A private detective is tasked with following a woman, nothing very original, except that! That’s where this novel begins, which, against the backdrop of the Six-Day War and May 1968, will take us to Israel, into the Sinai, in search of ancient scrolls.
The Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the apocryphal texts of the Old Testament. The author takes us from Paris to Jerusalem on an exciting adventure, in which the hero will pay the high price of discovering a book that is said to have been written by the hand of God himself.
We will become paleontologists, archivists, specialists in ancient languages, some of them dead. What is writing? A sequence of letters forming words, but does it have meaning? The Bible, the book of writings or of the word? Hence the question about Christianity: is it the religion of the book or of the word?
Alain Nadaud poses the question, and when his hero loses the meaning of the meaning of words, of syntax, of sentence construction, we begin to have an answer.
“The Book of Curses” would thus be a grimoire whose knowledge would disconnect us from reality, from our world, plunging us into another dimension. We would pass to the other side of the mirror.
This adventure novel is also a study of the holy scriptures, a metaphysical exploration where the seriousness of theology intertwines with esoteric speculations and scientific research. In conclusion, the debate between the word and the written is the dominant theme of this work.
