L'Herbe à brûler

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

L'Herbe à brûler (A Weed for Burning) is a Belgian novel by Conrad Detrez. It is the third part of his "hallucinated autobiography" trilogy, following Ludo (1974) and Les plumes du coq (The Plumes of the Rooster, 1975). Published in 1978 by Calmann-Lévy, the French edition runs 231 pages. The book won the Prix Renaudot in 1978 and is Detrez's best-known work. The story follows a Belgian Roman Catholic who spent years as a revolutionary in Brazil and then returns to Europe, where he finds life enervated. The novel was translated into English by Lydia Davis and published in 1984 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich under the title A Weed for Burning.