Jean-Francois Beauchemin

Kungsfågeln är en mjuk och varm bok om en författare och hans bror som har schizofreni.Broderns svårigheter, skuggor och mörker är närvarande men det är ändå en mycket ljus bok. Det står i romanen att den inte gör anspråk på att handla om någonting, men ändå innehåller den väldigt mycket: livet, broderskärlek, naturens betydelse, växter och djur, och fåglar, Kungsfågeln!

“Beauchemin discovers again and again that happiness is a function of the connection between beings—the nonhuman animals as well as the human.”—Maria Popova, A Favorite Book of 2023For readers of Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights comes a joyful, tender memoir of encounters with animals and their potential to transform our lives through joy.Two mismatched ducks quarrel amorously. A tortoise basks on a rock in the sun. Four deer ceremoniously visit a writer’s garden to announce the arrival of a newborn fawn. In Archives of Joy, renowned poet, essayist, and novelist Jean-François Beauchemin turns his poetic and playful gaze to memories of animals he has known throughout his life, from fleeting encounters to deep relationships. With each meeting, Beauchemin returns to a simple thought: that joy in nature is an essential counterweight to the inescapable awareness of the brevity of life.In short, humorous, and often dreamlike vignettes, Beauchemin meditates on the mysteries of existence, the alchemy of memory, and the entwinement of the animal world with our own—whether he’s nursing an injured bird back to health, deciphering the gaze of a judgmental cat, or keeping company with a workhorse nearing its death.His life as a writer and his beloved pet dogs and cats feature often, as do the creatures he encounters in his garden, at farms, or on woodland walks: sparrows, crows, deer, foxes, horses, and cows. Deeply restorative, imaginative, and dreamily poetic, Archives of Joy is a memoir that will stay with readers long after its final page.

In this contemplative novel-poem, Jean-Francois Beauchemin invites us to share in the inner world of the grieving Mr. Bartolome, who, following the mysterious disappearance of his young son, wanders and wonders, seeking to transcend his pain by encountering something larger than himself. Continuously occupied by the memory of his lost son, Bartolome's quest leads him from the city to the countryside and then to the edge of the ocean, where he marvels at the beauty of nature but cannot penetrate its mysteries. Through reference to the two-million-year-old "Turkana Boy," the fossilized remains of a boy found in 1984 near Lake Turkana, Kenya, Beauchemin addresses processes of memory and the long history of human evolution. Beauchemin's character Bartolome sees in the lives of the boys--separated by nearly two million years--a kind of twin destiny. Has the passage of millennia changed the intensity of human feeling at the loss of blood relations? "Who knows what they had felt? Had the same emotions, those associated with incommensurable loss, broken their bodies, as they had his?Over and above morphological differences sculpted by the passage of millennia, was there something resembling a permanence of feeling, a sort of eternity for the murmuring of the heart, transmitted through the ages by the bonds of blood?" Turkana Boy offers a poignant examination of grieving and one man's search for understanding. This surrealist narrative is punctuated with magnificent musings on the world and startling questions about what it means to be alive.