Mevlido's Dreams

"Certainly the strangest and arguably one of the most accomplished contemporary writers of fiction in French, Antoine Volodine has created a vast and perplexing universe of bad dreams in several dozen works under a variety of pseudonyms over the past forty years. Some kind of disaster has occurred, the revolution has long since turned into a nightmare, yet people resist as best they can—by telling stories to each other, which are stories about each other. Mevlido’s Dreams provides a new pathway into Volodine’s labyrinth, which for all the horrors it recounts is always cast in stylishly crafted prose." —David Bellos, Princeton University

A postapocalyptic noir that asks if love and political ideals can survive civilizational collapse

A meditative, postapocalyptic noir, Mevlido’s Dreams is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse. Mevlido is a double agent working for the police and living in the last habitable city on the planet, a sprawling abyssal ruin marked by war and ruled by criminals. Suspended in the bardo between his loyalty to the surveillance state and to the anarchists, communists, and other rebels he monitors, Mevlido clings to life and hope—barely—in the city’s vast slums, haunted by the memory of the wife he failed to save during the last war and dreaming of a mysterious mission he is told he must accomplish. At the same time, an enigmatic organization existing elsewhere—the Organs—observes Mevlido’s actions and debates its responsibility to him and to humanity as a whole. 

Asking what it means to love and care for others at the end of the world, this dense, brilliantly detailed postcollapse reality imagined by Antoine Volodine is one that grows ever more relevant amidst intensifying climate and political catastrophes. A key work in Volodine’s post-exotic fictional universe, Mevlido’s Dreams envisions a world changed beyond recognition and ruled under irrational authoritarianism in which dreams nest within dreams and the boundaries between life and death are fluid and uncertain.

Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French-Russian writer who has published twenty books under this name, of which several are available in English translation: Minor Angels, Radiant Terminus, Bardo or Not Bardo, Writers, and Solo Viola (Minnesota, 2021).

Gina Stamm is assistant professor of French at the University of Alabama.