L’Oxymore

“Not a drop of blood flows in these pages, not a gram of drugs circulates; not even a little rape on the thumb. The investigator, the commissioner, the police officer, the drug dealer, the sultry or abused women, everyone is gone. And the purpose of this book is certainly not to find them. Can one write a detective story without an investigation? Or rather – since in literature anything is possible if one lacks sufficient reverence for the rules –
how? To what extent and by what feints to designate as a detective novel a book that denies us not only the elucidation, but even the plot itself?” Joseph Schiano di Lombo

L’Oxymore is the last volume of the Livres bizarres, a series of publications initiated by Fanette Mellier during a residency at the Centre national du graphisme de Chaumont that began in 2008. Both in form and content, this book challenges and questions the notion of the detective story.

L’Oxymoreis a strange novel, a perpetual movement, a loop a priori sealed, another vain journey from the shadow that blinds to the light that dazzles, through all the shades of the gray area.