them, only their bodies, only a few days, only that. Only the radiance of their meeting, a conflagration, a future overturned. In a bedroom at the centre of a town devastated by war, they live the intensity of each instant of their impossible, ephemeral, absolute love.
With the lacerating poetry of this text, Arnaud Rykner brings to life a sensual voice, pulsating and pure in order to speak of the mysterious alchemy of passion and the urgent need to give oneself up to it.
About the Author
Arnaud Rykner is a writer and academic. He has published eight novels, several of which have appeared in paperback including “Le Wagon” which won the Jean d’ Heurs prize for historical fiction in 2011. He is a Professor and Director of Research at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, and has also authored a dozen essays and edited many collected works. As a theatrical producer he has notably put on the works of Nathalie Sarraute, Maurice Maeterlinck and Bernard-Marie Koltès. He is a Visiting Professor at Rutgers University and a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Durham.
About the Translator
Sue Boswell studied French Language and Literature at UCL and for a time taught French at Goldsmiths University of London. She then moved into university administration, specialising in external relations and communications. Later she became a translator for the Wiener Holocaust Library, and translated Arnaud Rykner’ s novel Le Wagon as The Last Train (Snuggly Books, 2020). Her other translations include Marcel Schwob’ s The Assassins and other Stories, Ilarie Voronca’ s The Confession of a False Soul and with her husband, Colin Boswell, Gustave Kahn’ s The Mad King, also for Snuggly Books
Paperback, 86 pages
Release date: June 4, 2025
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-174-3
Price: US$12.50
From the same author:
The Last Train, (2020); I Will Not Come, (2022) Me and My King, (2024).