Pachyderme

This cinematic tale opens surrealistically: with a traffic jam caused by a wounded elephant. Our heroine, Carice, abandons her car and walks trancelike through a wood to visit her husband in the hospital. Along the way she meets a few odd characters, including a blind pig keeper and an alien-looking baby. The surreal encounters do not stop there. The hospital is eerie and foreboding. When Carice’s whistling wakes up an apparently dead body in the morgue, she soon realizes that the aged cadaver she’s talking to is her future self.

Praise for Pachyderme:

“Peeters’ tale of self-discovery is enthralling; in the author’s hands, Cold War paranoia and thoughtfully subverted realist art provides commentary on other kinds of secrets, other kinds of betrayals and the conflict between duty and need.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)