About This Book
Determined to solve a dual crime-on the one hand an abstract Millennial Conspiracy perpetrated against the conventional "logocentric" mind, on the other a gruesome murder-litterateur-detective August Saint embarks on a most peculiar investigation, one that requires him to unravel the collusion of a dazzling assortment of unlikely characters. In his investigation Saint wanders through a distinctly familiar European landscape, but simultaneously, inexplicably, finds himself traversing parallel media-spawned realities. He discovers that movies, comic strips, news articles, biographies, and fiction have each captured a channel on some formerly unimaginable, universal, television-like network. There characters and incidents, while indulging in spatio-temporal experimentation and dodging astrogel intervention from outer space, evolve infinitely and cross media with impunity. In this reconfigured universe Saint mingles with celebrities from movies, television, and literature; courts a beautiful Cuban maiden; and witnesses the twentieth century's most magnificent and horrific events. His discovery, after these endless and exhausting adventures? The conspirators in the crime are legion. They include a Belgian comic book hero, and agile "bi-locating" friar, an aristocratic Proustian masochist, a sinister clerical familiar, an NYPD chief of Detectives, a distinguished Italian film director, the Baader-Meinhof gang, assorted literary luminaries, and possibly even Dr. Spock. At last, the criminal is captured and brought to trial, and in his features Saint recognizes a very familiar face.In The Mind Crime of August Saint, Alain Arias-Misson mines the epistemological fault-line where the old world of the written word lies uneasily against twenty-first-century electronic media culture. His latest novel is a fascinating fictive experience of a culture in the process of transformation.
