Uncertain manifesto - Frdrik Pajak

An illustrated artist's memoir of the motivations, feelings, ideas, figures (including Samuel Beckett and Walter Benjamin), travels, and love affairs that have influenced his life.

The writer and artist Frdric Pajak was ten when he began to dream of
"a book mixing words and pictures: snippets of adventure, random
memories, maxims, ghosts, forgotten heroes, trees, the raging sea," but
it was not until he was in his forties that this dream took form as Uncertain Manifesto.
The utterly original book that he produced is a memoir born of reading
and a meditation on the lives and ideas, the motivations, feelings, and
fates of some of Pajak's heroes: Samuel Beckett and the artist Bram van
Velde, and, especially, Walter Benjamin, whose travels to Moscow,
Naples, and Ibiza, whose experiences with hashish, whose faltering
marriage and love affairs and critique of modern experience Pajak
re-creates and reflects on in word and image. Pajak's moody black-and
white drawings accompany the text throughout, though their bearing on it
is often indirect and all the more absorbing for that. Between word and
image, the reader is drawn into a mysterious space that is all Pajak's
as he seeks to evoke vanished histories and to resist a modern world
more and more given over to a present without a past.

With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia