L'homme à l'oreille coupée

Once upon a time, there was a man who had lost his ear—it had been cut off. But how? Was it really by a whip during a circus act, as he said one day? Or was it bitten off during an argument by an angry lover, as he said another day? Or, for real, was it in the army? But will we ever know the truth, the real truth?

Jean-Claude Mourlevat’s text is a tribute to imagination and fiction. Barely has one page been turned before a new horizon, a new landscape appears, and the images come and go, from a circus to a kitchen, from a kitchen to the snow-covered plains of Siberia, in the middle of a storm. It did not happen once, but many times.

The next day he raised his arms to the sky: “You’re tiring me out with this ear! I’ve told you a hundred times. It was one evening when I had drunk too much. I fell asleep against a stove and it burned it. There!”