A beguiling, perspective-shifting story of obsession and loss set in the grimy, late-colonial decadence of Macau at the end of the twentieth century
 

In The Inner Harbour, Antoine Volodine focuses his literary investigations away from dystopian futures to a specific place at a particular historical moment: Macau on the eve of the Portuguese colony’s transfer to China. In a seedy flat in one of the city’s slums, a hired assassin named Kotter interrogates Breughel, a writer on the run from a mysterious organization code-named Paradise. Breughel has been hiding out in Macau with his lover, Gloria Vancouver, and a significant sum of the organization’s money. But Gloria is dead and the money spent—or so Breughel claims—and now he lives alone in humid squalor.

With increasing severity, Kotter extracts Breughel’s confessions, but are they truth or subterfuge? Or are the confessions an elaborate work of fiction by a writer aware that they are no longer able to differentiate between memory and fantasy? Volodine brilliantly blurs the levels of narration—between what Breughel tells his interrogator, what he remembers or invents, and the stories he has written, including his accounts of Gloria’s hallucinatory visions of an apocalyptic war between military forces and the “chrysalids.”

Interweaving threads of fiction and truth, lies and hallucinations, The Inner Harbour evokes many of the themes found in Volodine’s other “post-exotic” works: the slippage between dreams and reality, the nightmares of history, the exhaustion of literature and politics, and questions about what it means to be faithful to people or ideas long since vanished. But Volodine also uses the setting of Macau’s late-colonial decadence to explore new sensations of foreignness, alienation, and resignation, all of which coalesce into a nesting doll of narrative that houses an unconventional and tragic love story.

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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, Solo Viola (Minnesota, 2021), and Mevlido’s Dreams (Minnesota, 2024). He has won many literary awards, including the 2014 Medici Prize for Radiant Terminus.

Gina M. Stamm is associate professor of French at The University of Alabama and translator of Mevlido’s Dreams.