Publisher's Synopsis
Lithopedion (from the Greek words lithos [stone] and paedion [child]) is a short novel that obscures the boundaries between philosophical fiction and psychological thriller. Taking place in Northern France during an unspecified era of time, it consists of two parts: an assemblage of hypothetical memoirs from an unnamed, secluded, and paradoxical personage who evidently suffers from senility, delusions and maladjustment, documenting his entanglements with the horrors of his past and crushing emptiness and disorder of his present-day; an account from the apathetic police-official named Thibaut Sibyllin, who manages the fruitless criminal investigation of the aforementioned personage, hindered by both the impenetrability of the esoteric memoirs and his unbending indifference to the world. Emboldened by the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, and Franz Kafka among others, Lithopedion is an adjacency of the grotesque and the profound, apposing depictions of horrifying inhumanities alongside fathomless analyses of philosophy and the natural world. It is designed to disturb, deject, and tranquilize the reader, injecting them with a supernormal, unnatural sensibility, leaving them with a feeling of unaccomplishment and disorientation, taking them to the nethermost extent of limbo.